There's No WTF In Team

It's fundamental. When you park some one's car, you lock the doors and write the correct parking space number on the ticket. And yet some of my co-valets have not developed either of these habits, even though some of them have been here longer than me. Saturday night it caught up to them.

Our security cameras caught the images of a skinny fellow in a yellow plaid shirt going back and forth between vehicles in our parking garage. By the time he left, he had entered 11 vehicles, tossed the contents of the consoles and glove compartments, and had stolen several small items like mp3 players and cameras, some credit cards, and a backpack. He didn't break into the cars. He just found the ones that weren't locked up.
Of course, this causes a huge uproar among management and in our department. When the smoke cleared, five of our guys had been suspended for a few days (not consecutively--we can't afford that big a hole in the schedule.)

All weekend, I've had a whirl of thoughts and emotions over the situation, and it's been a struggle to make sense of what I think and feel. It happened on my shift, and I can't help but feel there was something I could have done to stop it. Part of me wants to point a finger at the other guys and say, "Why aren't you locking doors just out of habit?" But singling out individuals doesn't do anything about fixing the reputation of our department.

I've always described my job as being the one who cleans up the mess. After a while you can't help but develop opinions about the ones who make the messes. One of my (and the morning shift's) pet peeves has always been that the correct parking space is not written on the ticket. This decreases our efficiency when retrieving a vehicle. But a lot of the guys think that as long as you can find the car at all, that this is not a problem. Even my boss will say, "It happens." Well, it shouldn't happen as often as it does. As long as these guys have been here, they should have the space numbers memorized by now. I'm harping on this because Sunday morning I was given the task of finding the keys for the vehicles that were broken into, and the only way I had to find them was by the parking space number. Three of them were incorrect. Two of those had no space at all, and the third I never found.

I talked about all this with our Asst. Front Office Manager this morning (off the record--John and I are good friends aside from our professional relationship,) and we decided that what it really came down to is a teamwork problem. For example, when the guys park the cars, they aren't thinking about the fact that someone is going to have to come get that car, and it probably won't be the one who parked it. There are a lot of other little details concerning how the guys do things that cause problems for someone else, but I won't explore them all here. We will be having a long overdue departmental meeting soon, I'm sure, and maybe we can get some of this hashed out.