Gifts Freely Given LO12377

Jack Latimer (jlatimer@ridgecrest.ca.us)
Wed, 5 Feb 1997 09:23:42 -0700

In response to my post on Why Do We Post? LO12269 Linda Orthberg
and Frank Voehl mentioned the Deming story about the boy doing the dishes:

>Anyway the story as I remember it was about a little boy who did the
>dishes for his mother without being asked to do them. He loved to do it
>and his mother really appreciated it but she never gave him anything for
>doing it there was just the internal joy of it all. One day she told the
>boy that if he would continue to do the dishes she would pay him 25 cents
>each time. The little boy never did the dishes again. (Frank added that
>the little boy never did the dishes again with getting paid for it, the
>intrinsic joy was gone.)

This reminded of an incident that occurred some years ago. I work
at a large Navy facility. People who work there are dedicated to their
jobs and work hard, many of them putting in extra hours with no thought of
asking for extra compensation. They just enjoyed their jobs and gave it
everything they had. One day the commanding officer of the base, standing
at his office window observed that many people seemed to be driving home
shortly after 4:00 PM (our normal hours were 7:30 AM to 4:30 PM). He came
to the conclusion that people were leaving early, and issued a
proclamation that everyone was expected to be working from 7:30 to 4:30
and those who left early were stealing from the government - those may not
have been the exact words, but that was the sense of it. I had one person
who regularly came to work at 6:00 AM and left at 4:30 AM, claiming no
extra hours. After hearing the proclamation, he never reported to work
before 7:30 AM for the rest of his career. There were many others that
reacted similarly. The sad part was that many people at the facility
worked from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM and most were driving home legitimately.

The interesting twist and, the relation to this thread of this
story, is that here we had many people freely giving of their own time
because they loved their jobs and what they were contributing to the
country, and because of a commander who failed to check his facts and shot
from the lips, he, in fact, was responsible for the Navy losing many
freely given extra hours from people who enjoyed the gift they were
giving.

Jack Latimer

Jack Latimer
jlatimer@ridgecrest.ca.us

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jlatimer@ridgecrest.ca.us (Jack Latimer)

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