The Invisible Wall
Thursday, December 29th, 2005Yesterday I broke the invisible wall.
The invisible wall is my name for the “cultural barrier” that divides western managers from Chinese workers and businessmen. After you’ve been working in China for a while, you learn about it, and you just start pretending you don’t see things that would cause blood vessels to burst in your head if you worried about them too much. 5 people making a photocopy. 4 hours to compose a 3 sentence email. Windows left open in winter to prevent the computer from overheating. You just learn to pretend that this sort of thing really isn’t happening.
Yesterdy I broke the wall for the first time in something like 3 years. The heater in my bedroom is broken. It is clearly, obviously, plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face out of order. The fan works, the air conditioner (cool air) works, but when you try to switch on the heater the fan stops and it starts making a very loud, dangerous-sounding hum.
When the landlord came to collect the rent, he checked out the faulty unit. I made him listen to the dangerous hum. I had him aknowledge the lack of warmth. We discussed the lack of warmth for a while. Then the dangerous hum. He decided that the problem was the dirty filter, and proceeded to spend almost two hours in my bathroom, cleaning the filters. He is a very nice man.
He was disappointed that I was not satisfied with the “clean filters on the broken heater” solution, and grudgingly agreed to call a repairman. That was yesterday.
My landlord came at 1:00 and had me cut an appointment short so that I could wait with him in my apartment for the repariman, who arrived at around 1:40. He determined that the heater was in fact broken and that he would have to bring it back to the shop to repair it. He quickly and expertly dissambled the two large components and arranged them on the floor. So far, so good. But then he and the landlord spent the next 2 HOURS poking around at the other two airconditioning units in the apartment. I was trying to work, but I kept getting chased from one room to another. Every window in the house was open, air-conditioner parts
Lack of planning.
The inverse Time - Money relationship. In traditional local business, people are assessed by how hard they work — as indicated by how much time is devoted to a single task. Bottom-line profit is still a relatively new idea, as is the concept of quality control (ie: fixing things so they work). The only CSF (critical success factor) in traditional business here is man-hours. If my landlord devoted something like 6 hours of his own time to fixing the heater, then he has clearly done all that can be done. If I were to complain, he would throw another 2 or 3 hours at the problem.
The fact that it only required about 20 minutes for the repairman to switch on the unit, determine that he couldn’t fix it on-site and move the equipment out of my apartment was an embarrassment. If they only invested 20 or 30 minutes into the problem, then it demonstrated laziness and disregard. They didn’t feel that inconveniencing me and preventing me from working for almost 4 hours was a negative side-effect. In fact, they seemed puzzled and a little disturbed that I wasn’t crowding in and adding my own 2 mao.