Brad
When I was Manager Freight Claims at RI our office seemed to be the place of
last resort when someone had a bill they didn't know what to do with. We too
would get the $3.76 items, but the most frustrating ones were from the farmer
who would, at the behest of the Section Foreman and/or roadmaster buy the
wire and fence posts to fix a right of way fence. You are probably aware
that it is the railroad company's responsibility to build and maintain the
ROW fence.
In the latter days, being short of manpower to take care of the fences the
section foreman or roadmaster would tell the farmer that the railroad would
buy the wire and posts if the farmer would put it up or repair a damaged
fence. Said farmer would buy the material and do the job. He would give the
bill to the local agent, who would give it to the section foreman, who would
give it to the roadmaster, who would give it to the superintendent, who would
give it to the general manager, who would give it to the the VPO who would
send it to someone in the accounting department who didn't know what to do
with it, who would send it to someone else who didn't know what to do with it
and it would literally float around for months and months.
These would sometimes get down to my department, along with the 17
attachments you mentioned. If it came to me I would try to find out who in
the accounting department handled it and, since they were in the same
building we were, I would take it up there to someone I knew and try to get
it into the hands of the right person.
I have seen these things 6 months or more old...just floating from department
to department. If someone didn't know what to do they would just let it sit
on their desk and gather dust and maybe in a month or two pass it along to
someone else who was just as ignorant. All the while the poor farmer was
waiting for his money.
We even had the same kind of thing going on in our own office when I got
there. A clerk would write to some agent out on the line for some document
pertaining to a claim. The document probably had nothing to do with the
carrier's liability for payment, but would relate only to the distribution of
the payment among the carriers.
The clerk would fiddle and piddle with the file until the claimant would
become irate and call someone in the Traffic Department who would call me.
The claim should have been paid immediately and the documents gathered up
later, but they didn't do it that way.
Another big problem I had with the old clerks was that they would not use the
phone to request documents. They would dictate a letter, let the file go to
the file room, when the letter came back from dictation they would request
the file back, then send out the letter and let the file go back to the file
room. After a certain time the file would come out of the file room and go
back to the clerk's desk. If the reply hadn't come back the clerk would
dictate another letter and the process would go on all over again, and again,
and again.
When I found out how this was being done, I called the supervisors in and
asked why they just didn't handle this stuff by phone and have it all done in
one operation.
I was told that they had been trained not to use the phone unless it was an
emergency.
I have a few more stories...some of this office stuff is as good as the
operating stuff, but you have to have been there to believe how things were
done. I've got more, but this is enuf for now.
Pete
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
|