Working smarter, not harder

published April 19, 2012

in the Stockton Sentinel

Stockton, Kansas

     Every once in awhile, a new story is passed along on the Internet that is actually funny. There's generally no way to know the validity of a story, unless it can be checked on Snopes.com; and even then the truty may not be known for sure. This story was passed to me this week -- perhaps to some of you, also. Even if it's not a true story, it's an entertaining story about a man with a plan, and a perfect example of government mismanagement. We in America wouldn't know anything about that.
     The moral of the story is that sometimes it pays to simply work smarter, not harder. I got a chuckle reading this, and I hope you will, too.
     Outside England's Bristol Zoo there is a parking lot for 150 cars and eight buses. For 25 years, its parking fees were managed by a very pleasant attendant. The fees have been 1.40 GBP (Britisih Pounds) for cars and 7 GBP for buses. (With today's conversion rate, that would be $1.58 USD for cars and $11.10 for buses.)
     Then one day, after 25 solid years of never missing a day of work, the parking attendant just didn't show up. So the zoo management called the city council and asked them to send another parking attendant.
     The city council did some research and replied that the parking lot was the zoo's own responsibility.
     The zoo advised the council that the attendant was a city employee.
     The city council responded that the lot attendant had never been on the city payroll.
     Meanwhile, sitting in his villa somewhere on the coast of Spain or France or Who-knows-where, is a man who had apparently installed a ticket machine completely on his own, and then had simply begun to show up every day to collect and keep the parking fees, estimated at about 560 GBP ($888 USD) per day. And it worked for 25 years.
     After never missing a day of work for seven days a week, 52 weeks a year for 25 years, this amounts to just over 7 million pounds (about $12 million USD) ... and no one even knows his name.