Per Your Directive

Though I never really wanted to, I have run several bars.  As a teenager, I worked for a crazy woman who sold Mexican imports that she warehoused in the back of a motel in Cotulla, Texas.  My boss, an oil heiress from a family who had long stretched the confines of the definition of the word ‘eccentric’, owned the little motel/restaurant/bar in the small border town because her wildcatter father had seen one like it in Hawaii and decided he had to have a copy.

I had just turned 18 and had graduated a little early from high school when my boss sent me to Cotulla to temporarily manage the place until she could find a replacement for the manager who had died suddenly from a heart attack.  As it turned out, I ran that fandango in hell for months and eventually fully understood what had killed my predecessor.  

Chief among my management problems was how to run a bar I wasn’t legally old enough to enter during operating hours.  Texas liquor laws back in those days were a nightmare maze of contradictory laws written, amended, repealed and rewritten by drunken Baptists who prayed each Sunday to close the bars and private clubs they had enthusiastically patronized the night before.  Technically, the state was semi-dry and public drinking was only legal in private clubs, not bars.  I quickly learned that one of my management duties was to liberally scatter “Guest Membership” cards along the sidewalk in front of the “club” every night.

Let’s just say it was a learning experience, and among the hard-earned lessons was that bartenders frequently stole so much that breaking even was almost impossible.  Bartenders drink, and with each drink consumed, the house rules become increasingly irrelevant.

Over the next decade, I worked in a lot of hotel (after all, I had great management experience, at least on paper).  As part of running a hotel, I ran a variety of bars:  small intimate bars with jazz music, a country western bar with a mechanical bull, and even a few nice quiet bars with  decent wine lists.  About all these bars had in common was that hiring a good bartender was really difficult, and that even the best of them were going to drink as much free liquor as they wanted.  The best bartender I ever employed, judging solely by the number of customers he brought in and the profits the bar made, told me the day I hired him that he was going to drink a bottle of Christian Brothers Brandy every night that he worked.   About that, at least, he was perfectly honest.

Rules—and even laws—can’t change human nature.  This has been common knowledge for centuries, but politicians and bureaucrats persist in trying to change it.  You can look at Adam Smith’s writing about the folly of governments’ passing “sin taxes” on whiskey some 270 years ago for confirmation.  

This was a lesson in human nature that I have seen reinforced many, many times.  At one point in my early college days, I remember a sergeant patiently explaining to a group of wanna-be future lieutenants that as leaders, we should never tell our men to do something we knew for a fact that they would never do because issuing orders that would never be followed always erodes respect and authority.  

While at Enema U, I saw legions of administrators who never understood this simple lesson.  There was such a perpetual deluge of memoranda, directives, and policy changes that if total compliance ever actually occurred, it was probably accidental.  I remember one newly-appointed department head bemoaning over one such impossible to fulfill mandate.

“What are we going to do?  They expect us to do this enthusiastically.”

An older and more experienced faculty member sighed and answered, “Relax.  Enthusiasm can be reported.”

One of the best examples of altering a policy to fit the realities of human nature was sent to me by one of my better students.  During World War II, the very existence of the refined uranium needed to build the atomic bomb was top secret.  When some of the precious material was sent to machine shops to be milled and shaped into the appropriate shapes, a warning was sent with the material:

“We can’t tell you anything about this material, but it’s vital to the war effort that ALL of it including all swarf be returned to us.”

Swarf is the residue or chips and filings produced by the machining operation.  Despite the warnings, however, the folks at the Manhattan Project could determine that the amount of material returned to the authorities was less than projected.  Alarmed at the possibility of espionage, an extensive investigation was conducted to determine the cause of the loss.  Investigators were sent to talk to the shop foremen and the machinists.

The machinists who had worked with the uranium had noticed that when machined, the metal threw a bright spark, and since wartime rationing restrictions made securing flints for cigarette lighters impossible, the machinists had ignored the official guidelines and diverted what they considered to be trifling amounts of the strange material to be used in their cigarette lighters.

The people that ran the Manhattan Project were obviously very smart, and knew that human nature couldn’t be changed by fiat.  Accordingly, the officials used the special status of the Project and issued highest priority requisitions so that the personnel of the machine shops be furnished cigarette lighter flints.

We should all be so wise.