I think, therefore I am...

not employed by a Shared Service Center. One day I'm going to write that book. Until then here's another story from my personal experiences while working for such places.

What can motivate one to go to work each morning more than statistics? And then especially the kind that takes everything into consideration, except that it is about a human being, and not a machine. 

I mean when you have to register orders with 99.5% accuracy while at the same time you cannot communicate directly with the customers, neither the salesmen - though you have to read their often incomprehensible emails to do your job -, instead you have to ask the so-called local team to contact them to find out what they really want, but at the same time your employers prefer you to work with as few cases sent back with questions as possible...???

And then you get a complaint for everything, even if you asked and the local team simply forgot to inform the customer that you'd fixed the mistake, and anyhow it happened before the goods they'd ordered left the warehouse, and they got all the correct documentation with them.

Or if you correct a mistyping because the salesman sends a mail asking for it, but since you didn't notice it yourself, it counts as a mistake... And how many times the salesmen write I made a mistake, correct it. The customer receives a notification about those cases, too, as soon as I put the order in the system. Who's to blame then?

And so on, and so forth... It all reminds me of this fantastic and sad sad story from the pen of one of our most famous author, called The Tragedy of Man, and about the scene in the (maybe not so far) future when everyone lives in a phalanstery, and makes the exact same kind of products in the exact same kind of fashion, exactly as they are told. And when the re-incarnation of Michelangelo carves a nicer chair leg than he's supposed to, they punish him for it.

Actually, to me the future seems even worse. When all of us are worn to the last in our nerves, both physically and mentally, and there are no more cheaper countries to move these jobs to, then it will be completely automatized, and we'll become useless and die abandoned of our very selves. Cheers man.