There was a large scale administrative shift at a place I worked at. For the last few decades, the administration did what I call maintenance costing. This means that they planned to replace equipment on a very regular schedule (commonly based on when the warranties ran out) regardless of the condition of the equipment. So, for example, the intake fans and exhaust fans for the buildings were replaced in their entirety every ten years, which were the length of their maintenance contracts. Other aspects of the organization worked in a similar fashion, leading to a very predictable schedule, and ensuring that pretty much everything was more or less working at all times except for the planned downtimes for replacement. It was a bit more expensive, but in the long run probably ended up being cheaper simply because accounting was simple, and there was very few major issues which led to unintended consequences. As well, the system allowed for a regular upgrade schedule, so new technologies were incorporated on a regular basis, and the whole organization improved during every cycle. In the long term, the financial and productive gain from having this was far more than any short term loss from the higher costs.
Now, around the early 2000s, the administration was replaced with a batch of inexperienced business majors. These business major were obsessive with short-term fiscal gain. They looked at the accounts and determined that these maintenance schedules were highly inefficient. They believed that the equipment should be fully broken down before a replacement is purchased. This way they would need to have less staff available, and the costs would be pushed off for a few years down the road. I refer to this style of business management as just-in-time maintenance or stochastic scheduling. Basically, when you run the numbers, it seems that if you can pull an extra year or two out of a exhaust fan, then you should because it will save you 1/10-1/5 of the money in the long run. So, they implemented it, and because the maintenance schedule was maintained up to the day they implemented this new budget, for about 3-5 years it worked wonderfully. They were able to fire layoff staff right, left and centre because no one was needed for the regular replacements. They missed a maintenance schedule for a few pipe valves, and a few fans, and in the short term it looked great. They patted eachother on the backs, and gave themselves a raise because they did such a good job with fiscal planning.
… And then the shit hit the fan. Things started to break, and since they were all unplanned, there weren’t replacements available right away. Intake fans broke on buildings, and the entire building became a haven for bacteria and virii. It takes 2-3 weeks for a replacement fan to be purchased. So, for those 2-3 week, employees got sick, the pressure was way out of whack for the building so people had regular headaches, and to make matters worse the pressure differential led to more severe damages to the building due to water damage. Why? Well, the regular roof replacements also didn’t go through as planned, only patching, but since the outside pressure was higher than the inside pressure, water was literally sucked into the building through microcracks in the tar on the roof. Now, an entire half a floor needed to be shut down to deal with water damage. Which alone wouldn’t be a huge issue… if there was personnel available to clean up the water immediately, but since those brilliant business majors fired half of their maintenance personnel and pipes were bursts elsewhere that needed to be immediately fixed, no one dealt with the water damage. That is, until the black mould started to grow. Again, with some isolation procedures (eg. blocking off about half the floor) and a good ventilation system, this shouldn’t be a problem… but the intake fan was still broken.
So now, the entire floor needs to be evacuated, and health personnel are brought in to check the other floors for contamination. At least 20-30 personnel need to be either moved, or allowed to not come to work simply because their offices are full of toxic mould. All of this at the cost of an untold amount of productivity. Finally the intake fan is fixed, but at this point, a significant portion of the ventilation system needs to be cleaned out professionally and the entire top floor needs to be torn out and more or less replaced to deal with the toxic mould.
Needless to say, this was all at huge expense. However, the business majors remain in control of the administration, because unlike the previous administration, when things go wrong they can simply claim that it was unpredictable and unexpected so it wasn’t their fault. They give themselves another raise, and pat themselves on the back for being so smart that they saved a ton of money again the next year. When in reality, the amount of lost productivity and such completely dwarfs the pittance they saved by not doing regular maintenance. I, honestly, don’t expect there to be any change until someone dies, and even then it will likely be some foreman of the maintenance crews which gets fired, and not one of the execs. In fact, I would expect the execs to give themselves another raise for saving so much money firing the foreman.
So, the insanity of all of this becomes clear. In the name of short term gain was incredible long term losses. The only reason for the first few years it seems to have worked is simply because the previous administration’s efforts were so effective that they had lasting effects beyond the end of their tenure. While this is true for this example, it is true for pretty much everything I see these days. No one seems to think about the future and putting proper investment into it anymore. In the name of tax cuts, we cut maintenance contracts for our roads and buildings simply because in the books it looks good, and the only reason it looks good is because it doesn’t take into account the fact that those roads need maintenance and eventually will fall apart if they don’t get the repairs they need. The Metro collapse of the green line in Montreal is one example of it, another good example is the bridge collapses in the states over the last few years. In the name of the potential for more profit, our governments deregulate carrying the belief in the mystical power of the “free market” will save everyone. The name they even use for it brings up visions of God and unseen entities controlling the world, “the invisible hand of the market”. What is even more audacious, is the fact that when everything goes to hell because they failed to do anything ahead of time, they just claim that it could never have been predicted.
And they give themselves a raise to top it all off.
We need to change that dynamic, or things will really start to crash on us. Enough with Just-In-Time governments, and corporations. It is time to demand those that we grant the privilege of running our economies and governments start to look at preventative maintenance, and by maintenance, I don’t just mean hiring police forces and militarys, but investing in strategies that provide a safety net when things do go wrong, and not just expect everything to miraculously fix itself eventually. Even if they cost us a bit more in the short term. Why should we do this? Bad things will eventually happen regardless. Well, if we regularly maintain things, they happen a heck of a lot less, and when they do happen we are ready for them. Katrina is example of what happens when we are not ready for them. Katrina was fully preventable if the levies were maintained. Note though, that even with proper maintenance bad things do happen from time to time, the Ice Storms in Quebec are a good example of that. However, we can be ready for those occurrences by keeping people on staff and trained to deal with those problems.
How this is to be done on a large scale, I don’t know. However, until we realize this and do something about it, we are going to see more and more small natural disasters amplified to large scale issues due to the obsession with short term over long term.
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) Without lots of these, I think that they simply don’t believe that they can convince Canadians to vote for them. Since they have been doing pretty much nothing of any importance for the previous year, and they will lose people on the left to the NDP and people on the right to the Greens and the Conservatives. Especially since it is incredibly damaging for those MPs who haven’t shown up for any important votes during the previous month, but still got paid their full salaries. I know if my MP was one of those foolish souls, I wouldn’t be voting for them during the next election.