I’;ve been known to tell off people twice my age and about twenty times my experience when they were being idiots. I was right, too.
It’s not so much the inteeligence as the belligerance. I love pissing people off and spitting in their arrogant snot-nosed faces. Man, I love nothing better.
The victims were fucking idiots. I’m not saying the perp and the other Maccas employees weren’t to blame, but the victims were also.
You know, this always pisses me off when I read about the Milgram experiment or watch the video documentation. It’s not about someone’s capitulating to authority in unreasonable circumstances. It’s about capitulating to authority in a controlled environment. If I were in that situation, I would almost without a doubt continue to shock the other person. This is a controlled environment. The experimenters know what they’re doing. Okay, the “victim” is screaming bloody murder; good – that’s how he’s earning his 40 bucks. This isn’t Soviet Russia, and they’re not going to let anyone die or get seriously maimed despite some screaming.
To listen to you, you’d think this was all some kind of plot by an evil corporate empire. This incident occurred because a criminal loon managed to persuade a number of total doofusii to do appalling things to spineless idiots. Not because their employer failed to warn said doofusii not to do idiotic things. OK, Maccas may be open to some small degree of criticism through not publicising this particular method of fooling complete twats, but to suggest that Macca employees responsible should go to jail is just the most amazing example of the mindset that says doofusii are never ever ever to blame, and that those who fail to protect the doofusii from themselves always are.
What should companies do? Have a manual that describes (in 70pt font to keep you happy) every phone or other scam known and sit each employee down in front of it and read it out to them (holding their hand and moving the employee’s finger along each word)? Of course, if they did that you’d call it oppressive, or patronising. And if the scam happened anyway, you’d say it was because the company didn’t use 90 pt font and/or shout the instructions at each employee through a loud hailer, or employ an additional anti-scam employee to stand by the phone and check each call.
It doesn’t matter what Maccas does: you can fool some of the people all of the time. And jailing Maccas management because of that fact would be as much of a crime as what occurred to these poor girls in the first place.
Two reasons this applies to her.
One, her defense was “Hey, I’m just following orders”.
But also, they (the army) found it pretty easy to judge her even though she was in some unusual circumstances.
Given that McDonald’s was aware that this was happening with relative frequency for a decade, it’s definitely something that should have been touched on as part of management training as a matter of course. Every manager goes through a training period. There is a manual. Since they were aware of the ongoing problem, it was arguably negligent to continue to leave their floor managers in the dark about this, when preparing them for the possibility would have been trivially easy and would have spared a lot of their employees some trauma.
Acknowledging McDonald’s shared culpability for the outcome doesn’t absolve anyone else. The perpetrator is obviously the main bad guy, and part of the blame goes to everyone down the line – in each incident – who went along with his game without having the sense and assertiveness to make it clear to everyone else that it was rather obviously some kind of twisted joke.
Most companies make some effort to make their employees aware of scams that people might conceivably try to run on them. It’s just good policy. When you know that there’s a predatory prankster out there that’s spendinga lot of time targeting your employees, you have a responsibility to take some steps to protect them – even if only the really dumb ones are at risk.
Pretty much literally, in fact.
The number of cases over that decade were so low as to be off the radar. 60 cases in 10 years. 6 a year. How many fast food restaurants are there in the US? A few million? A few hundred thousand at least. And it wasn’t just Maccas. They (Maccas) had probably only been hit a handful of times over a decade. And the story linked in the OP specifically says that the management of the chains was not very aware. I can well understand that: a tiny handful of reports of a very weird thing, spread out over a large number of chains and the whole of the US. It’d be easy to dismiss the whole thing as nonsense. But that’s not what occurred:
“Company executives had sent out memos to owners and operators about the hoaxes” says the story in the OP.
So the companies had done something about it. Perhaps not quite enough, we could argue that backwards and forwards all day, it’s a matter of opinion. But to suggest that the companies knew all about this problem, or that it was a major problem, or that they did nothing is in my view quite wrong. And it seems to me their reaction was proportionate to the problem.
I knew something about my recollection was a bit off…thank you kindly for the cite, Kimstu!
Anyone else find it very interesting that Ogborn remarked, “Good girls do as they’re told?” I’m wondering what kind of family background she comes from.
If it’s wrong to beat people up because they’re weak, it’s wrong to exploit people because they’re stupid, IMO.
The victims aren’t necessarily stupid. They were in very real danger of violence, and in fact were assaulted in many cases. Imagine yourself in such a situation. What do you do? Scream that “this is crazy, I didn’t do anything”? The response to that is to be violently assaulted. The only one that really has to be fooled is the one committing the violent acts, and if these people are competent to stand trial, they should get the max.
With all due respect, this is exactly why the Milgram experiment was so important. It shows that abuse of authority carries far deeper ramifications than at the level of the abuser. This trust you, the vast majority of Milgram’s test subjects, and even myself place in the “experimenter” who “knows what they’re doing” is exactly what those who wish to abuse their authority rely on. Adolf Eichmann believed his superiors knew what they were doing and his orders were for the greater good of Germany and the German people. Perhaps even the world(if he bought into the Aryan Uber Alles propaganda). The ability of an abuser in a position of authority to wield the power of that position without the subordinates questioning it is extremely dangerous and that is exactly why the Milgram experiment is a landmark in understanding the dymanics of authority.
Enjoy,
Steven
What an apropos typo.
Nitpick – this was a McDonalds company owned store, not a franchise.
Yes, it is wrong to exploit people because they are stupid. Nobody is saying that the caller is an OK guy. But it is wrong to be that stupid and to be allowed to serve food to the public.
Gee, the hamburger fell on the floor. I didn’t know it was wrong to pick it up and serve it anyway.
My manager told me to go ahead and serve the meat that had past it’s expiration date and smelled funny. I just did as I was told.
But to me the most galling thing in the article was the level of pity for the caller. OK, he’s the accused caller but the whole, “he really wanted to be a cop” thing just creeps me out. You know this guy would be pulling over girls and forcing blow jobs to get out of a ticket every night.
I don’t think people obey questionable orders like this because they’re stupid; they do it because they’re afraid of losing their measly $6.35 an hour and ending up out on the street. In the article it says the girl took the job because her mother lost hers, so someone else needs her to stay employed.
Exaggerated crap. The store managers were not violent psychos. There was no threat of “violent assault” There was no need. The victims didn’t even protest that it might be a hoax or demand that the local police be called to check on “Officer Scott”.
Some of the managers slapped butts. That’s violence. As someone who has been sexually assaulted, at least for me, one of the things that ran through my head was “what can I do to avoid the violence escalating?” You don’t know that your manager’s fiancee isn’t some sicko who is really enjoying this and if the “cop” gives him an excuse to tie you down with duct tape and burn you with cigarettes he won’t be a willing participant.
“Create a job that any monkey can do, and you’ll need to find a monkey to do it.”
I wonder how well that hoax would have worked in a corporate setting? If the issue was breaking the law to ensure profitability, would they do it?
That story is so crazy it’s almost funny, except for the victims’ suffering - I don’t blame them for losing trust in people, how could they not?