It's not good when your girlfriend is late...

There is a HUGE generational problem now.  I own a lawn/landscape company, I am 36 years old and most of the people my age have little to no work ethic and don't take pride in anything at all really.  My 2 best employees ever really (I've been in business 6 years and been through at least 20-30 employees), both work for my now.  A 46 year man who's been with me a few years, and a 52 year old man who is in good shape and works his butt off too. 
Every 20 something I have ever hired:
* has a sh*t attitude from day one
* is late consistently
* calls in far too regularly for anyone that wants to actually keep a job
* they look at you like your a jerk when you ask them to do something...  I am the owner!  I hired you to do a job.... get to it!!
*  Feels like they are too good to do this work for this much money and I should PAY THEM MORE AND THEN THEY'LL WORK HARDER!  (actually had a kid say that to me)  I said show me you are worth more than the $8/hr and we'll talk, not until then cause you aren't even giving me $8/hour worth of work yet.
* They damage my equipment or break things at a clients home (a pipe, a sprinkler head, a curb, a pool pump, the stucco on the side of a house) and DON'T say anything??  No like, I am sorry but I broke this (so I can fix it before a customer gets pissed off)  Ooooooo I  just LAUNCH   _ _ _ HOLES for that one!  Same day, you're gone, and sometimes they don't even get a ride back to the shop.  GET OUT OF MY TRUCK.  NOW!
 
They piss me off (obviously).  I can say that at least here in the states, most of the unemployed I have ever given a shot to are simply unemployable.  Worthless people from an employer standpoint. 
  I was raised to take pride, work hard, climb up in any company I am in.  My parents taught us that we could do & be anything we set our minds to, and also drilled into me that they didn't care if I wanted to clean toilets for a living, but I needed to be the best damn toilet cleaner I could be.  These are completely foreign concepts to this upcoming generation.  They think they should get the participation trophy they have become conditioned to expect just for showing up, sometimes, and late.

Hear hear...I think part of it is today's diva culture which has elevated the image these kids have of themselves before they've done anything to earn it. They turn on the TV and instead of seeing people who have become successful through a combination of hard work and talent, they see trash like the Kardashians who are famous for, well, being trash. The overwhelming message is that you too can achieve stardom without having to work for it. Just appear on some reality show, or do something controversial or become notorious for some dumb reason or other. The net result is that a lot of kids are walking around thinking that they're potential celebrities simply by virtue of having been born. They walk into jobs thinking their very existence on this Earth grants them some kind of innate value, and that any employer who doesn't recognize this must be a jackass. 
 
 

Man, I was going to post about something similar!!!



Friends who've lived here in Vegas for a while told us that it was practically a cultural thing here… Back home, I can certainly tell you that I do see that younger people don't care much. Here, it doesn't seem to be a matter of generation.
 
First time I noticed was w/ our landscaping guy, Pedro. In his 40s. Referred by the landlord. We'd scheduled a meeting with him, he didn't show up in the morning as expected and called us at the end of the day - like 12 hours later - to ask if the next day would work. Next day he arrived late - by 6 hours.
 
He was just as late each of the following times. In fact, the last job we gave him, he finished w/ a cumulated 5 days delay because he was late by 3 days for the initial meeting with us and then late again by 2 days to show up and do the job.
 
Then there's our landlord's maintenance guy. Almost 60. He was supposed to fix the stove and a few other little things the week after we moved in, March 22nd. We finally got ahold of him at the end of September, after a dinner w/ our landlord.

He arrived one hour late, fixed the faucet, ordered the stove part that needed. Said he'd be back the next day - 45 minutes late, replaced a filter in the AC vent. The stove part that needs to be replaced had not arrived yet - he said he'd be in touch with us w/in a day our two. It's been over a month. No news. 
 
Recently, I've been trying to get rid of a few things we'd bought for the house before we moved in and realized that we wouldn't need them. Instead of having them sitting there in their box in the garage, we might as well get rid of them.
 
So this lady writes, asks about the microwave, we agree on the price, she tells me she'll be here the following day, around one. At 5-ish the next day, she e-mails me - she got sidetracked. Excuse me?!!! Sidetracked? - We set another appointment the next day… Same BS. Don't know her age - but I'd be tempted to imagine that a married lady called Barbara probably isn't all that likely to be 20...
 
Last week, same thing with a guy who wanted the treadmill… The guy seems to be in his 40-50s. We agreed to get in touch the next day - he postponed by 5 hours. We then agreed for a rendez-vous the next day - he wrote and said he couldn't show up.
 
In fact, the only "customer" who's been on time this far was a guy from North Carolina. A musician at that - he bought my Marshall AVT which I wasn't using. 
 

I've been punctual all my life. Partly, I assume, because I started doing radio theatre gigs at the age of nine, and being late simply wasn't an option. I get very, very annoyed when people behave as if agreed schedules were just to keep the others ready for the entré of the "star".
 
Then again, my better half finds it nearly impossible to be on time. She has an unbelievable ability to get something messed up one minute before she's supposed to start the car.
 
I also agree to, as discussed above, that scaringly many younger ones nowadays have no idea of the simple laws of working life and what it means/takes to start making a living on your own. At least here in Finland it's partly caused by the fact that it's really, really hard to find summer jobs for students. When I was young, in the 60's, practically everyone had their first summer job around the age of 15-16. Those first "hard earned" salaries were/are the base stone of understanding how life works.
Today, in my neighbourhood, I think hardly half of the school kids and high school students find any kind of job during summer vacations. Many companies don't hire summer hands at all anymore. So the kids stay at home watching "Reality"-TV and planning how they'll, too, one day do something cool, easy and interesting that makes them rich.
 
One hype-feature that causes damage, IMO: Have you noticed, that when some youngsters get successfull in, say, internet business or game industry, and sell their application/company for millions of dollars, the media like to present the guys as "ordinary nerds, computer kids" etc. who just "came up with this for fun". That makes the really ordinary kids think it really can be done just by coding trick levels for "Doom" in your bedroom. When you look at things closer, these "ordinary nerds" are graduates from good universities, the have degrees in economics, they've travelled around studying how things are done in other countries etc. They've done years of hard work to get there (+being lucky/in the right place at the right time).
 
 

Yup... good posts here.
 
I too run a business and have done so for 22 years. When I make an appointment with a customer for a specific time.... I'm either there 10 minutes early or if I'm late even by 5 minutes, I'm on my cell phone calling to let them know I'm running late and should be there shortly.  In all those years I think I have only "forgotten" one or two appointments. I had made it a few days earlier and had neglected to look at the calender that morning thinking instead about the job I knew I had....
 
I've not had too many employees, preferring instead to work alone. However, out of the 2 I did hire during one large project one guy was a pain.... I fired him at the end of the second week. Sloppy work, give a #### attitude, found him not working more than I found him working when I gave him something to do. Since I was 4 hrs out of town and the job needed to be done.... I simply told him to go set in the break-room at the facility and not wander around the halls, stay out of trouble and out of my way. Then he got upset and threatened to call the police on me when I fired him because I wouldn't pay him then and there. BTW, he lied to me to get the job. In the security business in NC you must have a clean criminal history. So the first question I asked everyone I was interviewing.... "Have you ever been arrested for anything?"  sounds pretty simple. He said no. The state board found an arrest and sent me a letter to terminate him immediately. That letter was waiting when I returned home so even if he had been a good worker, he could not have worked in this business. 
 
One example of what I dealt with daily from him: I put him in a room, with the job of running some conduit across a kitchen ceiling and down to a box. I bent and installed the first "tricky" bend for him. I chalked a straight line for the next two STRAIGHT pieces of conduit, and left him to it after I explained what I needed done.  This was at 8am.  9am came and I figured he should be coming looking me soon to ask what I needed next..... 10am came and went.... I resisted the urge to go and see what he was up to.  At 11am... a full 3 hrs later, still no sign of him.... so I went to the kitchen. I looked through the window in the door and he was standing there looking at the ceiling which had two straight pieces of conduit with one hanging from the coupling..... I walked in and asked what's taking so long.  He replies that this is hard work. I told him he should have been done in 20 minutes and it's been 3 hrs.... he says no way.... I climb up the ladder and finish the job in 5 minutes connecting the final pipe and bending it down to the box and mounting the box.  That was Wed of the second week. That was when I told him to simply go somewhere and set down and stay out of my way while I finished the job by myself.
 
I have seen the attitude of people not caring, and working slow because, in their own words, "I'm paid to work at this speed, if you want me to work faster, pay me more." I heard this a lot when I was a supervisor in a plant. I managed 45 people in a weaving room in a factory. It was a union shop and they refused to work faster and defied anyone to tell them they had to work faster.
 
That's not how I was raised. I was raised and taught to work hard regardless of the pay or the job. Always do the job the best you can. Be on time and be nice to the people you meet and work with. Say Yes/No Sir and Yes/No Mame and Thank you. And smile.

 Uh Oh...I seem to have arrived at this thread a little late.

Herb, Sounds like we have dealt with the same morons and also share many of the same values we were both raised with.  Unfortunately, I think largely these values will all but die off as our generation ages.  I hope I am wrong on that but I doubt it.

I think the problem with some people is that they think your business has been specially created in order to provide them with a living. These are the people who have never grown up - they think that businesses are their mommy. Either that or they're walking around with the idea that their boss is "exploiting" them and therefore they should maintain a bad attitude at all times in retaliation. I really don't think they have sat down and thought about what a job actually is. As far as I'm concerned, everyone is a trader. You have something to sell and you sell it. That's how you make a living. Either you're a business owner and you sell goods or services, or you're an employee and you sell your labor. The employer exploits the fact that someone needs a job and has labor to sell; the employee exploits the fact that someone has invested in a business (risk, effort) and requires labor. If you're selling your time and your skills, you have to provide what the employer is paying for - a good job. If you're being paid for your labor and your labor isn't up to scratch - whether that be because you have a bad attitude, are lazy or simply incompetent - then it's bye bye. In fact you're lucky that your employer doesn't have the legal means to recover the money they have already paid you for sitting around and moaning. I know there have been times when I've realized an employee has been duping me and I've wanted to hold them upside down and shake out every last penny I've paid them. 

http://www.ranker.com/list/notable-and-famous-punctuality-quotes/reference