JANET May and her son Jack love large, sluggish bureaucracies. Big government? Bring it on! Huge departments filled with public employee paper pushers who move at the speed of sludge? Perfect. Bureaucracy can be
good for businessSuggest privatizing certain government functions so that they would work quickly and efficiently and Janet's likely to hold her hands over her ears. She doesn't want to hear about.
Because Janet -- the entrepreneur's entrepreneur -- has found a way to make money off of government's inefficiency.
The name of her business? Stand In Line For You. And that's what she does. For real.
Actually, she, her son and his wife Alycia, mainly stand in line for local car dealerships. That's where the money is now.
You ever stand in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles to register a car or transfer title? It's a killer. At times, the line seems to move slower than a city bus up the Pali Highway.
She figured that car dealerships must have heaps of cars that have to be registered or have titles transferred. That meant the dealerships had to have employees spend hours standing in line at the DMV.
She made the dealerships an offer they couldn't refuse. Now, Stand In Line For You does the legwork and the car dealers don't have to deal with the understaffed, overworked DMV.
"We also pay traffic violations for car dealers in District Court and, to a lesser degree, get traffic abstracts for insurance companies," Janet said.
Janet realizes the irony of her situation. Her business, in a state known to have the worst business climate in the country, is thriving because of a big, slow government bureaucracy.
"We've always joked that if the state got its systems worked out or allowed privatization, we'd be out of business," she said.
The size of her staff depends on how many lines there are to stand in.
"We used to have 30 employees," she said. But some city departments streamlined their functions and she found she didn't need all the manpower.
Faced with a loss of business because government had the audacity to improve its service, she simply looked around for other undermanned departments. The DMV, with it's tedious paper work and long lines, was perfect.
"If a private business ran the DMV, the car dealers wouldn't have any problems," she said. "But the government runs it."
Thank goodness.
NOW for something completely different. We are beginning preliminary planning for the Honolulu Lite Great Poi Dog Contest.
The idea came to me the other day. I was playing with a wooden chopstick, sort of snapping it in the air like a drum stick when my poi dog Boomer came over and deliberately stuck his snout in the way. I thought, what a dumb mutt. Whenever I shook the chopstick, he'd come over and made sure it hit him in the schnoz. I thought, only a true poi dog would deliberately want to get hit in the nose with a stick.
Then I started wondering, what really makes a great poi dog? A real poi dog would not sit when told. And he definitely wouldn't shake hands. If you yelled at a true poi dog, it would take a pee, that's a given. But what are the other attributes of a great poi dog?
That's your assignment. Write me with your ideas for events to include in the Honolulu Lite Great Poi Dog Contest. Like one in which dogs are given points for fetching or not fetching certain items. (Fetchable: Barbie dolls, old doo-doo. Not Fetchable: balls, sticks, Frisbees.)
If we get enough suggestions and I can squeeze money out of my boss, we'll actually hold the contest to find the greatest real poi dog in Honolulu.
