Youth are encouraged to become responsible people.
When we are adults, the expectation is that we will act responsibly at all times. Responsible adults abide by and uphold family, social, community and national rules, laws, regulations and expectations. Aside from those more general applications, if you see yourself as the oldest, or the most capable and reliable person in a group, you should feel somewhat responsible to see that the group behaves appropriately. I remember being engaged in some inappropriate activities with several other youth when I was a new teenager (just thirteen years old). We were stopped by an adult acquaintance. It was the oldest who got the tongue lashing. He was the only one made to feel responsible for what we all did.
The rest of us were actually ignored as if we were not even there.
The dictionary defines responsibility a little differently, i.e. a person is responsible if they have a job or a position involving important duties, independent decision-making, or control over others.
Therefore, one who, being the primary cause of something, is able to be blamed or credited for it. A responsible person will do their best to cooperate with others to see that a job or an assignment is completed and done right, regardless of who may be in charge. Very often a person who is perceived to have certain talents and abilities will be assigned to the leadership of a group in order to accomplish a given task. There may not even be any special compensation for the person accepting that responsibility. In either case, if that person has accepted the responsibility, and depending on the outcome, he will either be blamed or receive credit for a job well done. A story is told of how “the responsible person” may not only be under compensated but also be overworked in order to maintain the operation of the business, etc.
“A man owned a small farm in Indiana. The Indiana State Wage & Hour Department suspected that he was not paying proper wages to his help and sent an agent out to interview him. ‘I need a list of your employees and how much you pay them.’ ‘Well,’ says the farmer. ‘There’s my farm hand who’s been with me for three years. I pay him $200 a week plus free room and board. The cook has been here for 18 months, and I pay her $150 a week plus free room and board. Then there’s the half-wit who works about 18 hours every day and does about 90% of the work around here. He makes about $10 per week, pays his own room and board, and I buy him a bottle of bourbon every Saturday night, and he sleeps with my wife occasionally.’ ‘That’s the guy I want to talk to, the half-wit,’ says the agent. ‘That would be me,’ replied the farmer.”
Owners, in the end, are responsible regardless of who else they may have placed in charge of their business. Business owners, like the farmer, often work harder and longer than their hired help and many times are less well compensated. Regardless, they cannot escape their responsibility. Responsibility, diamond like, has many interesting facets as the following personal story portrays.
I remember only too vividly an experience that I had during my freshman year at the university. My wife and I had just married (September of 1955), and we had just moved into the university housing on campus. At the time we applied, the only housing still available was the old Quonset Huts. They were constructed out of corrugated metal bent in a half-oval shape, much like a small airplane hangar or even like a huge corrugated pipe cut in half. The entrance to them were at the ends. The one that we lived in faced another one with our doors about ten feet apart. A family with a small three or four year old boy lived in the one facing us. One afternoon, the mother was in the process of washing clothes with an old washing machine set up in the front room. In those days, there were no modern washers and dryers like we have today, rather a simple round tub with a motorized agitator in it. After the clothes were washed and rinsed, they were taken out of the washer one by one and run through a ringer. A ringer was attached to the washer and stood about a foot above the tub. It was designed to ring most of the moisture out of the clothes before they were hung out to dry. The ringer was simply two automated, parallel rubber rollers, about 15 inches long, rolling in opposing directions. They fit tight together so that as clothes were run through the rollers, the rollers would squeeze most of the water out (that explanation was necessary in order that pilgrims might understand the rest of the story). During that first term at Utah State University, I rode a bike to school and to work. After school one day, I rode home and parked my bike in front of our Quonset. As I was getting off my bike, I heard a blood curdling scream coming from the neighbor’s front room. The door was open, so I rushed in, thinking something terrible was happening. Their young boy had climbed onto a chair and had his arm caught in the ringer, and it had pulled his arm in almost to his elbow. Fortunately, there was a roller release which I flipped as soon as I saw what was happening. I got his arm out of the rollers just in time to prevent the rollers from doing some major damage to his arm. The little boy was crying and had a mad expression on his face, and as his mother came rushing back into the room, he yelled at her, “It’s all your fault, you should have been watching me!” He was smart enough to know that his mother was responsible for watching him so that he wouldn’t do something (stupid) dangerous. Even though he knew he shouldn’t have put his hand near the rollers, he also knew that as a little boy his mother was responsible, not him, to make sure that he did not do it.
Responsibility in a business, or as a public servant, can be somewhat similar to that of a mother’s responsibility to her child. Immature behavior among adult employees happens more frequently as the size of an organization increases. The leader has the burden of responsibility for employees’ sometimes immature behavior, as well as the responsibility for the company equipment (The washing machine rollers). In summary, being responsible is to make sure that life around us moves forward smoothly and as expected, with as few unwanted and irritating problems (accidents) as possible.