Thursday 8 June 2000

Pic of the day: It's better to bend than to break - but sometimes it would seem that the one may lead to the other.

Chorus of wage slaves

Poor baby me. Almost every muscle in my body is stiff today. (I said muscle.) Both legs, left arm, back and shoulders. Strange. No fever, though! So it can't be too bad. :)

Not surprisingly, we just got to know that the ca 70 PCs which stand in the corners under the desks are all standing upside down compared to what their bearings were made for, and should with all due haste be turned around. And not suprisingly, the workers are very fearful of touching these - it's supposedly a job for SuperUser. Yeah, right. "These are the days when you wish your bed was already made."

Of course, I would be more likely to go to bed early if I felt reasonably sure that I would wake again next morning. But now that I'm over 40, you know, it's all downhill and picking up speed!

Of course, it could have something to do with my unmentionable workplace. Most people here never get their age pension. Some get a real job while they are still young and healthy. The others usually get a disability pension eventually. A few become leaders. Ahem. Actually the current boss at our office is not exactly seeing it as retirement, quite the opposite, she is working weekdays and weekends and I often see her far into the afternoon. It's anybody's guess how long she will last, taking a job like this seriously. I try not to. (Actually, we like our workplace. If it only weren't for the clients, and having to actually work.)

***

The economic boom here in Norway has tempted lots of people out in the workforce, but still not enough. We used to have the highest age of retirement in the civilized world, 70 years with voluntary retirement from 67 at reduced pensions. Now people are slinking off at 62, thanks to loopholes. There simply aren't all that many workers in a sparsely populated nation like ours. Not that the old ones are very useful in most lines of work anymore. They cringe at the sight of a computer mouse, and they are too old to carry heavy things. A few are still useful, such as professors in history and such I guess.

So basically we're having a labor shortage. This is why the obvious solutions don't work in our society anymore. The obvious solution to every problem in Norway is to throw money at it, preferably taxpayers' money. Once upon a time this worked reasonably well. Say you had two problems: People were jobless and grumbling, and some places lacked roads. So you gave the jobless people money to build roads. And everybody was happy. But today you can't do that. The work that needs doing today requires education. We lack doctors and nurses, teachers, programmers and engineers. You can't just give people a showel and money. They don't have the necessary skills. In fact, we don't even have the teachers to give them the necessary skills.

Incidentally, I talked about this with our floor hygiene technician today. She was elated by the phasing in of a fifth week of paid vacation, as part of the solution to this year's labor conflict. I pointed out that people are already working overtime. If they take two more days off, they will have to work 15 hours more overtime than they do already. Will this really make them more productive and less sick?

***

I'm not sure my symptoms are stress related. But I don't think it's a good sign when I find myself singing "Work, work, all day long" in the weekends or whistling Verdi's "Hebrew slaves" theme at work... (The famous one from his opera Nabucco, Nebuchadnezzar, or whatever it's called in your language.) Luckily it doesn't seem that my coworkers recognize the tune ... this has happened too often of late.