Freeday 8 June 2001

Pic of the day: Another "brighter road ahead" picture. And if you ask me when, I say it starts at the end. :)

More bureaucraziness

I was leaving the office at half past five in the afternoon. On my way to the exit I passed our mail shelf - a place where physical mail is sorted out for each of us to pick up. Unless it is terribly important, in which case we get a call to pick it up at once. Now, this document was from national user support and detailed a task that had to be done on the computer system before five today.

Now I know the letter had not been there at lunch, which was the last time I had any reason to be around there. What is more fascinating was that the document was a printout of an e-mail to our collective inbox. It could have been forwarded to me in less time than it took to print it out and place the bit of dead tree in the mail shelf. If so, it would have popped up on my screen with a little alert. Oh, and it bears mentioning that the e-mail had arrived a couple days ago.

At this point the new reader probably expects a rant, or at least a whine, about stupid coworkers. Welcome, new reader! Prepare for a different experience. I am Magnus Itland, the one and only. Sit tight. Sharp turns ahead.

The first point to note is that I am the resident software instructor and user support for these folks. If they don't know how to handle e-mail, it is my fault. And, uh, they obviously don't. So I shall have to work harder. Or smarter. Until either they get it (or get IT, as it were) or either I or they qualifies for a disability pension. It is anyone's guess who will break first, but I am definitely and defiantly going to try.

The second, and very happy, point is that I had already done the job. This is so much more amazing as it was not mentioned to me anywhere else, to the best of my knowledge, except in that e-mail. But it just so happened that I had checked the office's collective inbox. It is not my job, and I am not supposed to, but as Power User I do have access to it. So I read it yesterday. :)

[Now instead of me including a RealAudio file, just imagine that I can actually whistle. Hey, since we're imagining anyway, let's say my happy whistling in the foreground and the Hallelujah Chorus in the background. I've quite wanted to be able to do that.]

***

I am quite tolerant of human errors, flaws, mistakes and weaknesses. As well I should be, as I have seen such in myself often enough. Besides, it would be kind of stupid to assume that humans are all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good. People still debate whether a God can be all of that, and none of these people claim to be God.

But when it comes to my workplace, there is also the extra little point that it is, well, pointless. That is not to say someone won't be upset if we don't do our work. Someone will be. But society could easily be organized in such a way that almost all our work would be unnecessary. In fact, the particular workplace where I am could probably be eliminated completely, though that would be a rather drastic change.

Still, our work is mainly a result of regulation-horny politicians who simply have too much quicksilver in their trousers to sit down when they ought to. Once there is a century-deep layer of more or less conflicting rules, you pretty well need to have a bureaucracy to take care of it all. And pleasing the crowd by cutting the bureaucracy won't exactly help, the way modern right-wing parties love to do. If they would cut the regulations and let people do what they will if it harms none, then this kind of work would be revealed as the pointless waste of time it is.

But hey, I am paid for helping my numerous and nice coworkers do this pointless stuff. Who am I to complain? And we are a rich country. We can afford to employ lots of people, most of them women, with invented work. They may not be well paid, but they are paid, and have a level of independence that their grandmothers could only dream of. Go go go! :)

***

There is a Norwegian song, not exactly my favorite, but sometimes I think fondly of it. It is by a confirmed communist and all round strange person, Hans Rotmo. (Light knows if even that is his real name.) The song, "Dampsaga", tells the story of the industrialization of Norway, examplified with a timber mill in mid-Norway. The rural poor were scorned and distrusted, but a revival of industrialism ran through the country, and their workforce was needed in the new industry. Through changing times the timber mill remained a constant. When it finally closed in 1965, the workers were far removed from the rural poverty their ancestors had lived in. They were irreversibly free. "But the timber mill song became a hymn, for all the serfs who became free." "So we gather at the timber mill, and we sing the timber mill song because He that rules all was a carpenter, once a long long time ago."

Now if that isn't a strange perspective by a communist, color me red all over. But I like to think there may be something similar going on. Whether you believe in a personal deity pulling the strings of history, or a woolly kind of collective subconscious subtly influencing the lives of individuals, there may be processes going on. Deep undercurrents whose effects seem nonsensical as they happen, but make sense when we look back at them from a distance. I like to believe that the current bureaucraze is such a thing too.

In the end, I think that the rest of the world will see what I see today, that we don't really need this heavy handed regulation. That society will work better in a simpler, freer mode, where each follows his or her conscience and life goal, as long as they do not harm their neighbor. Where we cooperate spontaneously and voluntarily, rather than being chained together under threats. And then, when we surpass and transcend the society which we live in today, we may find that it was a necessary step on the road to a brighter future for all mankind.