[shag posted]:
``While just about everybody agrees that electronic messaging is critical to modern business and that some interruptions are vital to workplace interactions, clearly they've become too much of a good thing. This glut affects Fortune 500 corporations, tiny companies, schools, government agencies, churches, and nonprofits. Just about everyone, in other words.
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Oh, electronic messaging sure is critical. Back in the mid-90s I installed a used computer on a rigged phone line, in my work station so I could freely interrupt, get distracted, surf, wonder, think, enjoy, and mostly escape my asshole work duties.
I have zero interest in changing back to the bad old days of working `off-line' as they say, and I am pretty certain I speak for the masses.
Look at the traffic pattern here on LBO. Everybody is at work, surfing news and current event sites, cranking out e-mails, and generally fucking off on the job.
Let's hope it stays that way.
When I got to my last job, computers were already installed in the shop stalls for billing. Oh whoppy do-da-day. I had the billing program always open so I could click it if heard the boss or supervisor came by. I worked in walled in stall that could only be seen if somebody walk by.
Meanwhile I was chewing over something on LBO while wrenching on some chair. Whole weeks would disappear as I studied this or that on the web, ordered books, shopped, looked up weekend weather in Yosemite, and generally lost all interest in anything job related.
Meanwhile, I worked on getting my getting my job output down to some acceptable minimum and kept it that way.
While I think newer developments like cell phones and twitter are ridiculous, they do serve a mission critical niche. What niche? Most folks are not up to lbo email standards as a way to waste their time while pretending to work. So twitter, text messaging and other trivia systems fill an all important niche---how to kill time while pretending to work, and also be brainless while doing so.
There is a whole culture of games you can play on your cell phone. I know nothing about them but I have watched a couple guys on breaks. This opens whole other dimension to wasting time while getting paid. Two of the three or four workers who collected at the smoker's palace around the corner, used to carry on this cell phone gaming while on break.
Another cool development are small wireless head sets. People at work were supposed to use them for customer service calls. In fact they were talking to friends or gossiping among themselves, while appearing to make return calls.
``Constant distractions also make us stupid. Research clearly demonstrates that interruptions degrade accuracy, judgment, creativity, and effective management. The psychiatrist Edward Hallowell coined the term attention deficit trait to describe this phenomenon and found that it makes people perform far below their full potential...''
I think this is backwards. We, speaking for myself on the job, we crave stupidity, crave the degradation of our minds, just to be released from the crushing boredom of work. The last thing I want is perform at my full potential.
About the one and only great thing about my jobs was the actual work required a kind of creative, science like thought to figure out what was wrong with equipment that didn't work. In places where I was not under a demanding and vicious time schedule, I could spend hours figuring out circuits, electro-mechanical systems, call factory engineers I got to know, and discuss problems and solutions.
As far as the bosses were concerned all that learning was a complete waste of time.
There was an interesting systematic destruction of my former tech-world and its electronic and mechanical apparatus, whereby parts became modularized, then un-repairable, so that all you had to do was isolate a problem to a component, and then order the whole component. No more opening up a box, pulling a circuit board, isolating the part of the circuit that failed and then pulling the discrete elements off the board.
There was also a time when I could strip down a motor-gearbox. Take the armature to a shop to get re-wound, find the worn gears and bad bearings in catalogs and rebuild the whole thing.
Nope. Capital got wise to all that wasted time.
There was a lag in my industry of about five or so years behind the latest developments in screwing the skilled working class out of their jobs. So just as Capital had eliminated every conceivable interest or pleasure in my work, thank god computer email arrived to kill the time. I could pretend to be ordering components or billing, while fucking off web surf or writing long posts to LBO.
``This unplanned shift of priorities can derail progress on the primary job.''
Yes indeed. See, it has become very clear to me the primary job is making money, while production of anything is simply an obstruction.
``In recent years companies have been experimenting with more radical solutions. One approach is to apply quotas to the e-mail messages a worker can send...''
My way around these control systems which monitor e-mail activity was to use telnet to an off site account and run it in the background, while the foreground XPee Outhouse was running.
One of the older billing programs opened an DOS screen that of course looks just like telnet. I buried the DOS screen in the task bar. I had this program running just for its DOS and never used the program itself. These screen arrangements made the telnet window look like the DOS screen where my real e-mail activities took place, while Outhouse and billing program windows made it look like I was do valid, work related computer stuff at my work bench.
I had to do a fair amount of talking to people in the billing dept so I would go to their cubes up front. I couldn't talk to them on the phones, which I'll explain below. It was fun to catch them surfing, shopping, quietly talking to their friends, and basically just fucking off.
The receptionist P was probably the all time master of this art of doing nothing while appearing to be the overworked central hub of the entire business. She was a fascinating study in how to keep in touch with the non-work related world through communications where technology plays such a vital role.
She had both switchboard and computer wired up several different ways to avoid actual work. She sat in an open area and under constant supervision. What this meant was most of her methods depended on stealth technique. She had her LCD angled just so nobody could actually see the screen, unless they peered directly over her shoulder. If you were a customer talking to her on the other side of a low counter you not could see her LCD just to your right, because there was nice looking fish tank with cute little tropical fish in the way. P could make it appear she was talking on the phone to a customer and writing some thing down on her computer schedule. That's appearance. In reality, she was working surfing or shopping on-line, and talking to her daughter, all at the same. You could stand right in front of her and never know what was going on.
The really funny thing was, if she was on break, or out sick the office went nuts. Nobody wanted her job because they couldn't do it. She had also mastered the art of giving excellent sounding answers to impossible questions (phone head). You might never realize you got no answer. She could pack my work schedule to look full but was mostly empty. She could put calls on hold with two others on the flashing board then transfer each off the queue so they went off to die in voice mail. Of course I had my phone set to voice mail on the first ring, just in case P missed.
P was my favorite work buddy. We had to be on the job before the supervisors, so we had an unofficial morning meeting to rearrange any unwanted jobs that got through. We'd figure out the right excuses why this or that hadn't gotten done. How such and such got all FOOBAR, but somebody else was responsible.
Work control, work efficiencies, work supervision, work architecture can all be used against itself in the never ending class war. The real job skills are learning how to not work and keep getting paid. As my jobs got more authoritarian and efficiency prone, the more I tried to figure out ways look super efficient and get less and less done. I couldn't have managed with the phones and computers.