Summer Games - Job Edition

Work is a cornucopia of silliness, and thus can be blogged about again and again and again. This time: Those odd little mini-games we play at work. Your office is no place for fun and/or games? Think again.

The Greeting Game

This one is more fun the larger your office complex is and the more strangers there are. Depending on your countries, but more importantly, the "culture" in your workplace, greeting customs can be quite different.

Greeting your direct coworkers usually involves some more intimate greeting:

• waving towards the office/cubicle area, with a "(Hi/Mornin'/ 'Ello!)"
• shaking everyone's hand, girls first, short eye-to-eye and smile
• shaking everyone's hand, no eye-contact, because you're already talking to someone else (going-through-the-motions)
• short pat on the others arm or shoulders

If you encounter strangers / indirect coworkers somewhere, such as in the hallway, it's more like this:

• eye-contact, short smile and a greeting (Hello/G'd aft'noon)
• eye-contact, smile and a curt nod
• eye-contact and a curt nod without the smile
• avoiding eye-contact by pretending to be in thought/reading paper/smart-phone diddling

I found it fascinating to note that those customs can vary wildly from company to company, or even between different departments of the same company.

The fun part comes later - since you're usually not tied to your desk all day, you encounter those people several times each day. Greeting them the same as before? They'll think you're some kind of amnesiac or just plain vapid. So, after a few years in the office, your brain devotes a non-negligible part of its awareness to a moving database whether or not you've seen That Cute Girl With Those Ugly Buck Teeth, Man With Obvious Wig, or Frazzled Dude With The Same Stupid Tie Every Thursday.

Thank God we're not doing anything important with our brains all day, huh?


The Small-Talk Game

Let's face it. Most of your coworkers wouldn't have anything to do with you if you met them in "real life", so to speak. And you'd do likewise, because people just tend to be different. But since you're all squeezed into more or less vacuous cubicles, office rooms or what-have-you, you have to communicate with them somehow, or risk becoming an antisocial jerk.

This situation probably goes back into prehistoric times. Once upon a time, Oog and Zog were trapped inside a tiny cave for several hours because of a nasty case of Tyrannosaurs outside. What can Oog and Zog possibly talk about, Oog thought?

- Talk about shiny stone? But what if Zog not like shiny stone?
- Talk about dino outside? No. Zog surely not want talk about dinos. Oog and Zog run from Dinos every ugh-ing day!
- Talk about worshipping bear-totem? No, no, no! Last religion war only month ago! Bad Oog!
- Talk about woman with big gazongas, down by river? Not good. Oog not want Zog to want gazonga-woman too! Or more bad, what if Zog not like gazonga-women, but other Oog-Men? This would even mean the Awkward.

Then, a lightbu...err, bonfire went up over Oog's head.
Oog: So, errm - nice weather, huh?

Ever since then, people have talked about the weather, in order to pass a simple 30-second pause in the conversation. Because silence surely can't mean people are simply doing their job or don't have anything of interest to utter. This behaviour seems so ingrained in office culture, or culture in general, that I postulate: If ever a nuclear war or a giant meteorite happens to wipe out everone but a few pockets of life, buried deep underground, people will still have conversations like this:
Moleman One: Wow...sky sure is, erm. Rocky today.
Moleman Two: Yeah, tell me about it. And this artificial climate control, that keeps the same exact conditions down here - way too warm and wet, if ye're asking me.
Moleman One: Yeah, I know what you mean. Too warm, totally.
Moleman Two: But it's not the heat. It's the humidity.

And if I live to see that future, the next seconds involve MoleTeshik bludgeoning those two into greasy spots in the cave floor, now that those pesky ethical restrictions about killing stupid people are gone. Because, seriously? I like talking about the weather, one, or twice. But not all the fucking time.

The Information A-Bomb Game

Bosses positively LOVE this game. It involves one person arriving in a hurry at the desk of the other person.
Offender: "Hi there did you know what (random department or company) has done now?I'll tell you: they totally changed (some kind of their modus operandi)! Isn't that (good/bad/awesome/green with yellow stripes)? Yeah that's what I thought. Listen, since you're the one here who has (some vague connection with the topic/ little to no knowledge about it) because (of your study paper ten years back / you worked in the same office with that guy for two weeks / your name rhymes with the topics anagram), I think you're the perfect (guy/gal) for the job! It only involves (a shitload of work you won't realize until it's too late). And since you're only (totally overworked) and want to (make the carreer move / get a raise / keep your job). It would be impolite to refuse, since (I'm your boss / I'm your bosses' boss / I play golf with your boss / I can blackmail you). Thanks for your enthusiasm! See you later!!"  
He/She then hurries out, to avoid questions or resistance.
The Offended: *blinks* Oh Fuck-a-doodle.

The Toilet Game

Sorry girls, this one's for men only. The Pissoir in the Men's bathroom saves space and quite frankly, negates the necessity of sitting down on what may or may not be a surface laced with strange, disgusting and infected bodily fluids of undetermined origins. And I'm generally thankful of that, because, I don't know about the ladies, but in the men's bathroom, men usually are pigs.
In the office, people tend to behave better than in the average disco, so it isn't that nessecary to have a Pissoir. Every self-respecting loo still has one or several, for some odd civilizational reason I can't comprehend right now.
But it also gives anyone in the general vicinity a very thorough view of body parts everyone usually keeps hidden under at least two layers of clothing during office hours. Well, unless you have a very lax dress code on your Casual Friday, or you're saving your underwear for more important stuff. (In which case: I don't even wanna know). And do you want to see those body parts of your same-sex boss or coworker while he shakes of the last little drops of pee off his dick? Well, I don't.

Future's gonna suck

You know when sometimes, you wake up, and some sudden thought gets stuck into your head? Yes, this just happened. And when it's even more bizarre since I happened to think about future economic apocalypse.

As many of us are already, painfully aware - Capitalism without brakes is just like Communism by force was - a nice theory, but sucks ass in practice. The so called Information Age adds another layer onto that - many jobs that were necessary in the Industrial / Modern Age (which only ended about 15 years or so ago) will be (or are already) utterly obsolete. Such as, the typewriter. Or the data typist. Or really, many jobs centered around repetitive computer input/output. Statistical analysis? We have a tool for that. Software Development of basic functions? Most of these are already around by the hundreds. Even those Service jobs at call centres mostly reduce the poor slobs working at it to "reading the screen to the customer, and hoping he does not ask something out of category".

Now, in the idealistic capitalistic world of Adam Smith, those people will migrate elsewhere. Problem is? They are just like the ice bears when it comes to global warming - they have nowhere else to migrate to, since we already automated everything else.  Consumer industry? There's a machine that can do everything you do, better, and faster, and it doesn't complain when it gets replaced when its back, knee and shoulders are inevitably going kaputt. Farming? Pshh, yeah, same story. And when we, the customers, turned to Amazon, eBay and the giant internet machine? We deliberately turned our inner cities into barren wastelands - why buy a book for 13.99 when it's on sale for 2 bucks lower, and I don't even have to leave the house for it? Or have to deal with the stupid sales clerk?

Problem is, the same mechanism has a not so unexpected downside - we are not only the customers, sometimes, we ARE that stupid sales clerk. Who suddenly finds he/she/it got blown out of business, and nowadays picks packets in a nameless logistics centre - for about half the wage as before. And it's only a matter of years when that process will be, ultimately, mercilessly, automatized as well.

Of course, there will always be necessary jobs that can't be made obsolete. But there will be less than you think. For example: take, on an average day, a sample of a Google News page. Take one random article (Sports is especially noticable, but any general story will do). Compare the articles on one story, by different newspapers. Notice similarities? As in, word-for-word copies? Yes, most stories are made once and then sold to different distributers. That happended before too, of course, but Google News or other content aggregators make it transparent for us readers. The clincher: not only is this story being written only once and copied a thousand times, it is, more and more, written by software programs. (I've just taken a random article about it I found on the go. You'll find more, I promise.)

So, even jobs thought challenging on a mental level are going to be replaced. That leaves us with several categories of people:

• The Rich - Hey, if you're one of the 1 per cent, you can afford to care less about the rest of this shitty planet. Also, to manage your portfolio, you'll have prioritized access to a staff consisting of...
• The Intelligent - Those who are creative and brilliant enough to understand this world of increasingly complex interactions, processes, and technology - or at least the part needed for their jobs. A future remnant of the ever-diminishing upper-middle-class, those are the people creating the machines for ....
• The Slot-Fillers - as long as the automation of everything is not complete, you have people who read off the screen to give you your insurance information and recommendations (which are really generated by the programs behind it), or pick items in Amazon's gargantuan warehouse bellies (until someone replaces those as well). Those people will be increasingly pushed on the sides, the metaphorical polar bears. Since automatization or rationalization means you will only need a fraction of past labour in the future at steady or increasing output, chances are, everytime your job is gone, you will join the leagues of...
• The Underqualified Unemployed - Adam Smith invisible hand promises that supply and demand will magically heal the landscape until the economy makes our lives aaaaallll better. Unfortunately, there are flaws in this theory thingy, because people are not rational, or the system is not as eternal and self-healing as originally believed (which is one of the major reasons we still can't quite grasp climate change despite the fact that it's been here for over a decade now, but I digress). The problem here is that childrens television lied to us - not everyone will be a rocket scientist, even if (s)he really, really wants to. And that sales clerk that got shifted first to picking books, is probably not the next Nobel Prize winner, his/her other qualities notwithstanding. Have I mentioned business decisions such as hiring/firing'll come out of a data warehouses then? Which simply do not care if you're a nice person if you fail the ever-rising quota?

Now, if we look at those categories, we see where the next problem lies: the Underqualified will grow in proportion, and in return, the demand lowers dramatically (Bums won't buy Bugattis). This raises the competition for the companies, since the available market shrinks down because people can't afford stuff anymore. This in turn raises unemployment again,... yeah, you know where this is going.

At the moment, there is one major distraction from outright economic collapse - almost every state that's not named Greece has opened their budgetary floodgates to "jumpstart the economy". This has been the case, since, oh, 2008 or so? Peculiar, this, no? Especially since this dramatic flow of money more and more fails to bring the desired results, since Money won't solve the problem anymore if no-one dares to spend it. And even powerhouses like China are showing signs that no matter how much money you'll pump into it, the endpoint has been reached for quite a while now.

The most terrifying thing of all this, however, seems to be the fact that no one, on this entire planet, seems to have worked out how to defuse this economic time-bomb. Not the US, nor the EU, or China or Russia or Argentina or I-dont-know have come forward with something different.

And NOW we're gonna combine this time-bomb no one knows how to defuse with the fact that we need to stop turning our planet into a scorched wasteland, preferably in the next decades before it's too late. And we're not talking lower emissions, we're talking zero or negative emissions until 2100 to even stop further warming.

Welp. Good to know we're utterly, thoroughly fucked.