The Virtual Rambler

Number thirty one: 18^th December 2012

Gazing Into The Abyss

My brother and I were children throughout the years of post-war recovery. A period which has begun to feel as remote as the Victorian age , its public figures seeming as quaint now as characters from a Dickens novel. William Beveridge , Lord Beaverbrook , Clement Atlee. The presiding spirit of that distant land was one of purposeful improvement in the lot of the common people. Several crucial industries (coal , water , the railways) were nationalised and financiers were perceived as potentially dodgy customers you needed to keep a close eye on. After the war our uncle Edward worked for the railways , in charge of a wooden signal box operating rows of levers that switched tracks for oncoming trains en route to different destinations. The days of proper jobs , delivering demonstrable benefit to the community. Now thosehave really gone with the wind. How many people do you know whose work nowadays profits anyone other than their employer ? Shifts in the social and political air were gradually exchanging the vocabulary of a Care Home (“Nice and steady now love”) for the language of those who are hotly pursued by the profit motive (“Go , go , go !”). It wasn’t long before it was every man for himself and all hands to the pump , albeit one produced abroad , as the national assets were either abandoned or given back into private hands , for whom management had become a noun rather than a verb.

During those distant days of the 1950s , most working people produced things or provided a service that other people wanted , and the company’s office was just the place where accounts were kept and wages organised. Gradually the roles of office and business changed places. The latter’s task became that of generating sufficient income for bigger offices with ever more unproductive people in them , people who gazed into computer screens all day long. The dwindling remnant of people doing useful work - gardening , disposing of domestic rubbish , diagnosing illness - were invited to spend more of their days developing time-management and customer-relations skills than in mowing grass , emptying bins or treating patients. Those whose salaries reflected their executive status became known as “strategists” and they wouldn’t know a lawn-mower from a waste-disposal truck. Hence their brisk moves from one business to the next , issuing total quality assurance guidelines , innovative solutions and best-practice procedures as they went on their lucrative way. Managers From Outer Space. The development of writing was encouraged by the needs of complex administrations in the Fertile Crescent to record , monitor and effect their multiple tasks. The development of personal computers satisfied an otiose body of managers’ need to interfere with the daily tasks of their work-force in order to justify the managerial presence and its inflated salaries.

A popular parental injunction of my younger days was , “You can’t just sit there gazing into space all day”. Nowadays it seems that gazing into screen-framed space has become the daily obligation for a majority of the working population. The emblematic figure for this life in the void sits at a PC station , surrounded by colleagues at theirs. Some are sending electronic messages to their neighbours , some are surreptitiously gazing at scenes of people in various states of undress , others are drumming fingers on their mouse mat ; hard drives are rumbling and miniature hour-glasses move about the screens on the promptings of each ‘mouse’. On the wall they all face is a quotation from the company’s mission statement printed in large , bold font : When you’ve connected , informed and empowered your staff , they’re ready to collaborate with customers to provide a streamlined service second to none. A time-traveller who happened upon the scene might assume he’d stumbled into an early- learning centre rather than the workplace of fully-grown adults. Nietzsche⁽¹⁾ wrote that “when you stare into the abyss , the abyss stares back at you."


Wig

⁽¹⁾ Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German writer with a very large moustache. His books are sometimes on the Philosophy shelves , sometimes filed under Cultural Criticism , and he was a major influence on a number of earlier twentieth century authors. .

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan & Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012