Lunch Rush

One of the many good things about no longer being in the workforce is that I can pretty much avoid going on when traffic is at its worst. We don’t have the type of rush hour problems that much bigger cities do but, certain things like weather and construction can create jams. Nothing worse than sitting idly in your car on a road built for high speed.

With my one lesson now being around noon on Tuesday, I get a little hint of what driving in peak times is like. Seems a lot crazier than I remember. Lots of people going as fast as they can to get to wherever they need to go. Maybe trying to run an errand at lunch because it is the only time you have. Maybe running late and need to get back before someone notices. Don’t know but I don’t miss it.

I’m probably part of the last group of people who started work before computers and other tech devices made life “easier” We did have computers but things were really just getting started.

One of the things about reaching my age is that you don’t really appreciate how much technology has changed things until you think back to how things used to be done.

And it isn’t just technology. I remember people brought in a male stripper to celebrate someone’s birthday and it was done in a company conference room. I mean he kept his undies on but that would clearly be inappropriate in today’s age. When I started, you could smoke in offices – always hated meetings in the offices of smokers.

Our company headquarters were in Germany but communication was not easy. I don’t remember when we got email but I know we didn’t have it when I started. You could call but it had to be from a phone equipped to dial internationally and those were typically limited to managers and other important higher ups. So you had to use interoffice mail meaning you wouldn’t hear anything for several days.

Funny thing is that stuff still got done. All of the advances made it easier and quicker to communicate but then it brought along something else. I mean if you could get an answer quickly, then you were supposed to solve the problem quickly. It didn’t matter that you used to have to wait and the company didn’t collapse. Now, it was just expected that things would get done faster.

And that has just gotten worse. When I left, everyone had laptops, most had cell phones and everyone had access to the company servers – including email. And because it enabled you to work pretty much around the clock, that almost became the expectation. Maybe not for everyone, but if you wanted to advance, answering an email at midnight certainly showed your dedication.

Not that everything moved at warp speed. There were certain parts of the company bureaucracy that could grind everything to halt. How they got away with it, I’ll never know. But you often ended up needing to find workarounds to manage the internal company processes that were supposed to help you.

All of that speed simply creates the impression that everything is an emergency. And if everything is an emergency, than nothing truly is. The company doesn’t collapse because some small task doesn’t get done on time and most people are just doing the small tasks that are simply cogs in a very large machine. But with all the modern electronic conveniences, you should be able to get everything done. After all, work doesn’t stop when you leave the office. (If you even go to an office)

Now I think there are people who enjoy that type of life. People who just get off on living at high speed. Maybe it makes them feel super important to be busy the whole time. Like the company couldn’t survive if they weren’t there. (Spoiler – it would do just fine) It is just that other are not wired that way and when the expectation kind of gets set, it just adds to the stress.

I don’t quite agree with this. I know many people cared about what we were working on. But you can’t make people feel like they are in a pressure cooker. I don’t know if that has changed substantially since I’ve been gone but I doubt it. I read a lot of stuff on LinkedIn that speak to this but I strongly suspect it goes out the window at the sign of the first “emergency”.