House of Eratosthenes

If man is a species, and a species evolves by adapting to the struggle for limited resources through natural selection, growing stronger through the confrontation of the exigencies of nature, I wonder if the process can work the other way. If we rely on technology or whatever-else have you, to remove the struggle from daily life, can the genetic traits we have accumulated, start disappear through a process of atrophy?

In theory, I see no reason why not. In practice, it would appear this process is much quicker than the creation of those traits in the first place.

Item!

Ninety-seven percent of IT professionals feel “traumatized” at their work.

According to a survey released this month by Dublin-based consulting firm SkillSoft, 97 percent of IT professionals feel traumatized by their daily work. Indeed, 80 percent of them get tense just thinking about going to the office.
:
What appears beyond doubt is that workplace stress has turned into an epidemic…work has become so psychologically demanding because we choose to make it that way.

Duh. The article goes on to point out that “hyperactivity is now a badge of honor.” I’d say that’s right on the mark. Working in IT shops for twenty years in a variety of different capacities, I’ve come to notice some of the most esteemed and celebrated and up-and-coming highly compensated professionals, are the ones who put the most energy into showing how much adrenaline they have. It has not escaped my notice that these seem to be the people who take the most time to solve simple problems. Or, if they can somehow take all this cosmetic adrenaline rush and channel it into a productive solution to a problem, they’ve made the day far less productive for those around them. When Bob’s trying to get the index rebuilt on the database, after all, nobody within forty yards of Bob can think about a damn thing other than the stinkin’ database.

In fact, personally, I question how a real IT shop can have “badges of honor.” That strikes me as a case of choosing to make the job more stressful. After all, you’re there to make things work, or you’re there to show yourself off trying to make things work. You can’t do both.

If you try, everyone else will suffer as they wait longer before the damn thing works. But oh, what a show you’ll put on for them, trying to make it work.

Ninety-seven percent “traumatized,” huh. I wonder if this is a language problem. Like if you’re an IT professional, and at least one day in a week you get that feeling where you really, really wish it was Saturday and you don’t want to go in, you have to put down in this survey that you’re “traumatized.” Gawd, I hope that’s the case. To drive through the asphalt jungle, over the very spot where, two centuries earlier, Daniel Boone had to wrestle bears and what-not, grabbing your quick Starbuck’s Caramel-Macchiatto, waltzing in to your air-conditioned fortress, filling out a status report or two, and then answering a quick survey to report that you’re “traumatized.” Yeesh.

In the Civil War, when men had to have their legs amputated without anesthetics, there was no way to stop the bleeding without the benefit of a red-hot iron skillet. My point? A hundred and forty-one years on, 97% of the people who have to answer e-mails about why-isn’t-this-network-printer-working, feel “traumatized.” Trouble?

Item!

An office worker has suffered injury from his boss’ potty-mouth language.

A TELSTRA worker traumatised by bad language in the office has won a compensation claim.

The man was treated for anxiety and depression after his bosses told him to get his “arse” and “bum” on a seat, a tribunal has heard.

Sivanadian Perananthasivam has been awarded medical expenses and workers’ compensation for almost three months off the job because of emotional distress.

He was upset and weepy, and then later suffered migraines and nightmares and had a fear of answering the phone after he was sworn at, intimidated and branded a disgrace to his work team, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal was told.

The abuse that helped trigger a psychiatric disorder included one superior telling him to “park your little arse in that chair”.

The bad language was part of the Australian vernacular and would not offend the ordinary worker, the hearing was told.

But Mr Perananthasivam was a religious teetotaller and non-smoker not used to casual cursing.

Mr Perananthasivam, of Sydney, felt bullied and racially abused at work before the incident, the tribunal heard.

He was working as a bid manager for Telstra during the showdown and had since been sacked.

Two managers, Steve King and Phillip Cornwell, apologised to Mr Perananthasivam after Telstra held an independent inquiry.

Tribunal senior member Josephine Kelly ruled that he had suffered a work-related injury.

She ordered Telstra to pay medical bills and compensate him for time off work between February 9 and May 3, 2004.

You know, my lifetime is like the blink of an eye, against the mural of human evolution. I know of no human trait that has been developed over a mere four-decade span, in the ongoing struggle of the species to survive in a competition for limited resources. If you were to lengthen that amount of time by a factor of, let’s say, a hundred, to four thousand years or so — I still can’t think of any natural strength we’ve developed over that timeframe, other than, perhaps, a nominal increase in the average man’s height.

And yet in a single generation, I appear to have witnessed the pain threshold of the office worker yanked to the floor like a whore’s drawers. Waah!

So because of that, I have the sense that the human species, and thus any species, is capable of creating a new weakness in a fraction of the time it takes to create a new strength. I do not know this for a fact and have no way of proving it. I simply haven’t been alive long enough to see us do something really cool…like walk upright, see in the dark, change the shape of our teeth, expand our skull cavities, etc. These things take thousands of years, maybe millions.

I’m no scientist, either. And the scientists don’t want to find out about this stuff. They’d much rather bellyache about how President Bush doesn’t believe in global warming.

But I suspect if they were to take the time to look into it, they’d find my theory of slow-strength-rapid-weakness holds true, or anyway, that there’s some merit to it. A weakness can appear in a single generation, maybe even less than that, if an environment fails to introduce a challenge, and thus motivate a specimen to overcome it. Strengths, on the other hand, come from said challenges. They come from natural selection, and they come from mutations that allow one line of a species to compete more efficiently for limited resources, against another species failing to sport the new mutation, thus doomed to die off. That, essentially, is what natural selection is, as it’s been described to me. And it takes a long time. Generations. Oodles of generations.

Here it is 2006, and some guy with an unpronounceable name suffers injury when he is told to sit his ass down in a chair.

Thirty years for the weakness, thirty THOUSAND years for the strength.

You realize the ramifications of my theory, don’t you, if it is indeed true? We’re living in the end times. Armageddon must surely follow such a widespread and rapid shedding of the traits that we have accumulated over nigh-on-unmeasurable amounts of time, to survive in the wilds. Furthermore, if you buy into the theory that the taming of these wilds is a mere illusion, genuine only insofar as it motivates us to weaken ourselves by living in them — and I do — the end of the world is all-the-more assured.

But hey, don’t worry. Just keep sipping that Soy Latte, feel traumatized about having to do a restore on that network folder you erased by mistake, and sue your boss for telling you to park your ass in a chair. Pussies.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

WimpyWednesday, June 14th, 2006

Wimpy
Wednesday, June 14th, 2006