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Please change your bookmarks and update your etceteras. I do hope you’ll come along!
Filed under Boring Stuff, Strange Animal, This Way
Last night, the fox came back. I’m getting over the flu, and the night was restless; every time sleep seemed to draw me in, a nasty cough chased it away, a condition that continues remorselessly as I type this next part of his recitation, not having slept for at least ten hours.
Then there was the fox, sitting on a rock, talking as though he’d never left.
Listen, you know how every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings, or some such silliness? Well here’s another one for you: every time a human in a suit says the word ‘Efficiency,’ another human loses her livelihood. If they say they want you to be more efficient, what they mean is, they can’t afford to pay somebody else. Evil, I tell you– and the worst of all the critters are the ones riding on the shoulders of the ‘consultants.’ If you see a ‘consultant’ coming, the hair on the back of your neck’d better be standing at attention.
You think efficiency is good, and it is when you’re talking about fuel, or soup, but not when you’re talking about humans. When you’re a human trying to live a life, it’s best to do as little work as you need to do, so you have some extra time to do things like play with your kids or draw or go for a walk. If you don’t have a little extra time, you go crazy. But, when you’re in a situation where some cold-blooded critter-ridden consultant is telling you you need to do more, and faster, not only are you losing time, you’re also taking away somebody else’s.
Let me tell you a story about this chicken I once knew. She was out in the farmyard, scritching around, and she finds this sack of wheat, see? (She didn’t have no gluten allergies.) So she starts thinking about how nice it would be to have some bread, but how it’s kind of a pain to make bread when you’re a chicken, so maybe she could find some help. She decided to ask her friend the dog. “Hey dog, you want to make some bread? It’ll be less work for us if we both chip in, then we can share it.”
“Sure,” said the dog. “You grind the wheat, and I’ll mix it into dough.”
So the chicken ground up the wheat and took off to do something fun while the dog mixed it into dough. Although they’d both done less work than they’d have done if they’d tried to do it on their own, they were pretty tired, so they decided to see if the cat wanted in, too. “Hey, cat,” said the chicken, “we’ve done some of the work, here, but now we need somebody to knead the dough. Any interest?”
The cat was used to kneading, of course, what with its claws, so it agreed, and kneaded away while the dog and the chicken took a nice nap. Finally, they let the dough rise, and the loaf was ready to bake. “This is gonna be great,” said the chicken, “but I’d sure like to keep napping. Maybe the duck can bake the bread for us.“
The duck was more than happy to bake the bread, so it put the bread in the oven and kept an eye on it, glad it didn’t have to go through the entire bread-making process.
Finally, the delicious bread was finished. The duck took it out of the oven, and they sat at the table in the farmyard. They even shared some with the pig, because why not? It smelled so good, the farmer came out of the farmhouse and stood scratching his head.
“You animals know how to bake bread?” he asked.
“The proof is in the pudding,” said the chicken. “I ground the wheat, the dog mixed the dough, the cat kneaded the dough and the duck baked the loaf.”
“It was all the chicken’s idea,” said the other animals, praising their friend for her initiative.
“Well shit,” thought the farmer. “A chicken who knows how to bake bread. Hell if I need to keep feeding the rest of these animals.” So he shot the dog, drowned the cat, cooked the duck (and the pig) and made the chicken bake four loaves each day, because that was way more efficient, see?
For the sake of a functioning family, everybody needs a little something to do, a little role to play. Maybe it’s not anything more than how a little kid can ‘help’ dad take in the washing. Maybe it’s that one person chops the beans and the other person boils the water. Maybe it’s you clean your room and I clean mine. But, it’s the sane way to do things.
Seriously, end Efficiency now, or ya’ll are gonna have some serious issues down the road a piece. You can sing this: “Give everybody, a little something to do, and that means less work for the rest of you. Make one person do all of the work, and you may be faster and richer but you’re kind of a jerk.”
Filed under Essays, Fox, Gnostic Philosophy, This Way
One of the things about the fox’s recitation: he seems to be trying to promote a return to a sane way of interacting with the world. Spending some time trying to live out his advice has really underlined that for me. (A note: I know that there are better words than “sanity” and “insanity” to describe what I’m talking about, and I have no interest in impugning people with mental illnesses, but these words are what I have to work with at the moment, and tend to do the job.)
It’s easy to recognize madness in things like war and politics and consumer culture. It’s much more difficult to recognize cultural insanity in the day-to-day. Using the fox’s recitation as a guide, however, I’m starting to see instances everywhere.
Let me give you an example.
At a staff meeting today, we received a handout with the following information:
If your child is mildly ill and between one and 12 years old, you can find sick child care through… program at … Medical Center. This is a great resource when you have a mandatory meeting to attend or an event to host and your child is not well enough to attend school or daycare. [Employer] underwrites the entire daily fee for benefits-eligible employees working .50 FTE or more….
This was presented as an AWESOME, HELPFUL benefit that is GREAT for people who have work to do but are inconvenienced by having a sick child, because, as the Division Manager said, “it’s so annoying to have to use your sick time when that happens.”
Everybody agreed this was an excellent benefit. And, in the worldview of the TOTALLY NUTS, it is!
Seriously, this attitude is nuts, right? Like, pathological. There isn’t a meeting that’s mandatory enough that would make me think I was being “inconvenienced” by my sick kid, even if he just had some sniffles. If my kid needs me to stay home and take care of him, I’ma stay home and take care of him! There is nothing I do– there is nothing ANYBODY does– that is SO IMPORTANT that staying home with a sick kid shouldn’t be a priority. This plays into the value of family, of consideration, of basic human decency.
But, see, this is the whole “work ethic gone mad” system we live in. “Look how much easier it is for you to work! See, this is a BENEFIT! You could stay home and not get paid, or could have to use your sick time, but instead you can drop off your precious child with these people we’ve paid to watch him, and come in to work with us instead, and you should THANK us for it.”
I know this is a cultural thing, and there are countries with more rational sick leave policies, but that this is even considered an excellent benefit at a major state-run institution is a sad, weird thing, isn’t it? This is the direct result of the mixed-up attitude the fox talked about, when he said that work isn’t a virtue, it’s a default state. When we start to see work as a virtue, it can get completely out of control, and cause us to lose sight of things that actually matter, like taking care of family members who need us.
Of course, since we’re in the realm of King Sunday and King Monday, there’s very little we can do about this. At the very least, however, it behooves us to recognize madness for what it is.
