Indulging Self Importance

 

My petitioning creditor has messaged me asking if I can meet today to provide them with an update on the status of a liquidation and that’s just reminded me as to why I detest just about everything associated with corporate bs. I understand where these guys are coming from and I am saved by the fact that the boss is exceedingly busy on another matter to worry about too much other things.

This incident has gotten me to talk about one of the things that I’ve often mentioned – the fact that I detest the office and many of the things that I associate with that institution. Many would say that spending more than half my working life as a freelancer had the unhealthy affect of making me adverse to what everyone else called normal.

However, my aversion to desk work and the trappings of corporate bs came from national service. My first battery commander (who has, like all good military scholars gone onto become very senior in a statutory board) had an addiction to endurance meeting. He believed that team bonding among his officers and nco’s was best done over a work meeting and he was a little fond of holding them on Saturday afternoons (back when the working week ended at 12 noon on a Saturday). He would drone on and on and then look at us fidgeting and offer to get us pizza, which we would politely refuse because pizza meant a reason to keep the meeting going and the end of our precious weekend. His love for endurance meetings reached such as stage that we celebrated the fact that his successor as our battery commander was married and had every motivation to want to go home. We thus made it a point to be very nice to his wife whenever she showed up at the unit.

In this respect, national service actually proved to be valuable. My first battery commander showed me that meetings were actually a legitimate form on mental masturbation, regardless of whether this was in the military (part of the bureaucracy) or in the private sector (in the Singapore context, that includes the sector too small for Temasek Holdings). One of my worst experiences with meetings was when I was with an agency that served the Public Utilities Board (PUB), where I had to sit in a meeting that never seemed to end and I wanted to yell “What are you trying to achieve?” Thanks to the army, every time I am forced to sit down and listen to someone, I start to fidget after an hour.

https://medium.com/@RiterApp/5-tips-to-stop-wasting-time-at-work-eb148539394a

 

Copyright-Riter.

Like with most things, I do see the necessity of certain things. There are times when a face-to-face meeting helps break the ice and you can learn a lot by studying a person in the flesh. I actually liked creditors’ meetings that were done in person because it gave me a chance to meet the business people funding the professionals.

However, if we ae really honest with ourselves, we will find that the time we spend in an office is actually non-productive. If anything, offices and meetings are often counter productive institutions designed to make the impotent feel big. If you are in a white collar job, there’s no reason why “work” needs to be confined to a space for set hours a day. As long as you have a laptop or even a smart phone, you can work from anywhere.

Covid showed us how unnecessary the office was. We could do work elsewhere. Technology had shown us that you can access documents through a common server and you could have face-to-face meetings through zoom.

So, why has there been a rush to go back to things like the office or to Zoom. In Singapore, the answer is obvious. Landlords and property developers suffered in Zoom. If work could be done remotely, why pay so much for prime office space? Hence, you had the flurry off ads and articles about the wonders of the office, which in my feeble mind only seemed to enforce the point that offices are actually places of toxic socialising masquerading as work places.

Technology has freed us from tyranny of the definition that work can only be done within a certain time frame and confine to a certain location. We need to liberate ourselves from this need to pleasure ourselves in our own self-importance if we are to take full advantage of what advancements that have been made in order to be a productive society.