First they take away your secretary and assistants and give you voice mail, email, and a Blackberry. Then they take away your office and slap you in a cube about the size of a hamster cage. Then they attach a keystroke recorder to your computer to monitor your "productivity." Then they put you on-call 24/7 and even on vacation. Let's see, what's been left out of your productivity profile? Yes, the ability to get work done while exercising! Fear not. That too has now been overcome.
Meet the workplace Focker called The Walkstation
"The Walkstation is the combination of a fully integrated electric height-adjustable worksurface with an exclusively engineered, low speed commercial grade treadmill. At a maximum speed of 2 mph, the Walkstation lets you walk comfortably, burn calories, feel healthier and more energized... all while accomplishing the work you'd normally do while seated. No sweat!"
There's a constant passion for increasing our work day that's particularly evident here on the web (See Merlin Mann's self-worshipping and obsessive 43 Folders and the thousand of spin-offs from this site), but it all strikes me as so much overkill. Indeed, it strikes me as a serious variation of my favorite quote from Time Bandits
Supreme Being: Dead? No excuse for laying off work.
It's all really an extension of the common fear that "The hurrier I go the behinder I get." And with job cuts likely as we chat ourselves deeper into economic trouble, people are only going to become more obsessed with proving to their Corporate Overlords that they really do have value.
Of couse, the truth is that -- for the vast majority of people working in corporations -- their jobs do not make them nearly as busy as they could be. Much of the work that gets done in offices, the real work, gets done.... Tuesday, after lunch. The rest of the week many, if not most, of our current crop of office workers spend a lot of time padding out their tasks and just goofing off at work. Indeed, the Web itself is the greatest work goof-off invention ever made. Right? Right.
Now get cracking like the little corporate hamster you are!
Posted by Vanderleun at March 24, 2008 12:24 PM