Dec 3, 2008 09:00 AM
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San Francisco, 8:22 PM
Tue Feb 9
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Chances are, you're reading this blog at work. At the same time, you're pretending to be a cat princess in a bestiality-quest MMO with your left hand, making a new Lynyrd Skynyrd/MC Frontalot mashup with your right hand and denouncing Saxby Chambliss with both feet. And you're still bored. But fear not — the workplace revolution that's coming will eradicate boredom forever. You will be amazed.
How do I know about these things? Well, I hacked into your mashopolis account and saw the Lynyrd Skynyrd thing, plus I actually sang back-up vocals in the infamous "caged bird" incarnation of Lynyrd Skynyrd. And I'm the squirrel duchess you've been hitting on.
Oh, you mean how do I know about the workplace revolution that's going to smoke your head? That's simple. I am a workplace guru. I travel around the country giving seminars on 37 Easy Ways You Will Porcupineify Your Productivity Management, Without Stilts. I specialize in Hard Reboots and Interventions. You will know I am in your office suite if your cubicle walls all liquefy and then turn into razor-edged opaque Justice Screens.
So what are the awesome changes coming to your bedraggled cube farm? First of all, there will be whole new job descriptions. Armies of people will be needed to become molecular bonders, people whose fingertips are reengineered to stick things together. Human staplers, living paperclips, yours will be the most important function of all. True, you will be unable to touch anything casually — or anyone — lest you krazy glue it to something else with your amazing stick-anything hands. But your mash-ups will be much, much better.
Tort reform is coming! In a Nixon-goes-to-China-by-walking-on-his-hands moment, the Obama Administration will finally free us from the thicket of trial lawyers that prevent any kind of progress in the workplace. You will no longer have to worry about inadvertently suing someone for firing, humiliating or demanding mandatory piggy-back rides from you.
Middlemanagers will be better at multi-tasking. This is the biggest challenge in the American office today. If you think you're bored, just imagine how bored the people assigned to supervise your boredom must be. Help is at hand — since most humans only use like 5 percent of their brains at any given time, the average manager could actually have his/her brain divided into twenty different receptacles without any noticeable loss of capacity. True, some of those remote management units (RMUs) will mostly get the smell centers of the manager's brain, which means you could be stuck with an overseer who will try to smell you at very regular intervals, and who manages by scent. But see above about Tort reform. It all works out.
Your guilt will be prospective. One of the biggest wastes of time in the current office culture is that people wait until they've completely screwed the goose before feeling bad about it. This divides your work time unnecessarily into three phases: preparing to fuck up, fucking up, angsting over how badly you've fucked up. Plus the optional meetings about how to fuck up better next time. Instead, with four-dimensional just-out-of-time productivity upgrades, you will be fucking up, planning to fuck up, and wallowing in the up-fucked-ness of it all, all at the same time. You have will are fail. In fact, that's my new acronym: YHWAF. See how it's already written on a giant banner in your breakroom? That's how efficient things are going to be, from now on. Which brings me to...
Tupper! Your coworkers will not need to nag you to wash the tupperware that you left in the office kitchen sink — becuase your coworkers will BE that tupperware, and so will you. No more wasteful plastic recepticles in the workplace, plus no more sick days. Your organs will gradually be tupperwareized, and your ligaments will become vaccu-seals. It's all to do with stem cells, but don't worry — they're not from unborn babies. They're from your bone marrow.
Cyber-tele-bodics!!! William Gibson and company had it exactly wrong. You will not jack in, or download your brain, or anything like that. Rather, your brain will stay behind here, in the meat world (for your brain is meat, which is why it resembles goose liver pâté). Your body, meanwhile, will be downloaded into the Internet. Your arms and legs will be FTPed to a server farm in Bulgaria, where they'll run really really fast and do pinwheels for the amusement of children making shoes.
By now you're asking, how can I bring about these changes in the brackish sludge pond that is my workspace? Scratch that, how can you be the sluice you want to see in your workplace/sewer? ("Be the sluice" is going to be very big in Tom Peters seminars next year, you heard it here first.) Here's a list of things you should try to accomplish before you're ready to tackle real workplace change: dervishioning, medulla embossing, slow pidgin relanguishment, higher spin refocussing, Belgian-not-Belgian dichotomization, and partial semi complete existence negation (prospective). Good luck, and better working!
Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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