Standing rooom only

Working towards his full human potential.

London 1750
Chimney Sweep: Get up the chimney and clean it.
Boy: No. It's dangerous and dirty.
Chimney Sweep: It will be good for you.
Boy: Bollocks.
Chimney Sweep: It will help you reach your human potential.
Boy: Go fuck yourself. I'm off to be a cutpurse.
The above is, of course, a genuine dialogue from 18th Century London.







In my 36 years of work, no manager, supervisor or employer has ever said, "Well, these changes are going to be really shit for you. You'll have to work harder, for less, have shorter breaks and eventually we'll be able to get rid of you completely. Nothing I can do about. I just have to squeeze more value out of you".

Instead, we get platitudes of bullshit. It was bad enough in the early 1980s, when I first through a 'change' at work. This was in the Post Office in Liverpool. There was less of the "it will be good for you," and more of the "it will make you more efficient and will be better for the customers."

Once the process began, we soon discovered that 'efficiency' was measured in terms of the longer queues that each of us had in front of us in the office. If you only had one or two people in front of you, the office was overstaffed.

By the time I was made redundant from another job in 2004, the company paid more to 'change consultants' than they actually saved from the redundancy. Prior to the 'consultation' process, we had months of going to change seminars which was at least amusing as you could wind up the speaker by
pointing out the absurdity of the process. At the last seminar, the speaker essentially walked out in the end after facing a barrage of hostility from all present.

There is a huge industry of psychologists involved in the whole apparatus of control in the workplace and in the rest of our lives that vindicates my adolescent view of most psychologists (with the exception of at least some of those who work in the mental health sector) as distinctly sinister.

That's without mentioning the role of psychologists in the CIA and intelligence world from at least the 1950s - A road that led to Guantanamo Bay.

Tempting target

All of this brings me to a very clever man called Grant Schofield (Hat tip to CA). So clever, he probably cuts his own toenails with his cleverness. Professor Schofield heads the fascist-sounding Human Potential  Centre at Auckland University of Technology. He is full of ideas, some of them sensible, many of them bizarre, such as this extract from the Standing Desk Revolution:

Our proudest design achievement, and most powerful piece of furniture, is what I call the “anti-ergonomic chair”. It’s just not that comfortable, for which we love it. Having installed these in our offices at the Human Potential Centre we found that sitting on them for more than 10 minutes made our bums sore enough to prompt us to GOYA (Get off your Arse).

Our trials using “Sit-to-Stand” desks in other workplaces have shown similarly encouraging results. We’re seeing increased mood and vigour, more standing (about an extra 2 ½ hours a day), reduced back pain and overuse injuries. In some cases, the standing desks and un-ergo chairs have proved so popular people have been hiding them so we wouldn’t pick them up at the end of the trial.

Unfortunately, Schofield is not so clever with some things. The quote at the top of his article attributed to Orton Jobs is actually from Job Orton. If he'd been sitting down, he wouldn't have made that mistake.

As someone who spends all his working hours standing up, my view is the exact opposite to what he says. Of course, despite the way it is dressed up, as the answer to a variety of  health problems, the aim is increased productivity. The problem at heart is not that you sit at a desk at work but that you have to go to work at all. I define 'work' here as anything that you have to do purely through economic compulsion As Paul Lafargue put it in 'The Right to be Lazy,' "In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity."

How can you argue with that?
The best antidote to listening to Schofield's nonsense to sit in a chair and listen to Music with My Insane Friend.