Tendring
Topics……..on line
Our Brave New World
At the end of the 1960s I was, as a
Public Health Inspector, involved with a great deal of Health Education
work. Consequently Clacton Council
released me for one morning each week to attend a two-year part-time course for
teachers of adult ‘further education’ at the local Adult Education Centre. It
was very interesting, though by the time I had completed the course and passed
the appropriate City and Guilds
examination I had been appointed as the town’s Housing Manager. The qualification was useful though when, in
1973, I applied successfully for the post of Public Relations Officer to the
newly created Tendring District Council..
I
remember vividly our very enthusiastic young ‘further education’ tutor. The
1960s had seen the dawn of the electronic age and he was tremendously
enthusiastic about the benefits that it would bring to everybody. The day was coming, he said, when no-one
would need to do more than a few hours of work for perhaps just three or four
days a week. Humanity was heading into a
golden age in which everyone would have vast amounts of leisure time. It would be our task (he made it seem like
sacred mission!) as teachers of adult education, to teach folk how to fill
those unaccustomed hours of leisure positively and for the greater good of
humankind.
How astonished that young man would be (perhaps he is, because he was a decade or so younger than me) at the world of
the 3rd millennium – half a century later. The advances in electronic science have been
greater than he could possibly have imagined. His promised ‘leisure time’
though is being endured, rather than enjoyed, by two and a half million
unemployed, while those who have work are having to work harder and for longer hours
than ever before. Many shops and other
businesses are open seven days a week. The government is doing all that it
possibly can to tempt, persuade or coerce young mothers to entrust their
children to professional ‘carers’ and get back into paid employment, and for
the chronic sick and disabled to do any work of which their failing bodies or
minds are still capable.
In
the 1960s marriage was still the norm.
Most married women preferred, at least once children were born, to
pursue careers a mothers and home-makers.
Nowadays it is common for couples to live together as ‘partners’ before,
or perhaps instead of, marriage. Both of
many such couples need to work to ’manage’ a burden of debt imposed upon them
at least partly by government policy – repayment of student loans can take a
working lifetime, and the government actively encourages mortgage debt in
pursuit of its unrealisable ideological aim of ‘home ownership for all!’.
The
gap between the incomes of the wealthy and the poor is wider than it has ever
been. The new Chief Executive of a
failed bank on a salary of £1 million a year, is considered to be
‘self-sacrificing’ because he agrees not to be handed a six figure bonus for a
couple of years! Meanwhile state
benefits to the poor are capped, stricter means testing of benefits are imposed
and the state-friendly national press derides the unemployed as ‘scroungers’
and ‘shirkers’. More and more people
are dependent upon food banks and charity handouts for survival.
Depersonalisation
A
week or two ago I wrote in this blog about the many times when, on Clacton
Railway Station, the ticket office is unmanned, there are no staff visible
(there may be one or two employees tucked away in an office somewhere!) and
rail passengers have to be content with a time table on the wall, a ticket
machine and printed warnings about the penalties for travelling without a valid
ticket. What more, I asked rhetorically,
could travellers possibly want? Below is some sound advice for the successful entrepreneur in the 21st century:
Employing HRUs (Human Resource Units, or flesh-and-blood men and women) is rarely cost-effective They expect to work only a third (at the
most) of each 24 hour day and to take at least one day off every single week! They expect to be paid enough to enable them
to feed, clothe and house not only themselves but their families, and enough to allow
them to save for a pension when they can work no longer. They expect to be paid when they
are off sick or on holiday and it’s difficult and expensive to get rid of them when they’re
surplus to requirements. Where possible
it always makes financial sense to use a machine rather than an HRU, and the electronic age is making
that possible in more and more fields of what was once thought of as human
activity.
I hate it! It’s not just
because every pound saved by using a machine rather than a human means
another person unemployed. That comes into
it of course, but personally I don’t like drawing Cash from a machine instead
of from a friendly bank or post office counter-clerk. I don’t like phoning a once-friendly
help-line and being told by a mechanical voice that if I want this, press 1, if
I want that, press 2 and if I want the other press 3, or – worse still – being
referred to a website! I don’t like
buying things ‘on line’. I’d rather go
to a shop and see and feel what I am proposing to buy. Often I’d like to chat about my
purchase. There was a time when shop
assistants were knowledgeable about the things (cameras and photographic equipment, fishing tackle,
camping equipment) that they sold, but those days are over. Often nowadays there aren’t even instruction
booklets. ‘Full details are available on-line sir – you’ll find the website
address on your purchase!’
I am not
alone. I had thought that it might be
my age that gave me this dislike of machinery and fondness for poor frail and
often failing humanity. However I have
received an email from a regular blog reader, some thirty years younger than
me, that expresses even stronger feelings than my own. Here it is:
You
may remember me expressing dismay at the de-personalisation we are suffering;
Benefits being administered by Call Centres all over the country; Libraries
with automatic book check in and check out machines; Cafes reduced to a bank of vending machines;
Some Supermarkets (M&S Moorgate) with 90% automatic tills; Almost all Barclays banks “upgraded” to a hall of ATMs with a hotline to a call centre to arrange loans; Plans to close ALL ticket offices on the London Underground and take no cash on London buses – everything paid for by Contactless Credit Cards and Oyster Cards.
The final straw today, in the Evening
Standard, was that Brent Council has opened up a brand new Civic Centre and has
a Hologram Person directing people where to go in the entrance lobby.
Apparently the machine holds a tablet where you can key in questions and are told where to go by a simulated voice
I
know 1984 came and went without George Orwell’s worst fears being realized, but
even he didn’t see this coming. How long
before they decide we don’t need People in Call Centres, because robots are
cheaper and voice recognition software is good enough? – 10 years maximum is my guess.
And
of course the Internet is really part of the problem because although it
provides more opportunities for people to talk to other people on social web
sites, it allows so many public and private organisations to hide behind a web
site – often not even providing a phone number or an address or the name of any
member of staff.
Then
the other amazing thing is people living in two worlds at the same time. Over many
decades we have become used to people listening to music from ever smaller
music players while they walk and work.
Today though I saw several people WATCHING a video on their mini iPad,
with earphones in their ears as they WALK through the tube station. Can
you believe it, a completely parallel fantasy existence whilst actually walking
in the real world!
I haven’t seen
anything like that. I am sometimes alarmed
though when I am on my mobility scooter and see someone walking towards me on
the footpath while engaged in an animated conversation on a mobile phone –
sometimes even tapping out a text message as they walk. They are obviously in a world of their own
and relying on anyone in their way to step aside and let them pass. Now that’s something you just can’t do when
you’re on a mobility scooter!
A sign of the times
A
new Aldi Supermarket is being built almost opposite the recently re-opened
Century Cinema in Clacton-on-Sea . It is expected to open in mid October and
there will be thirty job opportunities for local people. Aldi Management
recently had two ‘open evenings’ to interview applicants for these forthcoming vacancies.
I
am told that over 1,000 hopefuls turned up to ask for for one of those thirty jobs! Yet much of the press persists in propagating
the government-friendly myth that most of those surviving ‘on benefit’ are scroungers and slackers
who don’t want work. I'd like to see the editors - or better still - the owners, living for a few weeks on 'job seekers allowance'!
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