Bullshit is cumulative

I hate my (work) laptop. I hate working with it. I sometimes feel sick at the thought of opening it.

It’s not the work itself; mostly I enjoy the work. It’s all the little things – all the little annoyances that build up to the point that working with my laptop feels like battling to do my job. Like putting a tent up in the wind.

Let’s take the task bar. It’s supposed to auto-hide. But it never does. That’s because there’s always some little reason for it to decide not to auto-hide – some application that is desperate to notify me about something. So it constantly obscures bits of my working area and I am forever shuffling it into different parts of the screen.

Or the alerts: ‘your password must be changed’, ‘Skype needs to update’, ‘you will need administrator permission to do this’, ‘Outlook needs your credentials’, ‘your computer needs to restart’.

You see the thing is – taken in isolation each of these little interruptions makes sense. But laid end-to-end across the working day, the net effect is a suffocating level of bullshit that saps your will to live and reduces to ability to get stuff done.

This isn’t just a whinge about my computer – many things are like this: cumulative bullshit. The employee experience for example, is often a concatenation of little annoyances (‘bring your ID card’, ‘wear a tie’, ‘stare at the people camping in your room’, ‘use this email system’, ‘sit there’, ‘fill in this form’) and unless we notice that we have inadvertently built this massive bureaucratic burden into our working lives, productivity and engagement will continue to fall. Because we never stopped to think about the (user) experience.

Once again: taken in isolation, each of these little things make sense. But piled one on top of another they are bullshit.

Image: uichang-dong, Pixabay