Thought Picnic: Contemporary Remote Viewing

See afar

My day is upset by the irregularity of agendas and purpose. Technology has made the world a smaller place and in the process robbed us of the day cycle because centralisation means that people way outside your time zone will place demands on your services and expertise to resolve their local issues.

We have now become modern-day remote viewers from the ability to remotely access systems to divining from accumulated logs the circumstances, status and situations that brought about a failure or a success.

Divining and prophesying

Sat at our screens completely squinty-eyed we peer, we think, we dispute and we discuss the issues with peers and not so peers, all this does not include the politics of management who what to know what is going on without exactly being interested in why it all happened – they have schedules and you simply have to recall you half-serviced crystal ball from Madam Silvera the medium and come up with answers that present even more questions you don’t have answers to yet.

The follow-the-sun myth has been reworked into being in one location and using working shifts to reach to the West and to the East, taking its toll because putting a shift into the day is not really compensated for in recovery time to adjust your body clock or biorhythms.

A shifted day

The day ends late, it means there is no sense in waking up early for breakfast or any of those chores, but if you are naturally an early riser who gets by on just about 4 to 5 hours of slee,p you can to be sure to need some sort of tonic if the mundane occupies most of your day before the rush and the panic sets in from afar.

The honest truth is, there is no particular productivity gain in this arrangement apart from bending to every whim of the Project Manager who can at times be aware and readily oblivious of the issues you have to deal with from the technical which can be quite easy to the people who God bless them have to communicate what they can see and experience in languages they hardly speak – none of us here are polyglots except in the multitude of words of our mother tongues and lover’s tongues – if you have bitten on one.

For order to the wonder

Besides, the devil is in the detail and there is an ongoing obsession to bring order to the chaos, I feel like those early days of Internet chatting when we all exchange pictures of each other like new-age pen-pals only that everyone labelled their pictures ME.GIF; by the time you have got 100 ME.GIF files, you are no better than someone collecting pebbles or sea shells from the beach – fun it might seem at the time but lacking in distinction or discrimination.

The novelty soon wears off and drudgery creeps upon you like slime with a life of its own to engulf and suffocate you to death.

It isn't really that bad, you get there and at the end of the day, whatever you have achieved is fulfilment enough to make tomorrow another day, if you can find it in you to just switch off after work.