I was chatting with a friend recently and she told me that she was looking forward to retirement as the stress level at work has gone up. She is in the civil service and the department had a new boss, unfortunately an over-ambitious one. From what she said, I gathered that this new boss comes with what I called a new boss attitude, typical of one trying to impress his superiors, trying to prove his worth, and doing his best to outshine others, at the expense of his subordinates' welfare.
The problem with mostly young (I assumed) new bosses nowadays is that, they come paper-qualified and did not rise through the ranks. Thus, they often fail to understand the difficulties and problems faced by people in the lower levels.
This particular new boss had plans to issue everyone with a laptop so that they will have information practically at their fingertips, literally via the laptops, as and when he asks for it, even outside office hours. So far, nobody has said anything for fear of breaking their rice bowl.
It is also difficult to go on leave, because when she is back, she had to stay back after office hours to clear the workload.
MOM has guidelines on the maximum no. of hours that an employee (usually junior) is allowed to cover in a week, but I am not too sure if it has rules that cover senior staff and those at management level.
With the advent of technology, computers, internet, emailing, and instant messaging, everything seems to move at breakneck pace. In the workplace, it also probably signaled the end of sanity and the beginning of chaos. People are complaining that it is so difficult to get the work done because emailing can be very disruptive. Imagine people who sent an email, followed up with a phone call minutes later expecting an answer. Everybody seemed to think their request is priority and that you are at their beck and call.
When I started working in late 1970s, it had already reached the telex age. Subsequently, the fax machine made its presence felt. Even then, we gave a reasonable length of time for a response, depending on the urgency, which was anything from a few hours to a few days.
Nowadays the response time has been reduced to mere minutes. Everyone seems to be chasing everyone else for responses, and getting all stressed up in between. It's bad enough with others chasing for urgent replies, but throw in an unreasonable and self-centred boss and you have my full sympathies.
If I am not mistaken, it was the Japanese that was always wanting urgent responses. No wonder they have job-related, stress-driven suicides.
With technology, there are huge pluses, but the minuses are not small either.
I admit that computers with its word-processing and spreadsheet capabilities made life much easier. I recalled the days of the manual typewriters. Imagine typing 8 copies of a long letter (with carbon paper in between the plain papers), and you hit the wrong key. You have to white-out the mistake on every single page, wait for it to dry before continuing. Now, anything is possible, cut and paste, copy, delete, insert, etc, your wish is the computer's command.
In those days, for those of us who took stenography, we lugged our portable typewriters to school. The generation now lugged their laptops everywhere.
A typical scenario of a kid doing homework now would be- computer on, music plugged into their ears, mobiles on the table. A closer check will reveal that other than their actual work, there is a tab each for facebook, msn instant messaging, emails, youtube. Observe a while, and you will notice the windows on the screen changing every so often, while tending to the mobiles too - their idea of multi-tasking. I only hope their marks will increase in multitude relative to their multi-tasking.
Baby-boomers of around my age are probably the 'privileged lot' to witness the technological evolution, of the typewriters and calculators into computers, of telephones into cordless phones and mobiles, among others. It is amazing how we managed to keep up and cope.
It's true that advanced technology gave us an edge, but it comes with a price, like loss of privacy, stress, etc.
Welcome to the crazy, stress-filled new-age world!
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