Schleptember

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

schlep
verb: go or move reluctantly or with effort.
noun: a tedious or difficult journey.

And so another Olympics have come and gone, with this one, Rio, being the 13th instalment of the Summer Games that I can honestly say I remember. Being from a warmer climate I haven’t paid nearly so much attention to the Winter Games (although that has changed in recent years), but I have always looked forward to each edition of the main event. I may have been vaguely aware as a three year old of Tokyo Games of 1964, but it was Mexico in ’68 where the Olympics first made a meaningful impact on me, and really it was not until the Munich Games of ’72 that I remember significant detail in any great measure.

Of course ’72 is infamous for the massacre of eleven members of the Israeli team by Black September terrorists, but notable too for the astonishing Olga Korbut and of course Mark Spitz, who rather overshadowed another remarkable swimmer, the 15 year old Shane Gould from Australia, who won five medals in the pool, three of them gold. This I remember very well of course. 1972 was also the last time an American won the marathon, in this instance it being Frank Shorter. Interestingly, his winning time of 2h12m12s would only have been good enough for 10th place in this year’s event.

 

Not so many years later the Olympics would take on new meaning for me as I took up my career in broadcasting, the Olympic Games being of course one of the most significant and demanding events for any broadcaster to cover. Every four years therefore saw a massive effort undertaken to cover the Games in a fitting manner as had come to be expected. This usually entailed sending an ever larger team of commentators and technicians, with the broadcast teams growing in size through the years as the complexities and technical capabilities grew along with the event itself. Meanwhile, back at base the enormous task of disbanding regular programmes for the large and ever-changing Olympic schedule was a forbidding challenge. When done well it left the audience oblivious to the frantic machinery churning away underneath  which was required to keep the Games on air. Because of the work involved and the significance of it, a good Olympic Games coverage was always a rewarding and memorable experience. The only time since the 1984 Los Angeles games that I wasn’t in some way involved in its broadcasting was in 2000, when I took time off to take the family to the Sydney games.

The continuous growth of the challenge of broadcasting the Olympics however took a very dramatic turn this time around, as technology stepped in and quite literally removed the need for large teams of commentators and technicians to travel to the host city at all. Instead, here in Australia a corner of an anonymous facility in an inner Sydney suburb was transformed into a rather secret remote viewing centre. The recent global expansion of high speed bandwidth, plus a drastic lowering of cost and higher reliability meant that for the first time ever commentators could sit back at home and call the events off multiple high-definition screens, with enough camera angles available to them to give the impression they were sitting at the actual event, instead of in a temporary facility 13,500 kilometres away. This concept was inevitable I suppose, but it’s bizarre to think that in a few short decades we’ve moved from vision having to be flown home on film by plane through the expensive and limited analogue satellite era to the point now where digital broadband circuits are so cheap we can bring back dozens of high definition vision channels for such little cost that we now barely consider the cost of it at all. Airfares, and accommodation on the other hand… It’s definitely a watershed time in the life of technology, with remote control of everything becoming the new norm. Of course, as with most things, the military got there first, and have already moved on from remote control, with fully autonomous drones about to change the face of warfare, but that’s another story.

Futurists and technology pundits have long been saying that the communications revolution we are now undergoing will be far more significant and have a far greater rate of change than the industrial revolution did, and I think it’s now pretty obvious that we can take that as a given. 

Just as the industrial revolution brought about machinery that automated many labour-intensive, repetitive tasks, so the communications revolution is automating many of the intellectual tasks we do today. Before I began working in broadcasting, I worked for a year and a half in a bank. Back then (1979) teller machines were only just being mooted, and computers were still tucked away in secure rooms and run by boffins with high level security clearance. Everything else was done by hand. In one of the smaller branches in which I worked we even still hand posted the ledger. If you can imagine that, it seems ridiculous today. You’d come into our bank, and deposit say a cheque. I, as the teller, would receive your cheque and a deposit slip, bang a rubber stamp on it and give you back a stub acknowledging the deposit to your account. The cheque and the deposit slip would then go out to the back room where a large leather-bound volume would have hand-written into it the deposit details and the new balance. If you left town and wanted to make a withdrawal from your account, you would need to go into another of our branches (and they were only open from 10 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon back then) and they would have to phone us to check the balance of your account. If you wanted to do any multiple transactions or serious business with your account whilst out of town, you would need the branch manager to pre-arrange access to your account at another branch. Hard to believe, isn’t it? And that was only 37 years ago. Now we transact our accounts from anywhere in the world on our phones without even thinking about it, unless you’re in Italy of course, where nothing to do with banks or money seems to work particularly well.  

All those people that enabled us back then to very slowly make financial transactions (including myself as a then-spotty faced teenage bank teller) have been replaced by computerised systems that make the process instant, generally error-free and without the need to engage in small talk with fumbling teenage bank clerks.

Automation is fine for repetitive functions such as stamping out screwdriver blades or processing financial transactions. However when you try to force automation on a process that is inherently malleable and requires flexibility and dynamism, much of the actual functionality of that process is lost, along with the jobs of potentially a great many people. We are entering an era where seemingly too many managers are being tasked with the job of bringing long established but apparently now dated areas of productivity and expertise into the 21st century, and that means shoving everything down a fibre optic pipe and having it managed by a piece of autonomous software, or better yet an app on an iPhone. And the rate of change is now so rapid that few take the time to consider what really needs to be done, and how best to do it well.

The area where I work is a prime example. I freely admit it is a bit of a Heath Robinson affair, with multifarious systems cobbled together over many years as needs and wants and methods have changed, without any real thought as to how to integrate everything efficiently. However, it amazingly really does work and actually produces everything we need it to. But undoubtedly, if you redesigned it from scratch it could be made far more efficient.

Instead, and in great secrecy, a team of supposed experts have drafted a tender document for a single piece of software to tie all the unwieldy bits and pieces of actual equipment together all across the country. And with this, they hope to eliminate the need for human involvement almost entirely. It’s as if they’ve been given a box of Technics Lego, and instead of creating the intricate, beautifully engineered apparatus with motors and gears and lights that flash, they’ve thrown out all the interesting stuff and built a single cube of one colour. Efficient yes, but hardly effective. And yet they believe this one cube will be everything that everyone wants it to be.

Actually, I use the Lego analogy for a reason. Not so many years ago, when our corporate leaders were trying to be especially new age and attempting to reach out to the employees for ideas, they had a totally left-field brain fart. With great fanfare and pride they announced that they had set aside a corner of the staff cafeteria and installed a table with huge pile of plain white Lego bricks there and invited all staff to build with them anything at all that they felt inspired to as they considered the future and the direction that we, as a national broadcaster, should take. After a week the idea was quietly shelved as the pile lay completely untouched other than the not insignificant percentage stolen and taken home for the kids.

 

It’s this lack of basic understanding of the concept of human endeavour that makes me fearful not just for my job, but for the future in general, and I don’t just mean the field of broadcasting. Doubtless it will sort itself out in the end (that might take a generation or two), but the current crop of tyro-leaders seem to have about as much of a grip on what needs to be done as I do about Madagascan beetle sexing. They do seem to think everything to do with broadcasting, i.e. all the intricate processes and systems can be reduced to a single app. They don’t seem to understand that a complex system is exactly that, and cannot be reduced to an app or even a series of apps on a phone, no matter how sexy they think it might look on their CV.

The single most useful thing I learnt in my time studying computers and such stuff at university (yeah, believe it or not I did) was that the vital element of any process or system was that the person using or initiating it must feel in control,  or as the text books put it, ‘the locus of control must remain with the end user’. Whether it be an aircraft carrier or a simple app on your mobile phone, if you don’t feel you in complete control of it, it simply cannot function effectively. This golden rule seems lost on those designing our future.

And so to schlep.

As I’ve written before, the difficulty of the shift-working life is that I don’t feel in control of my physical well-being. The rigours of rotating shift work and the demands on one’s body make any sort of routine impossible, and without a supreme effort of will the discipline required for serious running is very hard to find. And so I schlep about from one race to the next, losing motivation, finding it again and so on. In both senses of the word, noun and verb, I find myself neatly defined by this one rather exceptional word.

My next race goal was to be Almeria, a delightful town I’ve visited just once, and then regrettably without running there at all. A trip away with the chance to run the half marathon with the gang from RC would have been an extraordinary joy. The agents of change at my place of employment however, with their tunnel vision and Lego brick mentality, have made prudence necessary. Whilst they have little to no chance of achieving their aims within their stated timeframe, they are the kind of managers who will, as soon as the ink is dry on the contract they sign with the software providers, likely reclassify our positions and begin a Hunger Games approach to staff reduction; i.e. sack everyone and invite them to reapply for the fewer and lower-paid positions they create in their place. They make no secret, at least verbally, of the fact that they believe our environment requires young, 21st century tech-savvy types and that there is no longer any place for us ‘old guard’. Old guard? I’m only 54 for Christ’ sake! Although it is true I don’t really ‘get’ Apple logic, I hardly think that’s the point.

A difficult and tedious journey indeed it is, but sadly not one to include Almeria just yet. All significant travel has been postponed for the moment until we see what transpires with my employment.

May we at least run a few miles yet and watch a few Olympics events along the way.