Ms the Word: What ever happened to the industrial age?
Why knowledge workers aren't so smart, after all
By on Feb 21, 2011
I am usually suspicious of anyone who has to quote their middle initial.
So you can imagine that there is some scepticism attached when I tell you I am reading a book by Stephen R. Covey.
I am also not a fan of sequels, which are usually cheap ways of repackaging something you did earlier, so The 8th Habit: from Effectiveness to Greatness is an uphill struggle.
I dread to think what the 6th Habit was like.
Apparently, the author has influenced millions upon millions of people worldwide. I must have missed out somewhere.
I am already on page 13. I have managed to squeeze 900 pages of Shantaram between pages 11 and 12.
We are now firmly in the knowledge worker age and he is provoking me.
The knowledge worker has climbed over the pile of now rather useless industrial age workers, and this will bring about a downsizing of 90% of the industrial age workforce.
Thank goodness we are not mired in that age among all those ugly people.
Apparently, the unemployment trends are to do with the shift to knowledge workers.
Presumably, this master race has managed to avoid eating, does not wear clothes, and lives naked under stones.
Presumably, their computers are powered by the sun.
For as I sip my cappuccino in Starbucks, I read the news that the next time I am here, the cup from which I am drinking will no longer bear the words Starbucks Coffee but will instead just say Starbucks.
I guess that is part of the knowledge worker thing, the change.
Idly, I lift the cup to read the legend underneath: Made in China.
Somehow, this irritates me.
I am having trouble assimilating the fact that Starbucks is going to move its focus, presumably to parlay the experience of dispensing its ethically sourced coffee into some other dining experience.
Sandwiches or wraps, I guess, but principally something that will exploit its distribution network.
And it is balancing its ethical coffee stance with the import of hundreds of thousands of cheap mugs, with each of which China takes a little nibble out of the US balance of payments, raising the level of their international debt, from which somehow the knowledge worker is immune.
The knowledge worker in his material world, who pecks away on his Chinese computer, strokes his Chinese iPhone, fishes his Chinese wallet out of his Chinese Woolrich jacket, signs with his Chinese pen, picks up his Chinese Burberry scarf and heads back to the office, and drops a quarter into the paper Starbucks cup in the grubby hand of the unshaven former garment worker in the street outside.