Being a Techno Geek

The routine of a mid twenty / thirty year old at workplace is sit for those blissful 8 hours of work in front of a desktop. Not even for a minute flinch away from that insane stare and the lunch hour seems like we are missing a lot of things. 7 pm back home and after another hour we have our home desktops switched on, either for work from home purposes or merely for the fact that some of us are computoddicted!

We can imagine no task complete without a few clicks here and there and rap tap goes the keyboard. We form the brigades of employees who are completely paralysed when power failures occur.

But to imagine a whole large chunk of those employees, who have taken onto manual working all their lives. So much so even today with the advent of this revolutionary technology they still find themselves among piles of papers, innumerable files and cupboards full of 3 decades old stock of data maintenance that nobody ever would give a glance to! Layers of dust gathering on those historical data that form the base of the Organization’s inception and the well laid out building plans.

A manufacturing sector somehow tends to a clear demarcation of two genres of employees. One being the old horses that grow along with the aging organization and the other being the newbies. It’s said that it’s hard to get in-depth technical competence from the newbies when compared to the golden period of engineers of the 1970’s, 80’s and early 90’s era. Similarly it’s like taking the horse to the river but unable to force it to drink water, when the old horses suddenly find a rectangular inanimate object on their tables with a mouse. From right away dismissing the idea to initial hiccups and slow motion clicks around in vain; many ultimately end up resorting to following their old ways. Along with an explanation that 5 years more and retirement knocking their doors, these rectangular objects best lay assured at newbie desks. The hindrance seems to be pushing limits when critical data needs to be retrieved and the concerned person wishes how lucky would he be if they were a click away, rather than flipping pages amidst a land full of dust. Compiling information also feels like a Herculean task, as years need to be matched and the corresponding data needs to be fed and worked upon. Lot many things have no information, as back then nobody thought it could lead to a link in the new strategy background work or maybe the CEO wanted to see the attrition levels of the last 10 years.

What’s a predominant feature of not being techno geek for some is that their great ideas face premature death, because of the inability to present them in the sweetest and shortest way. How would a VP of the organization devote some 30 minutes to listen to a new thought if the same idea can be caught within a span of 2 minutes via a presentation? Afterall things seen visually are recalled stronger than pages of thesis work on the matter which ultimately land up in some corner of the office. Similarly being techno geek can save a lot of time in hand to do more work that could help clear out backlogs if any and give in more space to think of the innovative and untried. By and large the whole of 8 hours is consumed in doing the routine task and when does one have the time to think something new and fresh? What may form to be 6 points of a job description when examined closely may turn out to be just 2 points when computerization of the same collective is implemented! What management may think is eating up their financial resources and adding onto the weight of employees may be eventually sorted out such that the manpower count is reduced, kind courtesy disinterest in learning the technology!

So if the fear of getting redundant by introduction of technology is of prime concern, then how about the fear of getting redundant by not knowing the ways of the techno world? Why when one doesn’t shy from acquiring new machines for increase in production, is there a hesitating human in front of a rectangular inanimate object?