It has been months, nay, the better part of the year, since the pandemic began. The pandemic keeps rolling on, changing the world as we know, it, and our excuses within it. There are large excuses – cover-ups for policy failures and grave mistakes that cost lives, and then there are the little ones. Today, when the big ones are up in the air and damaging the political lives of some and wrecking those of others, let’s talk about the little ones. Like the ones where you feel you don’t, can’t, shouldn’t need to do something, but someone still expects it of you. What’s your alibi ?
I’m not talking about something grand – nobody is asking you to lead a country or take over the World Bank or WHO. Rather, someone is asking you to do your job, and do it well. At one time, before the pandemic wrecked everything, alibis for not doing your job could range from bandhs, natural disasters and other impediments to getting to work, to illnesses, children’s needs and even inclement weather. But now you’re at home. WFH right ? No need to travel. Buses are metro railways run empty, or less crowded anyway. Brew some decaf, open your laptop, fire up your Gmail/G Suite/Meet and you’re earning your bread right ? So what’s your excuse now ?
Your excuse probably lies in the terms separated by slashes in the penultimate sentence of the last paragraph. Yeah, software, and technology, and complicated bits of code that appear as words and messages and menus to make your stone-age mind oh so muddled. Weren’t you the one who took unholy amounts of stationery from the office and then laboriously got down to writing everything, and by everything, we mean only as much as would pass muster with your colleagues, and by colleagues we mean only those above you who hold the keys to your promotion ? What became of turning up late to office with a traffic-related excuse every day, and running off because you had an important social function to attend ? What happened to dropping off your kid when you were supposed to be taking class for others’ kids ? No, all that has been replaced by LED screens, keyboards, webcams and endless streams of disembodied voices and datasheets.
So it’s not fun anymore, and it’s not convenient anymore. Not when your kid is home all day and becomes a real problem to deal with. Not when you can’t cut corners at home or in your work life, and must actually balance it rather than pretending to so you could play each against the other to your benefit. Nope, it’s not fun anymore. Especially not, if you enjoy a cushy government job where technology is only introduced through kicks of the boss’ polished shoes, and stays as long as it is monitored. Yes, nobody likes the complicated world of technology when it robs you of those little economies of effort, and instead demands what they are actually paying you for. You either go downhill and become a wage slave (oh so Marxist!) or fight tooth and nail with all the collective you and your sympathizers can muster against the omnipresent world of tech.
So when you are asked to mail someone, you pretend you typed the wrong address. When asked to collaborate over Google Drive, the result is you create a doc that no one else can access because you didn’t give any access. When asked to livestream, you muddle your way through half an hour before your kid makes a cameo in real time and then your data plan (1GB a day, seriously?) gives up the ghost. All the while you loudly and very piously wish for a return to the good old days. When all this doesn’t work, you hide behind your clients, your students, that one colleague who can’t handle that one file, or even the tribals in the forests. The encroachment of tech must be stopped at any cost!
For a while, it seems to work. Yes, that spreadsheet you were supposed to make was given to someone else, someone less skilled in pretended or actual ignorance. That Google Meet you left halfway was completed by someone else. Your collaboration was not required because the cells you were supposed to fill up were done by someone else. Life becomes convenient, and as it become convenient, what started out as an occasional complaint against tech becomes an ideology in itself. Sprinkled of course, with generous amounts of wisdom about how you will retire long before tech has made much headway, and anyway the younger generation knows its tech better and has to learn for the future. Big words, hollow claims, more time for you and whatever the hell you do when not doing actual work. Convenient.
But karma is a bitch, and in the age of Covid, karma can kick ass faster than you can pronounce Google Workspace. A certain time, a certain event, a certain conjunction of the stars – something happens that drags you out of your convenient utopia and then you are six feet under because you never learnt to swim. I see it happening all around me. Given that I’m the Social Media Champion, the head technical committee dude and everything techie in my institution, there should be a certain sense of schadenfreude in all of this, especially when I’m suddenly in demand for something as random as a misspelt email address. But instead, the dominant feeling is one of nostalgia and a calm realization that where I was, they are today and others will be tomorrow. But let’s start with me.
It was 2014, and I was well-settled into my short-lived career as a content writer. I had found this lucrative client who paid good money for quality articles related to tech. What attracted me to the client was that he didn’t require me to write ordinary tech reviews, but quirky pieces aimed at an audience that knows its tech a bit, and can enjoy a tech joke once in a while. The work included various types of writing, from short pieces to longer ones. The per word pay varied as well, creating a somewhat complex mosaic of payment tiers.
For the first few weeks, I was given the more standard stuff, and the pay calculations were simple. X words multiplied by Y rate and Z is what I get. The client (let’s call him T), didn’t haggle, though he did correct my math even when I under-calculated my dues. I would marvel at the efficiency with which he would do his math, and how he always provided these neat tables for any invoices that I might have required.
But marveling and admiring isn’t the same as being efficient. So when the workload became more complex, I began to face difficulties in totaling my dues. T helped me out as much as he could, but there’s a saying that God helps those who make their own invoices. There came a time when I had gone a month without pay, all the while working on a range of articles with varying levels of pay. That XYZ formula didn’t work anymore. The back of the envelope filled up, and I was getting perplexed.
Eventually, T asked me to tell me how much he owed me. I knew he would not haggle, even if the amount was big (it eventually ran into around $200 plus, which was big for me then). But he would also be meticulous about the calculations. I had to impress him with something more structured.
Out came my exercise book. I opened the last two pages, and made careful tables of the dues. My best handwriting, numbers rounded off carefully to avoid any under or over-charging and labeling of categories so there is no confusion. The whole tabling, plus the math, took me the better part of two hours. But hey, I was being systematic right ? Finally, when I was confident that my tables looked professional, I took some well-lit photos and fired them off into the work stream.
My reward may have been a chuckle or a ROFL moment on T’s side, but I’ll never know. He was too professional to ever poke fun at me. But my swollen pride came crashing down when, in as many words, he asked me to send the invoice in an excel sheet. Yep, apparently, 25 odd years after Microsoft first introduced office, drawing tables on paper was no longer the hip thing to do.
This was my “Invoice” moment of 2013, and of the rest of my life.
My initial annoyance at this reaction gave way to slow realization that his calculations were accurate because he wasn’t the one doing them. Excel did them for him. You put in a formula, drag them to the relevant boxes and ding! You have all the math you need. What stung was that I already knew this, or believed I did. I had a decent computer science education in high school, and Excel was taught there. We were taught how to populate cells, put in sum commands, etc etc. We knew that this was used to generate invoices manually, simply because our textbook exercises included such examples.
But lo, when the time came, I sent my first complex invoice in the form of hand-drawn tables that would embarrass someone a quarter century older. Meekly, I opened Excel and began to re-learn the ways in which Excel worked. I googled formulae, and learnt that you can’t simply drag rows the way you can drag and rearrange columns. Eventually when the data was put in, calculations happened faster than I could blink, and the invoice was ready far faster than when I had made it by hand. I was now officially part of the 21st Century!
Apparently, I did a half-decent job. T made some changes and sent me the corrected invoice. The final amount was accurate as I’d sent it, but there were some stylistic and other modifications that he advised me to do from next time onwards. I had passed the invoice test, and took his feedback seriously. From then on, anything that involved calculations saw me fire up Excel (or Google Sheets nowadays) and hammer the keypad until the work was done.
During that eventful day (and night), I learnt some valuable lessons. The first one was that technology will catch up with you, and then block your path until you learn its ways and methods. It is just too convenient, too fast and too widely used for anyone to shield themselves from it. Secondly, we have some idea of technology ourselves. We have learnt it in school, during workshops or even while doing petty tasks. We just never apply it in situations where we really need to. Our education system asks us to rote learn rather than learn by application, and so when people learn Excel, they learn it to get good grades rather than apply it to situations where they can actually generate a workable invoice.
Finally, and most importantly, I learnt that these realizations would not come until you were pushed into a corner. If T had accepted my paper tables and had merely suggested that I use excel, I probably would not have bothered. I was too puffed up about my paper tables to take his advice. But when technology becomes a non-negotiable minimum for progress, for payment, for getting the basics done, that’s when you realize all this and learn in earnest. That is when the knowledge you get stays with you, and you begin applying it to myriad situations that you would till that day have tried to overcome without using tech. That’s when karma, smiling at you for all the times you avoided tech and made life harder for yourself – but probably more for your colleagues – smiles as she takes you to the cleaners.
But even as I changed, the world around me did not. I belong to academia, which is notorious for using old tech and older notions of how to get work done. Nary a day passes when some academic’s wizened computer doesn’t give up the ghost, an overextended license doesn’t expire or something involving frantic calls to those better tech-endowed doesn’t take place. All of this passes because the fundamental tasks – teaching, research and application – can still be done without tech. Can still be done inefficiently and with huge wastage of manpower, paper and other resources, but when that professor says that he doesn’t do Google Drive, you don’t really have an option.
But karma, karma doesn’t spare anyone. The day comes when that professor retires, and then find that the entire service book and pension papers need to be digitized for him to claim the money needed to survive. Chances are that he still has a young assistant to help him out. But what if he doesn’t? That’s when, after a career made out of avoiding tech to the greatest degree possible, he finally succumbs. He calls his kids settled comfortably abroad, or his students, or his neigbours, or even the guy running the cyber café, so he can figure out how to upload a few documents and claim his pension. In his old age, tech has finally caught up with him, and boy is it kicking ass!
But the pandemic has made life miserable even for those who don’t yet need to draw their pensions. Online classes, online attendance, online research, online this and online that…. All of it has ensured that the pen and paper people are finally being kicked by karma into the digital age. Their phones now contain more than Facebook and WhatsApp- they contain Adobe Lens, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and if I have anything to say, Google Sheets as well. They are learning the hard way that unless they collaborate digitally, they will get left behind .Their classes will not take place, their students will be dissatisfied, and their performance metrics will begin to suffer. Pushed to the wall, as I was in 2013-14, they are imbibing tech faster than if they were induced to take a dozen tech workshops to aid their career advancement.
Every day, thus, a new Google Sheet or doc is being created. One which these technologically handicapped people must edit with data only they can gather and which only they have. Oftentimes, it still leads to printouts and use of paper to fill data, which is then uploaded by hapless underlings. But these cases are becoming fewer. For one thing, the budgets of institutions are going downhill at a time when prices are rising, and economy in office costs and stationery is now mandatory. On the other hand, it is becoming clear that when you work from home, you can’t simply call upon another person to do it because what if he’s not available or not willing or not able to do the work? You don’t have the common framework of the college anymore to ensure that you get some support from somewhere. So you have to do it yourself at some stage, or get called out for your inefficiency. If there is one thing that professionals hate being called out for, it is inefficiency.
But it’s not enough that those who hit the tech wall today learn it the hard way. Tomorrow’s workers- our students today – must also learn, whichever way they want. Jobs in the moth-eaten world of academia are becoming scarcer by the budget session, and more and more privatization is taking place. Those entering private spaces will have to adapt rapidly to an already highly digitized world. They would have to start using G Suite and its myriad apps from Day One, or get kicked out on Day Two.
In their interest, we need to not just make the students of today use tech to learn, but learn to do tech for their own needs. I’m talking Excel and Google Sheets for things like attendance, course selection and other calculations. I’m talking Google Forms for surveys that they may take for practicals. I’m talking Google Docs for typing – yes, typing on a keyboard – matter that tomorrow they may need to send to their bosses. If today they face their “invoice” moment when a professor makes them fill out a Sheet or a Form to mark their attendance, tomorrow they will be able to do so much more easily when handling professional workflows. It may even be doing them a service, since a professor can at least show a little empathy to a student using a tool for the first time, which a corporate overlord may well not.
So to wrap up, it’s clear that everyone will face their “invoice” moment and face the reality that either they use tech, or get thrown into the Recycle Bin of organizations that no longer countenance alibis, excuses and made-up stories about “tech issues”. It is incumbent upon those who faced their moments before to prepare the younger generation for the time when they may face theirs, so they are prepared and can quickly adapt. Because let’s face it – the pace at which tech is evolving, it will catch up with everyone over and over again, and there will be multiple “invoice” moments before we can hang up your laptop bags. But if we prepare them today, perhaps they will be better prepared for the initial few such moments, and who knows, might actually prosper when faced with such adversities.
As for those academics who continue to be tag-teamed by the formidable pair of Karma and Tech, it can be safely expected that they will lag behind the others. In doing so, they will make their own lives miserable and that of their colleagues, even more so. But you can only afford to be miserable, if you can afford to be inefficient, and inefficiency is something that is being removed with every financial haircut. A day will come when they will get the choice of taking their alibis with them into an early retirement, or become true members of the digital community. When that time comes, all of those who faced their moments and learnt for the better, and continue to learn, can afford to crack a wistful smile – for the bygone times when the inefficient could still make life miserable for those who actually got the work done!