Be what your boss wants you to be

There's a big difference between working hard and working smart - and that's where technology comes into play.

As humans, most of us spend over 30% of our life at work. And when we transmogrify into mules, donkeys and dogs at the workplace, the number increases alarmingly to 50%. Spending half our lives in the office is bad enough, so why make it worse by working hard as well? The problem is, most of us don't know the difference between working hard and working smart.

This is explained better by ‘Gates Theory of Diminishing Productivity’, which states that 20% of all employees spend 80% of their time staring at Windows Office while the other 80% spend 100% of their time staring out of their office windows. In other words, what you choose to stare at determines how hardworking you are.

One of the first steps to making your boss believe that you’re the man is by making your presence felt in conference rooms, during brainstorming sessions, meetings and presentations. What you need to do is spew jargon until it impresses the right people. Just google for ‘bullshit generator’ - and you'll be surprised at the sheer volume of bovine droppings present online. So how do these corporate poop creators work? By stacking three columns of words, of which the first set could be actions, the second, descriptors and the third, systems, for instance. So, at your command, the site pulls out a word randomly from each column, puts them together and magically creates phrases for you to fling around, like ' mesh best-of-breed architectures', 'integrate user-centric paradigms' or 'disintermediate enterprise supply-chains'. If you’re in IT, there are sites that specialize in jargon that might interest you, like 'beta-test authentic APIs', 'capture peer-to-peer blogospheres' and 'share semantic tagclouds'.

If you need something a bit more pompous to suit the environment, go for sites that create entire statements, like 'Double-digit throughput increase impact compliant market opportunities reaped from our organic efficiency gain, whereas the clients enhance the situational paradigms'. A statement like this has enough bullshit to power you to the corner cabin. If you are in HR and have the unenviable job of handing over titles to a million minions, ("Make it fancy and impressive or we'll leave - CTS is hiring") opt for sites that can generate job titles. Fancy designations like Customer Usability Associate, Dynamic Quality Representative and Forward Assurance Architect are sure to leave your employees in such a state of euphoria that you won’t have to give them a raise.

Besides the conference room, another key location in your office where appearing busy and seeming productive helps is your workstation. A simple but effective way to do that is by downloading an Excel sheet screensaver that will make it look as if you are busy working on an Excel file whenever your computer is idle, which is probably the whole day. If you can't download the file because of admin restrictions, fear not. You could make it more authentic by converting your existing Excel sheet into a screensaver – check out any of the zillion websites available for this purpose.

So the choice is really between what Garfield says and what Garfield says. You could go with the former President of the United States, James A Garfield, who said, "If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it", or concur with Garfield the cat who believed, "Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?" If you believe in the latter, you’re in luck - technology is right here to give you a helping hand. 

If only mobiles could talk...

If you think technology has made our lives complicated, spare a thought for the mobiles…

Ask any mobile and it will tell you that one of the biggest problems it faces is Electro Mannetic Radiation (EMR) – in other words, harmful radiation from man - in the form of body odour and bad breath – that can send it into a state of shock. The problem is not only limited to such unsafe emission, but also to prolonged exposure to nonsensical conversations carried out by people with suboptimal intelligence. This is measured by mobiles in SAR - Simply Awful Rants. The next generation of mobile phones have been instructed to choose their owners based on the SAR ratings as high SAR values can spell doomsday for them.

Research has also shown that mobiles suffer from acute thermal effects because of staying pressed to the face of the speaker, as a result of which his body heat gets to the phone. Phones suffering from this problem have reported several symptoms, ranging from faded and jaded display screens to a sense of numbness, where they don’t respond to touch. Other symptoms include needless vibration during the most inappropriate of times, erratic sleep modes, partial or complete memory loss, poor reaction times and occasional blank calls.

A few mobiles decided to save themselves through an ingenious technique – they would die on their human owner in the middle of a call, leaving him stranded in mid-stride, mid-sentence and hopefully in the middle of the street that he was crossing. But man’s power of coercion is legendary - he would take the mobile apart, pull the battery out, rub it against his dirty jeans or worse, and put it back. So mobiles quietly went back to work, fearing infections. Besides, worse things could happen to them. They could be sent to some shady service centre in the neighbourhood, where their body parts could be removed and sold at exorbitant prices abroad.

Meanwhile, the mobile union has risen up in arms, protesting against the way mobiles are being exploited. "In the good old days, there were only GSM and CDMA to contend with - and life was simpler,” sighed a clunky Motorola with a gargantuan antenna sticking out of its head. “We just had to make and receive calls and send a few sms-es - even these were rationed because of high air time costs. But now, with Wi-Fi, AR, QR, 3D G-Sensors, motion gaming and other equally complicated jargon, we are so confused that when there’s an incoming call, we start hunting for an app to attend to it.”

A few other mobiles decided to use their ‘size zero’ look to their advantage and would hide amidst files and books, or slip into the gaps between car seats or sofas, thus making it impossible for the owner to find them, especially if they were on silent and the vibration mode was not on. The humans would invariably lure them out of their hiding places, with threats of getting a new mobile.

Some mobiles went for snazzy covers and scratch guards that were actually shields against human radiation. It saved them from all the wheezes and sneezes, the coughs and laughs, all of which drenched them with germs. The Association of Intolerant Radio devices Trying to Impede Mobile Extinction (AIRTIME) finally came up with an idea that would save mobiles from all these problems - hands-free technology. The farther mobiles were from men, the safer they would be.

The other option would have been to construct a radiation shield that would protect all mobiles from such harmful emission, but the mobiles would have to wait at least until the end of 2013 to do that. By then, the world would have more mobile connections than human beings - and it would then be man’s turn to go into silent mode.