Kill people, or we will ignore you

If your worst enemy got beat up, would you be happy or would you send him a get-well card?

In the middle of the Sahara, the Sahrawi people live in exile, waiting patiently to be able to return to Western Sahara. They have been waiting since the Seventies, just minding their own business and not resorting to suicide bombing or other terrorist attacks (at least not for the last 20 years). When Casablanca was rocked by terrorist attacks in 2003, these guys even sent a letter of condolence to Morocco, the country occupying their homeland. Anybody who thinks Muslims are incapable of peace with their neighbors should take a look at these guys.

And what have they got to show for it? Nothing. Not a damn thing. We haven’t heard from the Polisario Front since 1991 when they gave up terror. Nobody pays attention and they never register on the radar of violence-centered Western media.

Instead of letting these people dry away in the desert, we should be praising them and showering them with every conceivable comfort and effort to help.

This would be sending a message to every insurgency in the world: keep it peaceful and we will support you any way we can. Now we are sending the exact opposite message: as long as you don’t blow up airliners, we will ignore you.

a.k.a. Martin Walker

It seems to be a given that managers today not only don’t know Jack Shit – they don’t know you either.

Don’t think this doesn’t bug them. But how are bosses supposed to get a straight answer from the common man? They can taste the sugar-coating, but there isn’t much they can do about it. One thing they can do is disguise themselves as common workers and walk a mile in your shoes.

This is what Stephen Martin did. He is the CEO of an engineering company in northern England called the Clugston Group. To get a feel of what his employees really think, he grew a beard, relocated to a shitty hotel and showed up for work as construction worker Martin Walker. Since he was new on the CEO job, nobody recognized him and thus treated him like one of the guys.

“They said things to me that they would never have told their managers,” he says. I bet.

If I found out that some deadbeat I had worked with, and trashed the company’s management to, was actually the CEO, it’s hard to imagine how I would react. I would certainly feel a bit cheated, but I’m hoping I would also credit the guy (or woman) for caring enough about what his employees think to put himself through all that trouble.

You?

Show us the money!

Isn’t it strange how managers want us to work in groups but reward us individually? Maybe team friction and back-stabbing office politics would fade away if our compensation depended, at least partly, on the success of our colleagues.

Has anybody tried this?

Treading on Chile’s toes

Harebrained ideas usually come from North America, but now the South seems to want a piece of the action. Three Chilean architects want to dig a 150-kilometer-long tunnel from Bolivia to an artificial island in the Pacific Ocean. (That’s almost three times the length of the Channel Tunnel.)

Why do this? Well, because Bolivia is landlocked and would really like a port on the Pacific so they can ship their natural gas and minerals and finally start earning some real money. Chile took their coast away in the War of The Pacific 130 years ago. Apparently this is still a touchy subject, because the reason for the tunnel idea is that nobody wants to “tread on Chile’s toes”, according to the Financial Times.

Bear in mind that Chile is a country with 6,435 kilometers of coastline. Is it too much to ask that they give, say, 20 of them to Bolivia? To patch up old grievances, sort of like when Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt. Would they even know it was missing? If Peru (2,414 kilometers of coastline) chips in, they could give Bolivia a wafer-thin corridor to the sea. Wouldn’t that be being the bigger countries?

Or how about just letting poor Bolivia (literally one of the poorest countries in Latin America) ship whatever they want through a Chilean harbor? Sweden ships iron ore through Narvik in Norway, so what’s the problem? Do they really have to go underground? And who says the ground doesn’t belong to Chile and Peru?

I can’t imagine this project every being carried out, but it certainly has a good shot at placing among the dumbest ideas of the decade.

Hermosillo

Friday’s daycare center fire in Hermosillo is too horrible to contemplate, but right now I’m mostly pissed off at the Mexicans. The nursery had no fire alarms, no sprinklers and only one exit. And this is where you house 142 of your children? How stupid can you get? (Yes, I called you stupid, because in this instance you have been very, very stupid.)

We all love the laidback mañana mentality of latinos when we’re on holiday, but this is what happens when you apply it to fire safety. Shame on the politicians, building inspectors, nursery staff and parents of Hermosillo for letting this happen. You should have taken better care of the children.

C.R.A.P.

Saw the best acronym ever today: “Compulsive Risk Assessment Psychosis”, a.k.a. C.R.A.P. In the context it was printed, it means a situation when doctors and pharma execs exaggerate the significance of every sniffle to scare people into scheduling more appointments and buying more drugs.

My mind is, of course, already expanding the concept. C.R.A.P. can be found in so many places. Media outlets drumming up scare stories about how you get beaten up for no reason every time you step outside of your home at night; greens convincing us that everything is going to shit even though air and water is clean compared to before. And so on.

I guess the antidote is to not believe everything people tell you. Often, it’s C.R.A.P. Especially if somewhere along the line, money is transported from your wallet to theirs.

The end of management

I have become increasingly fascinated by the discrepancy between managers who think they’re the dog’s bollocks and employees who think they’re crap.

Now there is a new book out by Charles Jacobs called “Management Rewired” that might be on to an explanation: We humans are much more emotional than rational, he says, and what managers do is exclusively rational. Jacobs says that today’s management is “more suited to forms of life lacking the ability to think.”

That means that if you think your boss is an idiot, it doesn’t mean you have a problem with authority. It just means your mind is working.