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James Ledbetter and Katharine Mieszkowski

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Rage Against the Machine

By James Ledbetter
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 10, 1999, at 3:02 PM ET

I heard about the workplace anger survey this morning on NPR. If I understand it correctly, this "study" was issued by a marketing company whose "research" consisted largely, or maybe entirely, of reading the results of a 1996 Gallup poll. That strikes me as a shade less than clinically reliable; in fact, it makes me angry!

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Still, I can relate to the anger-at-work crowd. It's silly to blame the Internet, but I would argue that technology is a major factor. It's not just the increasing complexity of technology, but our increased reliance on it. As someone whose work life is largely "remote," I can testify to the frustration at high-tech stuff that just doesn't function as it should. The simple process of my filing a timely story for the Standard's Web site can get amazingly clogged. Editors and other managers get in the habit of thinking that properly working technology is a given; in fact, it's more like a best-case scenario. Take their high expectations against shoddy machine or network performance and you've got a sure-fire recipe for office rage.

Did you see the Mike Judge movie Office Space? Like all his work, it's uneven. But my favorite scene is where three disgruntled software technicians take a constantly malfunctioning printer out to a field, and proceed to kick the living toner out of the thing. It's all shot in slow motion, like a mob pounding from a Coen Brothers film, with a nasty rap soundtrack.

Kicking the printer,
Jim