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James Ledbetter and Katharine Mieszkowski

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Rage for Rage's Sake

By Katharine Mieszkowski
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 10, 1999, at 5:28 PM ET

Hi Jim:

RSS

As a fellow remote worker, I empathize with your rage against the machine, although I am still not willing to concede that "workplace rage" is a phenom worth adding to the lexicon.

I haven't seen Office Space, but a few years ago at the Burning Man festival, that annual West Coast orgy of all things arty and survivalist held in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, I saw computer programmers gleefully blowing up old hard drives and monitors just for fun. How's that for evidence of dependence on technology breeding antipathy toward it, not to mention the self-evident visceral pleasure of detonating expensive equipment that so quickly becomes obsolete? Boom.

Today's media offer a nice corollary to your rage against the machine, in the form of Thomas Friedman's "Foreign Affairs" column "The Y2K Social Disease" in the New York Times. What's more annoying than technology that doesn't work when you need it to? How about other's people's technology invading your space? And the chilling implications of none of us ever really being logged off? Technology is making the boundaries between work and play evaporate, Friedman worries, until there will be no downtime. Work, as the saying goes, is expanding to fill all available time, now with the help of these handy interruption devices--pager, cell phone, fax, handheld.

Friedman declares that the real Y2K problem is overconnectedness. He fantasizes about restaurants of the future with cell phone and no cell phone sections. (Here in the Bay Area, I've been to more than one eating establishment with signs explicitly forbidding the use of cell phones, but have yet to see the appearance of phoning sections.)

But guess what? This phenomenon of overconnectedness turns out to be just another excuse to add one more new rage to our list, which is growing seemingly by the hour, road rage, air rage, workplace rage, now "Y2K rage."

"More and more I find myself reacting to people with cell phones the same way I react to people smoking cigars at the dinner table next to me--violently. I call it Y2K rage," he writes.

I would like to discourse further on the changing nature of the relationship between work and life as influenced by technology, but I'm seething about the rash of new rages in our midst. Am I suffering from rage rage?

Send soothing words.
Katharine