Disaster Planning

I'm feeling a little bit hopeless this MFW. Maybe it's a cry for help, but almost nobody reads this blog and I wrote this, and it mentions the media in some passing way at least. Maybe it's a cry for help. May be.

I work in a workplace where there is a new initiative being worked by the whole company for "disaster planning". Disaster planning is basically a set of contingencies for how business will be conducted if there is no office to go to and the office is destroyed or rendered inaccessible (due perhaps to a flu epidemic).

As I have also lately been working for another client as part of a diverse team of people, part abroad, and part in the U.S., I've been effectively working under many of the same kinds of constraints that a "disaster" would impose on the first workgroup.

This past year I've also begun to work the majority of my hours in a home office, and have ceased commuting to work and dressing for work much of the time. My gas bill and dry-cleaning bill have withered, while I have undergone a real transformation mentally to adjust to my new mode of community.

I have taken the first faltering steps toward exercising my own internal discipline about work. I've seen the imprint of isolation on my psyche and begun to take lingering breaks to walk up the street to the bakery or to a coffee shop to sip from the font of social interaction. And I've looked into the dessicated souls of my fellow commuters the one day a week I drive 40 miles to work "on-site". Watching the peak oil "fuel-o-meter" tick toward empty, while listening to the creaking and moaning sounds of our declining post-war civilization broadcast on NPR.

The dry-cleaner greeted me "long-time no-see" in broken English last time I saw her. Every night I wait for India to go to work, and my job at 11 p.m. is to check in with my team and remind them that our firm's work is more important than their other clients. India is 10 1/2 hours different from us, a devilishly simple conversion of numbers which is often an intractable puzzle at 2 in the morning. The team and I take turns keeping each other up and asking staggeringly simple questions that seem impossible to answer under the effects of time-zone-lag.

And it occurs to me that by my on-site work-mates' standards, the state I'm living in is a disaster. The workplace is inaccessible, and will eventually remain so in perpetuity. Now, home is the office. Work is where ever-you-are. "You are your job", and your job is to make someone you've never met, and never will meet, do your boss' bidding. You are an electric cattle prod that's been modified into a tool of social discipline. You are riding a de-escalator. Up. To the future. And you are just hoping, against hope, that it won't lurch to a stop in the middle. Between floors. Between first and third... worlds.

Of course, "Disaster planning" has another sense. Up until a couple of years ago, it only meant "planning" in the same sense as airlines phased the homily "in the unlikely event of a water landing...", while failing to mention that an airliner slamming into the ocean at any speed really could hardly be called a landing at all. But today, there is nothing comforting or dismissible about planning for the most likely disasters. Planning means making plans -- in the positive sense, such as "Let's make plans to go to a movie. How about Armaggedon?"

As one who has been on the vanguard of change for some time, I now believe that the huge investment I have witnessed companies making in enterprise-level web applications development is based on the assumption that in order for companies to compete, white collar jobs will soon be transitioning to a global fulfillment model. Companies are "planning" for this transformation. In English, that means that white collar workers are not in Kansas anymore. We are going to be clicking our heels together as a primary mode of transportation for the rest of our working lives.

As place dissolves, information spaces will rise in our psyches until they are the real "there", and what we now still think of as "here" will mean less and less to everyone else. In fact, eventually we won't need to be here, at all. "Here" will happily be relocated, out of the city -- in other words strategically redistributed, in the same sense as the internet's distributed network model positions its assets disparately so that local disasters do not threaten the larger whole.

Keep in mind, it's no coincidence that your blackberry contains the same basic hardware as a home detention device. If you are home-schooled, home-detained, or "working from home", it's basically the same. It's a form of distance [learning/storing/working] -- one that's imposed by a stranger you'll never meet, who is really just communicating his boss' prod to you.

Have you ever zoned out during a virtual meeting as the late afternoon packet-loss has garbled a transmission into broken broken English? Have you seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Mars, while attacking a shipment of mars bars? You will and more. It's time to colonize mars. It's time to step into Wonka's tram ride. You don't switch horses in mid-stream. It's war time.

And at the end of our time, the end of days, in our life-times, we will become experts in disaster planning. Naturally, what will happen then is a matter of deep personal faith. The faithful look to an omniscient being steering us toward our destinies -- a 3-point walking-on-water landing. In that inspired vision, there will be the holy, wholesale reclaiming of souls and other territory, especially Oceania and Eurasia.

By comparison, the dubious look warily at the decision making process of the all the fallen -- drug addicts, prostitutes, politicians, bosses, and selves. We perceive phantom hands pulling puppet strings in the shadows -- making us dream up new and disastrous plans, yielding to hunger and other aversions. Planning for an even better disaster.