Pushing the bar

There is something in the writing of a blog post that is like bellying up to the bar and having a chat with your favorite bartender...not that I have one exactly, but some of you may remember that H and I went to a place in Bennington and watched two young women do aerobics while filling the alcohol needs of their customers... Anyway, that's another story.

I have had a day of emails that are related to each other, and none of them seem to make it possible to get closure. Each one triggers another, and in frustration, I finally just made a phone call. Should have resolved it, but the person I had been emailing with (let's call him "Bob") wasn't in his office, so I left a message. It won't surprise you that Bob returned the call in the 5 minutes that I was on the phone with H reporting the email transactions.  And that Bob asked in his voice mail message for information that was in my last email. So how should I resolve that? By phone? By email?

I am going to trust that he can go back to the email and find that information.

All of this was triggered by my efforts to get someone else (we'll call her Betty) to do something that she had agreed to. Bob had to intervene to get it done, but a week after Bob took action on his end, Betty still hadn't returned the call. Bob had asked me to remind him that Betty was supposed to be in touch. And that's what started a day of about 20 emails...

"Bob? Has Betty been in touch"? 

"No."

So I had to email Bob to ask if he could reinitiate the contact through Ben who was supposed to contact Betty for Bob. Ben? Yes. Ben. My email to Bob required an email to Ben which ostensibly prompted a call to Betty. And my email to Bob required that I call Bill who is supposed to be helping resolve issues with Betty for H and I, but Bill wasn't in, so, you guessed it, I sent him an email... (sorry about that... I should have changed H's name to Boris!)

(Note from Boris:  I LIKE that name!!)

So I have spent the day borrowing time from the work I need to do, so that I can contact Bob and Bill about Ben and Betty. And my day has been so full of blather that I can't get the work done. I keep pushing the "Send/Receive" button on my computer to see if anyone has been in touch....I told H this. I told him that I had turned into one of those rats who keep pushing the bar. H laughed and said, "yeah, but they are usually trying to get food, not another electric shock." I didn't laugh because I had just finished watching three gruesome videos that recreate an old study by Stanley Milgram, that showed that 60% of people will push a lever to shock someone because they can't remember a word pair, and because the "experimenter" tells them the experiment requires that they do so. They shock them until they appear to have had a heart attack or died. They shock them despite the fact that the switches are labelled "extreme danger". Here's the link if you can stomach it... it makes me physically nauseous.

Why, you may ask, was I watching this? Because it is part of what I need to do to prepare for my class on research ethics. It is where the idea came from that there are only certain things we should do as academics, and others that we should avoid. It is where we (as scientists) realized that the ends (knowledge) don't necessarily justify the means (stress, embarassment, fear, self-loathing).

Anyway, there is something in this that is familiar... We keep pushing the lever at work when all we get is shocked. And sometimes those levers are labeled "extreme danger." And of course there is something in the lives that many of us live - on the bus or the train at dawn to get to jobs that don't respect us, where we work for eight or ten or more hours and then back on the bus or the train to get to marriages where ... (nah... you know the rest of this particular nightmare). 

And then we have the computers that require that we respond to emails that mean we don't really have to speak to anyone face to face, that mean that we can leave a message and go on with our lives, expecting that the other person will respond when they have the chance. Except that's not the way it works in real life. We keep pushing the bar. Even if we keep administering shocks to ourselves.

There is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a young woman who has created a virtual study hall so that students can post questions and faculty members can answer them for everyone to see, and one of the Harvard faculty members said, he thought it was making students lazy..."The service is so easy for students to use that he worries people are using it as a crutch. 'I got the feeling that students were asking the questions because that was easier than thinking,' Mr. Morrisett said."

He is considering "intentionally leaving questions unanswered for the first 24 hours, to encourage students to work things out on their own."

Hmmmm...leaving the email to "age" for 24 hours rather than spending my day pushing the bar.... Might give me a chance to think.

It's enough to make me want a drink....