Arguing with my elephant
TRAVELLING is fun. Always has been for me. I enjoy everything about it, from the planning to the return trip and everything in-between.
These days, with a navigation app on every smart device, road trips are a different experience by quite a margin. I remember holiday road trips as a youngster; Dad would have his old trusty map book that only came out of the book case when we were about to set off.
He’d then sit and plot our journey by tracing the route on the map, then jotting down a list indicating the roads we’d use, the towns we would pass through, the distance between towns and occasionally, which potential gremlins to look out for.
It was like a game to us, we’d read the route numbers, note where there were rivers, check the names of the towns – especially looking out if we had to turn off the straight road in any particular town.
Now imagine the drive … There was Pops driving and a constant chorus from the back seat, reading road signs, calling out the names of rivers, predicting what town was coming up and, would you believe, calculating how long it would take us to cover distances at the speed we were travelling at any given time.
Yes, everything a modern GPS, or GPS app, can do now, we – my siblings and I – could do decades ago. And unlike the Brit and American voices on the GPS, we could pronounce the names of South African towns and streets.
You have not lived until you have heard a GPS voice try to pronounce ‘Umhlanga’.
Here’s the thing, because we were all engaged and participating in the trip, we seldom experienced boredom. It’s almost as if we believed that if we did not keep reminding the driver about all the details we had memorised we’d get lost and never find our way to our destination.
By the way, those map books were a real treasure. We would have to replace ours every few years because it would always get worn out by all the wear and tear of trip planning and checking. The older ones were stored, and when we’d find them every so often, looking at the routes traced with pen and the scribbled notes inside the cover, we’d enjoy the nostalgia of the trips we’d experienced.
I am sad that map books are no longer as popular. Maybe it’s because of modern technology making it obsolete … or maybe it’s possible that, because towns’ names, city names and street names get changed so often here in SA, the publishers just, without much ceremony or fanfare, quit.
Of course that’s not the case, but if it were, I would not blame them for giving up.
I mean, think about it, if our parents had not allowed my siblings and I to believe that we were ‘a part’ of the road trips, a long journey would be unbearable for us … with nothing to do but ask, “Are we there yet?” or take a nap whenever the boredom became unbearable.
I am tempted to believe that this could be one of several factors behind the new in vogue concept known as “quiet quitting”. Maybe people just don’t see the point in exerting themselves in the workplace because somewhere they could have realised that their efforts were fruitless.
Oh dear, the elephant in the room just gave me a sideways glance as if to suggest that ‘quiet quitting’ is just a politically correct term for being lazy. But I am not going to entertain that for now.
However, in a fairly recent article in the Harvard Business Review, I read that ‘quiet quitting’ – doing the minimum work necessary to keep one’s job – is a new name for an old behaviour.
The magazine’s research data that was – according to the article – gleaned over several decades, indicates that “quiet quitting is usually less about an employee’s willingness to work harder and more creatively, and more about a manager’s ability to build a relationship with their employees where they are not counting the minutes until quitting time.”
The article went on to suggest that poor management left employees feeling undervalued and unappreciated, saying that if managers showed unfair favouritism, or engaged in behaviour that was inappropriate – not explaining what they meant by ‘inappropriate – employees responded with little relish for exerting themselves in their jobs.
However, the opposite was also true. The article went on to say that “Most mid-career employees have also worked for a leader for whom they had a strong desire to do everything possible to accomplish goals and objectives. Occasionally working late or starting early was not resented because this manager inspired them.”
It was an interesting read.
And now for some random trivia … Did you know that “elephants are the size of trucks if trucks had big horns on the front and four legs to stomp on you with when they’re done running you over. They can also hurl a human being around with their prehensile noses. Most importantly, they are much, much smarter than any unarmed human who would choose to fight an elephant,” this according to a post on gizmodo. com.
Yet in a poll released in May 2021 it was found that eight percent of Americans think they could beat an adult male elephant in a fight.
Why am I saying this? Well, because for the next few weeks and months, I am going to have some serious debates with my own personal elephant in the room.
He will be arguing that unproductive workers just marking time in their jobs are lazy, while I will be asking my pugnacious pachyderm, what if these unproductive workers just lack inspiring leadership?