when you’re so angry you just have to dance
TV is driving me a bit crazy at the moment. I stopped watching for a few very busy weeks, and now that it’s raining and I’m at home more, I’m being re-exposed to the madness. To wit, a 4 Corners doco last night on Telstra call centre workers. Telstra has been steadily changing its labour practices over the last five years — making sales of new services a part of ordinary customer service work, instigating sales targets for ‘customer service’ workers, then increasing the sales targets to unrealistic heights, for example by 200% in 2005-6. Two Telstra workers have committed suicide in the past year, both suffering from depression due to work-related stress.
What was striking about the stories of these two people is that they were both so-called ‘high achievers’ at Telstra, and both became disillusioned, and finally suicidally depressed, after having apparently believed in the dream. It appears that if you have the resources to create an emotional boundary between yourself and the workplace, you can survive inevitable harassment much more easily than if you identify with your job, and the company you work for. Anyhow, it sounds like a scary place to work, Telstra. The team leaders go on training camps where they are taught to group trouble-makers into three distinct behavioural patterns: dragons, the people that actually oppose the smooth distribution of team efficiency and/or obedience, like union reps; submarines, who pose an obstacle to increased sales by ‘flying under the radar’, ie underperforming just enough not to attract attention; and savages, those recalcitrant types who don’t give a rat’s arse.
We can all go away now and work out our own individual under-performing personality type. I would totally be a submarine. In a moment of supreme pop-politics geekdom, A. pointed out astutely that all the talk of ‘flying under the radar’ on Big Brother actually references this corporate lexicon. We spent hours a few weeks ago watching Sunday night nomination while waiting for Ugly Betty to start, trying to figure out what it meant when one of the housemates nominated someone for eviction for ‘flying under the radar’. It’s like the worst Big Brother sin; every eviction, at least three or four people are nominated for it. So, mystery solved: housemates accused of ‘flying under the radar’ are not meeting their corporate duty to perform, as housemates, in the workplace that is the Big Brother house. That is, according to their peers, and/or self-appointed team leaders. Weird.
(The existence of Big Brother is enough in itself to make me want to break the television, yeah. On the other hand, Big Love Season Two just started. Who could refuse the mixed pleasure of re-acquainting oneself with Bill, the hick polygamist with a heart of gold, and his three ambivalent wives? Not forgetting Wanda the AWESOME serial poisoner.)
Sometimes you get so angry you just have to imitate David Byrne’s lamp dance.
from my minimal exposure to BB (my housemates watch it while i try to drown it out on my headphones) ‘flying under the radar’ is when a housemate avoids getting into household arguments so as to avoid being put up for eviction. which is a really odd catch22 - you avoid having an argument, so people don’t evict you, which makes you a threat, so you get put up for eviction.
pet hates about big brother:
1) i always hated home and away cause i thought no-one could possibly be that stupid/immature/obnoxious in real life, yet these people are worse
2) Big Brother always asks for clarification when people are nominating someone for eviction, yet the housemates can only babble about someone being a threat/going under the radar/everyone in the audience likes them, and big brother accepts that as clarification
3) perpetuating the myth that all australians shorten words and end them in -o
Comment by barry — June 19, 2007 @ 12:50 pm
thanks for the blogroll link too, by the way!
Comment by barry — June 19, 2007 @ 12:50 pm
I feel slightly embarrassed about posting about Big Brother now :) It’s one of those shows that produces pleasure (in this audience, anyhow) only by hating on the contestants, or laughing at them. There’s something about that Schadenfreude thing that makes me feel icky.
Comment by Az — June 20, 2007 @ 1:03 am
I had an idea for a reality television program to take it to the next level - not the ‘watching people interacting in banal ways’ aspect, but the tendency concerned with a kind of fucking-with-people sadism. I’d call it something like Forbidden Experiments, the idea being that since the development of ‘ethical research’ standards in academia, all of those psychologists cannot do their cruelly manipulative ‘experiments’. And maybe recreate the best of the old ones: that one where people think they’re pushing a button giving ever-stronger electric shocks to someone until the person appears to be unconscious and then dead, testing whether people will, for ten bucks, follow the order of someone in a white coat to kill a stranger. (Almost everyone does.) And that one where people are divided into prisoners and jailers, which ended with bashings and torture. Of course, in reality TV you offer more than ten bucks, so the proportion ‘going all the way’ into sadism would probably be, like, everyone, and you can make people go through heaps of them, thus seeing a cumulative destruction of peronality that would be buth entertaining and educational. And all those psychological experiments either forbidden or not proposed because they would have been will have a place, on our screens. Ah, what can be achieved with signed agreements to waive rights to civil action, or just filming in certain Third World countries, wonderful.
Comment by benjamin rosenzweig — June 20, 2007 @ 7:33 am
It’s already happening — witness Teen Fit Camp.
Comment by Az — June 20, 2007 @ 1:37 pm
They’ve done a reality TV version of that “prisoners and jailers” thing, haven’t they? In the UK, about two years ago? It was explicitly based on the forbidden experiment. There was a Barbelith thread about it, and I think I might even have watched an episode or two.
But that wasn’t what I was going to say! I was going to say that David Byrne’s lamp dance completely makes life worth living. (That and Doctor Who.)
Comment by Ika — June 23, 2007 @ 11:56 am
you thought i’d respond to this one, now didn’t u az??
hehe
anyhoos, yes, i did see the four corners episode on telstra - scary stuff, indeed, though it didn’t come from a surprise. i heard all of that (except about the decidedly diabolical-sounding team leader training camp) from a mate who’s worked there, and cannot hack the place.
and the bit on that episode where senior management at telstra insisted their workers “wanted” and “liked” to sign AWAS and work under those conditions made me want to puke. inelegant phrasing, i know, but the only way to put it.
and yep, you were right about the ‘big brother’/'under the radar’ thing - despite my myspace bulletins, i’ve actually just stopped watching it - it always was puerile, but this year it’s gone hardcore conservative. eeecchhh
(and now i’ve purged myself of bb, may i indulge in a little bruce springsteen-style ‘dancing in the dark’. there’s a joke there, but i’m too tired to work out what it is :)
Comment by jay — June 24, 2007 @ 11:48 am