“Work is something unnatural,” the French author Anatole France (1844-1924) once said, “laziness alone is divine.” This is an attitude that is still common today, and companies have been trying for decades to somehow control rampant laziness with unannounced checks at the workplace, time clocks, transparent glass doors or huge open-plan offices. In times of home office, employers are also helped by the small status circle in Microsoft Teams, which only lights up green when there is (hopefully) still life on the other end of the line. France, by the way, was not lazy at all. He even received a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921.
The US bank Wells Fargo has just fired more than a dozen employees because, according to the Bloomberg news agency, they had merely simulated keyboard activity. Their aim was to create “the impression of active work”. If you don’t want a rat or a chick to race across your keyboard, you can now use so-called mouse movers, which merely simulate mouse movements for the computer and sometimes look similar to the electric shaker boxes that at least simulate the presence of their parents to babies crying in strollers.
Employers have also upgraded digitally
Now, from the other side of the Atlantic, it is difficult to judge whether the obvious deception of the dismissed US bank employees was due solely to laziness or whether it was a morally justifiable reaction to previous measures taken by the employers, i.e. whether it was the result of a digital arms buildup that can be observed worldwide and is driven by mutual suspicion and mistrust.
Thanks to so-called bossware, it should theoretically be easy for companies to virtually check in on staff from time to time and find out about this and that in their email inbox or browser history. The motives are not always as pure as those described by crime writer Cornell Woolrich in his short story “It Had to Be Murder”. In this story, the solution to a terrible crime was due solely to the voyeurism of a reporter who was persistently looking through the window (a very worthwhile film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock under the title “Rear Window”, 1954).
The contemplative life is a state that many strive for, but which – in this respect, communism is not much different from capitalism – is usually only granted to very few. Of course, you have to fight back: Tom Sawyer praised the tedious task of painting a garden fence until his friend finally took over. Cinderella called the pigeons for help when she had to sort peas and lentils again. Today, in the digital age, it may be the “Mouse Mover” that can serve as a screen saver for the soul of those who are suffering.
And at least that is reassuring: if you are really lazy, you will eventually be punished with boredom anyway. And that has never made anyone happy in the long run.