Cyber
Society Forum
Who Called This Meeting?
Automated Schedulers the Latest Scourge
for the Technologically Besieged Office Worker
by Marita Moll
SUMMARY:
Technologies that
are smart enough to schedule our meetings and reserve our conference rooms are certainly
creating new frustrations for machine-dominated workers. But more than that, they
may be yet another brick in the wall of “the future that doesn’t need us.”
To avoid being relieved of the responsibility of being human, we need to practice
guerrilla acts of resistance to the world of machine command and control.
mart cards, smart communities, smart houses, smart rooms—it’s only
the humans who seem to be getting dumber—increasingly losing ground to their own
inventions. We create technologies to organize our lives and finish by having our lives
organized by the technologies we created. This is nothing new, but it is the kind of trend
that is eventually self-destructive. The future that doesn’t need us is built one
brick at a time. Take automatic schedulers, for example – when were we judged unable
to organize even a simple meeting without extensive machine intervention?
Yesterday, when you needed to organize a meeting, you called up the person who
scheduled events in the available meeting rooms. While engaging in some brief
pleasantries, you make your request.
"So, who’s organizing the hockey pool this week, and oh, by the way –
can you pencil in a meeting for me—board room next Tuesday morning, please?"
Standard office procedure? Apparently not in the 21st century workplace.
Increasingly, your communication is with a machine—clinical, antiseptic and not
marred by wasteful office small talk. Today, you click on an icon on your computer screen
and invite a room to your meeting.
"You invite a room to your meeting???" I said skeptically as the dinner party
chatter landed on this topic.
"Yes, you send an e-mail to a room and the room e-mails back to accept or decline
the meeting."
I admit to having had a complex relationship with the rooms in my life. It seems that I
am always trying to clean them up, dress them up and show them off to my friends. But the
room has always been a passive participant in these vain endeavors. An invitation assumes
some kind of action on the part of the invitee. It requires some kind of intelligence. For
a moment I imagine the room of the future deciding whether or not it wants to meet with a
particular group of people.
In my brief history as head of a technology group, I always steadfastly resisted
automating functions simply and easily done by people. But, once installed, one quickly
gets accustomed to the unintended consequences of a new technology. Despite opposing the
installation of voice mail boxes, I admit that I was soon ignoring ringing phones that I
used to answer as a courtesy and using the new voice mailbox as a filter, just like
everyone else. Telephone tag, voice-mail jail—there are no cute names for scheduling
snafus yet – but they will emerge as more and more workers look for ways to describe
the frustration of these technological catch-22s.
"So what happens next," I ask my friends now negotiating their way around
this new social framework. "Does the room then invite participants to the
meeting?" I imagine an Information Age snowball dance where e-mails split up when the
music stops, randomly wandering into the source code in search of partnering instructions.
"No, no," was the frustrated reply. "Then you look for participants not
already automatically booked to attend other meetings. Remember the annual September
resolve to hold weekly work group meetings—9:00 every Monday morning? Now the machine
will book those meetings. Those good September intentions pop up to harass you all year
around."
I recall that these meetings always had a regular cycle. They would gratefully come to
an end two weeks before Christmas or after three out of four people had missed two
consecutive meetings, whichever came first. But by then the effort had served its purpose
of getting us all up to speed on what the others were doing. I’m alarmed to hear that
it is now possible for these meetings to reschedule themselves, thereby ensuring that they
never die a natural death. It seems there is no mercy for the poor office worker of the 21st
century.
"Well, it could be a good thing, perhaps for those working offsite? " I offer
in the tone of condolence.
"Not for long. Before you know it, the machine is scheduling meetings of groups
that no longer exist, comprised of people who no longer work there and monopolizing rooms
stocked with fresh coffee and doughnuts for nobody," came the cry from the
technologically besieged.
"Oh, you need to find an opportunity in all this," I said seizing on a
standard business mantra. "For example, if all your rooms already had dates,
you’d be off the hook. You could dance without dragging the room along –
organize your meeting at the pub down the street."
This comment was not appreciated. We all knew that there are few such options available
for frustrated employees trying to cope with the latest craze picked up by the
technology-loving managerial class.
Lately, Microsoft’s integrated communications software, Outlook™, especially
the scheduling features, has been taking the business world by storm. "This system is
complete overkill for us," said one user. "But, I can’t afford to say
anything that makes me look like a Luddite. My boss loves technology." Billed as
"user friendly," many people say scheduling meetings on these systems is not
that simple, especially considering that the task never required a degree in rocket
science. One hapless employee confessed that, the first time he tried to schedule a
meeting in Outlook system, he inadvertently piled up five meetings of the same people, in
the same place, at the same time—all of whom he knew were going to receive multiple
notifications, via pop-up notices on their computer screens, of his technological
ineptitude.
"I looked like an idiot and the machine was making sure everyone, right up to my
supervisor, was notified repeatedly. It was so embarrassing!"
Another user pined for the old days (or at least a few months ago) when he could look
at the large white board on the wall and see, in one glance, four months of information
about upcoming meetings. "It was easy to get the gestalt of the time frame. I get
none of that when I click on this icon – just a list of dates littered with useless
phrases like "meeting re . . . " and "discussion about . . . " because
of character limitations in that field. All of the specific information is on the next
screen where it is no longer connected to the bigger picture. It is so infuriating –
my level of stress is going right through the roof with this thing – and where’s
the benefit?"
"Where’s the benefit to the workers?" is the question. The technology
department may benefit from a common platform offered by the new integrated communications
software. The purchasing department may like the "turnkey" approach to software
acquisitions. Upper management, while relating to the command and control functions the
software appears to offer, may be even more seduced by the portrayal of integrated
communications software as the ‘Promised Land’ of time management systems.
"Coordinate busy schedules the easy way," says the MS Office on-line
Outlook™ tour. "In a single view, find free and busy times for each team member,
and locate an available meeting area. Then, send e-mail or a meeting request to the entire
group." Sounds easy enough.
Users will tell you, although they aren’t usually asked, that it’s never that
easy. What was a simple task has just become another technical hurdle to jump and they
have lost yet another important vehicle for person to person interaction in the
increasingly machine-dominated work world.
"I found a stranger on our floor the other day who was looking for a room that had
been booked for a personal evaluation. The evaluator had not arrived at the scheduled
time. The poor evaluatee, already nervous about the exercise at hand, was beside himself
with worry that he was in the wrong room. He kept coming into my workspace, which was just
adjacent, to ask if the machine could have made a mistake on the room—if there was
any way to check. I was relieved when the evaluator finally showed up, apologizing for
being late. He too expressed frustration that there had been no way to notify anyone
nearby about the delay. He’d never been on this floor and didn’t know anyone who
worked in the vicinity of the room. All the arrangements had been handled by the machine.
No human interaction. No one to call."
Are we creating a future workplace where people are just bystanders waiting for orders
from machines? Jason Ohler in Taming the Beast; Choice and Control in the Electronic
Jungle suggests that we are entering a period of cultural evolution in which we work
backward from our inventions to a belief system that supports their existence. Technology
critic Neil Postman calls it Technopoly. For example, we invent a scheduler and
then look for reasons why this is better than the manual scheduling system. Ohler predicts
that Technopoly will be followed by Technianity – the creation of
belief systems by machines for machines. "Our machines will begin to exhibit the same
impatience with us as we exhibit with them."
Getting back to schedulers, perhaps we ought to recall the final actions of the
computer HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Currently, the only reason the
room declines the invitation to the meeting is because it is already booked. But in the
future, this will be a smart room – really a computer dressed up like a room. In the
future, the room may feel entitled to sick leave and vacation, or, like HAL, decide to go
all the way to long term disability!!
There’s the point. The personification of technologies, as Neil Postman
points
out, is "not merely picturesque anthropomorphism. It reflects a profound shift in
perception about the relationship of computers to humans. . . The computer, it is implied,
has a will, has intentions, has reasons – which means that humans are relieved of
responsibility for the computer’s decisions." It’s one more step towards a
world Bill Joy warned against in his now famous Wired article "Why the future
doesn’t need us." Joy imagined a world in which machines create their own sorts
of beings that are more intelligent and less troublesome than humanity as we know it. His
stature as chief scientist of Sun Microsystems gave his arguments enough credibility to
send shock waves through the scientific/technical community.
We all need to worry about letting our inventions control us. We need to take proactive
measures. Go ahead, schedule a meeting outside of the software. The room will probably be
free. If it’s not – check the restaurant down the street. If you run into the
boss, just say the computer is "down."
About the Author
Marita Moll is an Ottawa-based writer
and technology critic who still manages without a cellphone or a videocam, and has never
downloaded an MP3 file. But she candidly admits that it gets harder all the time to work
at the edges of the mainstream without falling in.
