a technology job is no excuse

She didn’t see a wedding ring, and didn’t know if he was married. So she just kept repeating: “Your family loves you. Your parents are so proud of you. Your military family loves you. All the people here, we’re working so hard for you. Everybody loves you.” The impromptu team kept waiting for an ambulance, desperately willing Cirillo to hang on. “You are so loved,” Winters told Cirillo. “We’re all trying to help you.”

It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.

Many, many people in that field don’t really want to have to handle customers; “customer” being the word for human beings who have expressed trust in your expertise and conscientiousness using their own money.  Many of them have never done time in retail, and learned the principles of delighting the customer, nor utilities, where you will never hear from a customer until something goes wrong and the victory condition is silence.