#turnitoffandonagain

Maybe not.

We live in a world where everything is instant; we want it all and we’d have liked it all yesterday to be honest, but ASAP will do (I just want to point out that I hate ASAP more than any other acronym in existence, because it’s fucking meaningless. All tasks are done ‘as soon as possible’. Oh, what’s that? You mean you want it done quicker than is possible? Well why didn’t you say that, if you’d put QTIP…I still wouldn’t have done it any quicker. Because I hate you. And your children.)

This kind of environment where everything happens at the swipe of a finger or click of a button leads to impatience. If you want any proof of this, the next time you receive a WhatsApp message, read it but don’t reply. I guarantee you they’ll text again.

This impatience then, moving down Dante’s Inferno of Laziness, leads to situations where if people are not getting everything instantly they think there is a problem. These problems start to stack up and all of a sudden they’re overwhelmed. They now believe they’re too busy to do everything and so they stop taking action and start ‘escalating’.

These escalations are largely along the lines of ‘I pressed the logon button and it didn’t work, was I supposed to type my logins first?’ except they don’t even add that clarification, that’s simply for your benefit as a reader of what would otherwise be a long and tedious email exchange if I transcribed it fully (Lazy, I know).

Once in you’re in this Circle of Laziness, there is no getting out. You might as well beat yourself repeatedly with your keyboard, or smash your face through the monitor, there really is no hope for you.

And all you needed to do is have a little patience; or some initiative to try more than one solution; or at the very least, one solution.

I’m not sure there is an easy fix to this downward spiral, and it isn’t necessarily a people problem, it’s an environment problem. While ever people expect instant, anything less will lead to this chaos. One thing we could do though is use a general rule of thumb that if you have access to Google or Youtube, go here first for your solution. We literally have more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before, and that resource grows on a daily basis – it’s so unlikely that you’re the first person with your problem, there is bound to be at least a starting point out there.

I know this won’t work for everything, as I said – there are instances where you need to ask other people for help, I completely get that, but the motivation for this came from generally menial problems that could very easily be fixed with a little effort.

What’s that, your web browser isn’t working? Have you checked your router?