Chain Smoking Blue Monkey

There is something about technology in general that gets under our skin. Creeps under there and makes us itch. We feel like we need to scratch that itch. It turns out that we don’t like things under our skin except what belongs there. We don’t like having things inserted under the skin. Through work and happenstance, though, we are getting technology pushed underneath the skin every day.

When I look at my own skin, though, I don’t see anything. Nothing is crawling out from underneath my flesh, but every day something is getting pushed underneath there. Let’s just shoot to the honesty here. I am sitting at my various desks pushing things underneath there… every… day. I am looking for things every day to put in there. I am little better than an addict looking for the newest novel drug. No better than the pop culture whore looking for the next new band, the next new style, the next new fad. I am desperately looking for something to make my brain light up! To make the rest of my life just a little easier. Just a tad easier. Isn’t that what I am searching for? Making my life easier? Isn’t that the point? Why else would I be in this desperate situation? It isn’t my human nature to make things more difficult for myself. Is it?

Look. See, there’s nothing under there at all. I’m clean. I don’t touch the stuff. Not me. Wait, what’s this? A new way to connect. See, look, here’s what it’s really about. Isn’t it? I can communicate! Talk! Chat! With others! They are people, after all. Surely you don’t think that I’m just addicted to the thing that let’s me communicate with them, do you? God almighty, no, that is NOT the issue. I am not an addict. Look, I am clean. I don’t even SMS. No much. Not unnecessarily. Unless I need it.

All of this is just, you know, to help me get through the day. If I had allergies I would take allergy medication. This is no different. I have a problem. I am not organized. I am not connected. I must respond. My sickness is all around me and everyone has it. Failure. This little thing, this pill, this keypad, will help me. This is it. The magic pill is here and I am beginning to feel healed. The symptoms are fading away. Here are the answers! The responding to everyone! A CALENDAR FOR ME!? It. Is. Wonderful.

I was at the edge of the abyss. I was disorganized. I was behind. I was failing. I was a failure. My life was fail. No more. I have inserted the appropriate suppository. I have swallowed the correct pill. I have injected the right drug. I have sniffed the right powder. FRIENDS… I HAVE FOUND SALVATION! Task it! To do it! Wireless it! Salvation can only be found in connectivity. This is the apex of our realization as humanity.

There is no dark side to this.

On some days the chain smoking blue monkey is a person. The person that gets you the results you want. The results that you can’t get yourself. We all need those monkeys eventually. Often, it is technology that gets the result. There are those other times when it is a person who knows more about the technology than you do that gets you the result.

There are moments when the “result” is nothing more than recovery. The aftermath of a disaster. Some csbmonkeys respond to disasters.

Something went wrong. Terribly wrong. The csbmonkey is there to survey the aftemath and deliver the news. Bad news. Good news. No news. The facts. The truth.

The csbmonkey becomes comforter, psychologist, and counselor.

The csbmonkey has seen and heard many things. Many disasters. The protestations of innocence in the face of hammer clawed laptops and pitch-perfect baseball style delivery of computer parts to walls, floors and ceilings. The sticky residue of corn syrup sweetened beverages. The smell of dried coffee. Crumbs. Full sized french fries lodged just beyond the visual acuity for those that don’t know where to look. Cracks in glass and plastic. Blood.

We become detectives. Judge. Jury. It is against our nature to execute, of course, although we certainly have a few happy fantasies when our jury delivers the verdict. Guilty. What, again, exactly were the accusations? Ignorance? Lying? Murder? Reckless computing? Entrusting one’s life to a magic box?

All of the above.

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

The verdict only takes a few minutes to reach. (Usually.) Then the csbmonkey comes through to deliver the bad news or, perhaps, the good news? It might be both. It might be the facts. It might be the truth.

All of the above.

We’ve been found guilty of believing in that which we are unable to distinguish from magic. We believe in it. We believe in the fantasies about it. The fantasies that we were promised and the fantasies we created. What is our sentence? Our punishment? The inability to resurrect on our own. The need for special knowledge. The need for doctors, lawyers, electricians, plumbers, butchers, biologists, engineers, help desk technicians… csbmonkeys all.

While my goal is to post one sort of long, thoughtful post a week, there are certainly going to be instances of just brief observations from my workplace, like this one today.

I suspect that every workplace has a manager or upper level administrative staff person that is a technological fantasist. Someone that is very busy all the time doing their job, yet always feeling overwhelmed and under-organized. I call them technological fantasist because they see or hear about new technology in their peripheral senses but are unable to devote any time to actually researching that technology and all of its good and bad points. Nevertheless, they know about it and have heard rumors about it and have already started constructing fantasies about it. The main fantasy is about how finally, FINALLY this time, this technology is going to do it. This technology is going to work perfectly. This technology is going to get their time and their entire body of disorganized work fully organized and flowing smoothly like glass. The exchange might go a little something like this.

Client: “Yeah, right, but I’ve heard about this monkey that can do this a little better. I’m interested in that.”
Technician: “You do know that the monkey chain smokes, right?”
Client: “Oh really? I’m sure they’ll work that out in an upgrade.”
Technician: “The product is CALLED ‘chain smoking blue monkey’. It’s in the name.”

We humans like to get things done. We like processes and we like outcomes. Sure, we like chaos and novelty too, but we like all of that in service of the grand scheme we are concoting in our heads about some sort of idealized outcome. The outcome is basically a fantasy we have about what the future is going to be like. These fantasies come in all sorts of sizes. We are familiar with the big ones like “have a career in that thing I like… I think” and “find a cute person to mate with” and “god, if I don’t quit this job soon…” and the more ambitious “…and rule the world! MUAHAHAHAHA!”

It turns out that many outcome fantasies are smaller than these. They are not big fantasies at all. They get assigned smaller names than fantasies. They are “tasks” or “to do items” or “that shit I have to get done by the end of the week.”

How we get to the idealized outcomes, achieve those fantasies, seems important to us, although it may not be very important at all. It may seem important in the midst of attempting to achieve that outcome. Increasingly what helps us achieve these fantasies, these tasks and to do lists, are systems for managing the information. What we use to manage our information are computers. Because of that, computers (and all its far flung family of information processing and management devices) seem important.

What we really want out computers and their relatives is to help us turn our fantasies into reality. Comptuers aren’t important. The freaky information wrangly family is not important. Achieving the fantasy is important.

All of the importance we place on technology in our daily lives may be very misplaced and miscalculated (but not entirely and not always) . What we really care about are the outcomes that technology helps us achieve. We often act like we care about the technology itself, but ultimately we care about achieving something else altogether. If something else could do the same job as a computer, or a telephone, or a PDA, or a pencil, we would use it. If a chain smoking blue monkey could do the same thing a computer does, and do it slightly better, people would start using the monkey.