By Diana Holbourn
Becky and Other Students Discuss World Problems, How Some Have Been Unintentionally Made Worse, and How Some Have Been Diminished
Book three of the Becky Bexley series. Chapter 1 continued.
This series accompanies the books about what Becky does at university and afterwards, which you can find out more about on my author website. (The online series is in draft form.)
One of the group said, "I've heard there are a few therapists who've been experimenting with giving people with certain mental conditions such as depression drugs like magic mushrooms to help with their therapy, because they can change their perception of their situations so they start thinking of them in different ways, like if they start feeling more relaxed and less worried about them. I think there'll have to be a whole lot of research to find out how safe that therapy really is before it ever goes mainstream though."
Another student said, "Yeah. Not all therapy's good, especially if the therapist isn't. I remember a joke I read on a forum about one kind of therapy that's sometimes called Rogerian therapy, after the person who invented it, I think, where the therapists who use it don't believe in giving advice, but I think they just ask questions and paraphrase what the people who've come for therapy say back to them, to prove they're listening and understand. I can't remember if the joke was written by the person who put it on the forum, or whether they found it on the Internet and copied it there. But it goes:
"'Patient to Rogerian therapist: I'm really depressed. Therapist: I see. Yes. You are depressed. Patient: Nothing is going well. Therapist: Nothing well. Patient: I feel like killing myself. Therapist: You're thinking of killing yourself. Patient: Yes, I'm going to do it NOW. Therapist: You want to do it now. Patient: [Jumps out window.] Therapist: Whoosh. Splat.'"
The students chuckled, although at the same time, some of them made faces and said things like, "That's gross!"
Then one of them said, "Really though, anyone who's well-trained in that kind of therapy probably uses that technique a lot more skilfully than that!"
Another one of the group said, "I've read some funny psychology jokes on the Internet. One goes:
"'One day at a trial, an eminent psychologist was called to testify. A severe no nonsense professional, she sat down in the witness chair unaware that its rear legs were set precariously on the back of the raised platform.
"'"Will you state your name?" asked the district attorney.
"'Tilting back in her chair, she opened her mouth to answer, but instead catapulted head-over-heels backwards and landed in a stack of exhibits and recording equipment. Everyone watched in stunned silence as she extricated herself, rearranged her dishevelled dress and hair and was re-seated on the witness stand. The glare she directed at onlookers dared anyone to so much as smirk.
"'"Well, doctor," continued the district attorney without changing expression, "we could start with an easier question."'
"Another joke I read goes:
"'A woman when to see a psychotherapist and said she was troubled by having no friends.
"'The therapist asked, "What do you think might be causing the problem?"
"'The woman said, "That's what I'm paying you to tell me, of course! What, are you lazy and want me to do your job for you? If I knew already, I wouldn't be here, would I, you fat ugly twit!"'
"And another joke, about someone at an optician's, goes:
"'Patient: Doctor, doctor! I'm terribly worried! I keep seeing pink striped crocodiles every time I try to get to sleep. Doctor: Have you seen a psychiatrist? Patient: No - only pink striped crocodiles!'"
The students were finding the psychologist and other jokes amusing, despite a fair few of them studying psychology.
Then one said, "You know that joke that was made earlier about using statistics to give the impression that something's true when really it isn't? Well I read a joke on the Internet once about statistics being used to fool people, like by convincing them that one thing's causing a lot of problems, when really it's got nothing to do with them and they're being caused by other things entirely. It went something like:
"'Warning! For those who have been drawn unsuspectingly into the use of bread:
"'1. More than 98 % of the inmates in American prisons are now bread users.
"'2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardised tests.
"'3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.
"'4. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.
"'5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough". It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average person eats more bread than that in one month!
"'6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and osteoporosis.
"'7. More than 90% of violent crimes in America are now committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
"'8. Most bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.'"
The students grinned.
Then one said, "I heard about a study that was done ages ago that found that when prisoners' diets were changed so they were eating healthy food instead of the junk food they'd been given before, rates of aggression went down. Mind you, I don't know by how much, or how many people were in the study, and how many of them got less aggressive, or whether any other studies have found the same thing. So I don't know how reliable the study was. I do wonder whether there was something in it though, like whether eating a lot of some kinds of food can make people feel more aggressive, or put them in a worse mood."
One of the group said, "Talking of criminal behaviour, as well as performance targets like we were earlier, it's not just government targets that can have bad unintended consequences. Businesses can set them, and things can go wrong there too. I read about one case where garage mechanics were set a target of doing about 150 dollars' worth of work an hour; but instead of making them more efficient, they reached their targets by over-charging customers and doing repairs on their cars that didn't actually need doing. And targets can actually slow people down, because they can panic about how to achieve them, and they'll be less likely to try out new ideas that might increase business sales quite a bit but might be at risk of not working. So people ought to at least be given good ideas about how to achieve the targets, and not punished much if they don't, unless it's obvious that the reason they're not reaching them is just because they're slacking off.
"I heard that targets can be introduced when bosses or the government don't trust people to do a good job, so the targets are an effort to make them do better, and also to measure how well they think they're doing, by finding out just how badly they're failing to meet the targets. I think governments can think of introducing targets as an easy solution to improving performance; but I would have thought that a better solution, although a much harder one to achieve, is making sure everyone employed in the organisations is likely to do a good job in the first place."
The student who'd first started talking about problems with government targets said, "Yes. I think it's not targets themselves that are the problem, but there's a problem if targets are thought to be the main solution to problems, so there isn't enough consultation with people in the organisations about what the problems that mean they're not meeting them actually are, and what they need to help them improve things.
"It's probably impossible to foresee all the unintended consequences policies might have though, since so many unexpected things can happen.
"One possible example is that there was this government drive to make people drink more responsibly, where they encouraged drinks manufacturers to make more of their products low-alcohol ones. But instead of making people drink less, it seems some people ended up drinking more, partly because supermarkets, probably after trying to work out how on earth low-alcohol products could be made to seem appealing, advertised them as being healthier options than normal-strength alcoholic drinks, that it would be acceptable to drink at lunchtime in the middle of the working day; so some people probably started drinking alcohol then when they wouldn't have done otherwise.
"Lots of different policies can have unintended consequences. Another one is when governments try to protect jobs in certain industries in their countries by putting taxes on cheaper imports of the products they're making, which can often be produced more cheaply abroad partly because the wages of the workers aren't so high in some of the other countries where they're made. The taxes are meant to make the products from abroad just as expensive as the ones made in the home country, so people won't have any incentive to buy the imported goods in preference to the ones produced in the country itself.
"But apart from that making it more expensive for people who want the things to buy them, because they can no longer buy the ones from abroad more cheaply, it can mean that other industries in the home country can suffer because of what's being done to protect the one making the goods in that country.
"For instance, I think a policy was introduced in America to protect their steal industry, where a tax was put on cheaper imports of steal, so it would actually become more expensive than the steal produced in America, so people would buy that instead. But workers in the car industry lost out because of that, because their companies switched to buying American steal, but because it was more expensive than the steal from abroad they'd bought before used to be, they had to put the prices of their cars up to cover the costs, so people started going for cheaper imported cars instead, so there ended up being less demand for workers to work in the American car industry. I don't know if a lot of them were made redundant because of that. But maybe they were.
"And I heard that in India quite a few decades ago, the government brought in laws to try to protect the jobs of workers in Indian factories, by banning imports of the things they were making, so people would have to buy theirs instead of ones from abroad. Well, it might have protected their jobs; but in other ways, the laws were harmful. Where there weren't many companies making certain things, like cars, or where there was only one of those companies in the country, it meant that because there was no competition because people had no choice but to buy their products if they wanted those things, the companies didn't have any incentive to make them very well, because they knew there were no alternatives for people to buy, so it was either buying their products or not having them at all. So they didn't bother to make them to a high standard.
"And then there weren't enough cars to go round, so the government rationed them, so people were only allowed one car. And it was worse, because since they were hard to get hold of, people started using theirs way past the time when they should have been scrapped because they weren't really fit to be on the roads, and people bought second-hand ones a lot that were way past their best as well. I don't know how long the government kept those laws.
"But that proves that no one should go into politics thinking there are easy solutions to problems, and that ruling a country will be easy! And any politician who tries to convince voters that some new policy they have will be really simple to bring into being, and gives the impression that it's bound to make things better without any problems, is probably either lying, or they haven't thought things through properly. ... Well, either one of those two, or they're giving the impression that problems will be solved easily accidentally, because they deliberately leave out details to make things sound simple and catchy enough, and to be able to say them quickly enough, that they can be easily featured on short news broadcasts, so as to make them easy to publicise, and appealing and memorable to voters.
"Maybe governments should have teams of pessimists working for them all the time, whose special job it is to work out what could go wrong with any new policy ideas they come up with if they were put into operation, so they can adjust their ideas to make sure those things don't happen. ... Mind you, I suppose it's possible that the pessimists would think of things that could go wrong with every single idea they came up with, so nothing would ever get done!
"Still, I heard that some organisations know they've got policies that are causing unintended consequences, but they don't change them, because they think the benefits of what they're doing outweigh them, such as where a government department has rules that mean any new drug that's made to treat a health problem has to be tested thoroughly to make sure it's safe and effective, and that can take years, so some people die while they're waiting for a drug that could treat them to finish being tested. But the government department won't change their policy, because the number of people who might die if they're given drugs that turn out not to be effective or fully safe might outweigh the number of people who die while promising new ones are still being tested. I don't know if anything could be done about that, such as people whose lives are at risk if they have to wait being allowed to try out some drugs that haven't been fully tested."
Just then, the students were distracted by somebody near them blowing up an empty crisp packet and trying to pop it. They chuckled, and it put them in the mood to turn the conversation light-hearted again for a while.
One of the group said, "Imagine if it was announced that there was going to be a trial to see how some milder doses of cannabis affected people, because the government was thinking of legalising the milder forms of it, but they wanted to test its safety first. Imagine if almost the entire country volunteered to go on the trial!"
Another student said for fun, "I think it would be good if they did legalise cannabis. But imagine if the reverse happened and a government committee met and decided chocolate should be classified as a drug because of its feel-good properties, so the government decided to ban that. Mind you, I don't suppose they'd do that, since they'd lose the next election for sure!
"Or imagine if they decided sunshine was too much like a drug because it can make people feel good, and because after all, getting too much can have harmful side effects like skin cancer, so they decided there needed to be a new technology invented that would block out all the sunshine from reaching the country. They'd know they'd be unpopular if they told everyone they were banning it because it was too much like a drug to be tolerated, so maybe they'd say it was to stop global warming.
"But the policy might backfire if all the plants in the country started dying!
"Actually, talking about using things as drugs when they're not reminds me of a joke conversation I had on the forum I was talking about earlier, with this bloke I called Trollfest before, because it's kind of suitable, but his real username's Chess Master. We used to tease each other a lot. He's from Sri Lanka. One day I joked, 'Oh no, it's raining! That's not fair; it's supposed to be summer. Someone needs to be called to account for this. ... Someone like the Sri Lankan Prime Minister. I mean, who else's fault could it possibly be?'
"There was another day when I was thinking of making a quip like that, but I stopped halfway through and said for a laugh, 'By Jove, was I about to say something that would have had me hauled up before the United Nations Diplomacy police? Shocking! I must run and hide, lest they're watching, and they've got that new thought-sensing technology they can tell what people are thinking with.'
"Someone else on the forum, whose username was Stick Insect, for some reason, said, 'You make a mistake when you believe that the reason you should run and hide is to avoid having your thoughts exposed. For the most part, humans walk around wearing their thoughts on their sleeve. At the very least, they certainly wear their intentions on their sleeve (or both sleeves, as the case may be).'
"I joked, 'Oh my gosh! Are you suggesting the United Nations Diplomatic police will simply forensically examine people's sleeves to find out how undiplomatic they've been, or are thinking of being? This is getting even more scary!'
"A bit later I joked, 'OK, now I've had a few martinis and an entire nine pints of stiff tea, I feel I can pluck up the courage after all to say why those UN diplomacy police are so scary. They're ... Oh my gosh! They're ... Chess master's brothers! Now if that isn't scary, what is? I'm going to run and hide, right now! I'm going to need at least another twenty-eight pints of stiff tea to recover from this!'
"One of Chess Master's friends on there said, 'Yeah go run and hide.'
"I joked, 'I already have. I'll double-hide now. And I don't thank you for reminding me of my scary predicament! Just the thought of it means I'm sure I'll need at least another thirteen pints of stiff tea to soothe myself! Possibly fourteen if I'm especially enjoying it!'
"Then a little bit later, I joked, 'Wow, I don't know what came over me there. After fortifying myself with a stiff chocolate bar, I've decided to pull myself together and brave whatever cometh!'"
One of the students grinned and teased, "You twerp!"
Another one joked, "Imagine if some doctors actually started recommending that some patients drink pints and pints of tea and eat chocolate to cure anxiety, saying it was bound to be healthier for them than medication. You might get people saying to their friends, 'I'd love to come out with you this evening, but I don't think I can leave the house.'
"Their friends might say things like, 'Oh no, has your anxiety got worse then? You don't think you're developing agoraphobia, do you?' And the people with anxiety might say, 'No. It's just that the prescription the doctor's put me on has me running to the toilet every five minutes!'
"Their friends might say, 'I wouldn't like to go on a medication with side effects like that! There must be better anti-anxiety medications than that out there!'
"And the people with anxiety might say, 'Well, it's not exactly a medication; he's ordered me to drink forty pints of tea a day!'"
The students laughed.
But then the conversation got serious again, as one of them said, "You might call the problem with having to stay by a loo an unintended consequence of a policy! Actually, getting back to talking about those, I heard that Another thing that caused unintended bad consequences was reducing the hours trainee doctors had to work. It used to be that trainee doctors had to work up to 100 hours a week, sometimes at the hospital for 36 hours in a row, not working flat-out all that time, but just on-call for some of it, where they'd have the chance to nap, but had to get up immediately if there was an emergency.
"The thinking was that they would need to be working for that long to learn as much as they needed to know if they were going to go on to be fully-qualified doctors. But it gets to be harder to learn the more tired you are, and some doctors gave up their training because they couldn't cope with the exhaustion; and other ones even started taking drugs to cope. Some made mistakes and did things like giving patients doses of drugs that could actually harm them because they were too tired to think clearly. So the government decided things needed to be changed.
"They introduced new laws that said doctors had to work shorter hours. You would have thought that would have made things better. But it caused problems of its own, since it turned out that doctors weren't learning so much because they were being trained for far fewer hours than they used to be; and the safety of patients didn't improve, because mistakes started being made for different reasons, partly because doctors were less familiar with each individual patient in their care and how ill they really were, and what they most needed when, and other things like that, because they spent less time with them.
"When doctors hand over the care to other doctors at the end of their shifts and the beginning of the other doctors' shifts, they give them a lot of information about the condition of the patients they're caring for. But if they accidentally miss a few important details, it's more likely that some patients won't get all the things they need, or mistakes will be made, especially if a doctor forgets to tell another one about an allergy they have to a certain medicine. And doctors would still often get tired because of the heavy workload they often had.
"The law made it so they had to be supervised more of the time, so fewer mistakes were probably made than might have been otherwise. And nowadays, the government has realised it can be a problem when doctors have to hand over to each other a lot so important things might be forgotten, and I think they've made it the law that detailed written notes have to be made or something, so it's less likely that a doctor will forget things than if they're coming straight from caring for someone to just having a conversation with the doctor they're handing over to, trying to remember everything on the spur of the moment. And I think that by law they get a certain number of hours allotted for sleep per shift now.
"But it just shows you what we were saying before - that something that seems to be for the best can have unforeseen bad consequences, so it's best to consult with people who know a lot about whatever the laws are being made about before they're made, so they can be altered if it turns out that there might be problems with the first ideas."
Another student said, "I heard about something that's causing unintended bad consequences not long ago. It's to do with those pill organisers people can get if they sometimes forget to take their tablets. I think they can be especially useful for old people who might be on quite a few tablets a day, and their memories aren't as good as they used to be; and these tablet organisers are like little boxes split into sections, one for each day of the week, or even ones for different times of day if they need to take some tablets more than once a day, and they can put tablets in each section when they get them, and then if they can't remember whether they've taken that day's tablets or not, they can just look in that day's section to see if they're still there. I think they can help people a lot.
"But I think some people have sometimes had problems with ones they get from the chemist ready-filled, partly because some tablets for high blood pressure they take have a diuretic effect - they make people wee more and more often, to flush more salt out of the system, I think, since that's one of the causes of high blood pressure; and people haven't wanted to take those tablets when they go out, because they don't want to be running to the loo all the time; but when those tablets are mixed in with the others, they haven't known which ones they are, so they've decided not to take any of the day's tablets when they want to go out, so they can avoid the one that makes them do that. But some of those tablets can be ones they really need.
"And another problem is that a lot of old people who've been trying to remember to take their medications without using pill organisers often forget, but they haven't told their doctors they sometimes forget, maybe because they don't realise; so their doctors have often assumed the medication just isn't working that well for them, so they've increased their dose of it.
"And since the people still forget to take it sometimes, the doctors have thought it still isn't very effective and increased their dose more and more over time; and then when they switch to using pill organisers, they suddenly start taking the medication every day, but the dose can be way too high because it's been increased so much over time, and taking the tablets properly means they start getting the full amount of it; so then the old people can accidentally overdose on it, which can cause problems like falls, where they can break bones, if, say, they're on diabetes medication to lower their blood sugar and it suddenly starts getting too low, because low blood sugar can cause people to feel shaky and tired and dizzy, or they're on medication for high blood pressure, and the tablets end up making their blood pressure too low, which can cause dizziness and light-headedness.
"So it seems doctors ought to switch them back to their original dose for a while after they start using pill organisers, and the old people should tell their doctors if they're switching to using them if they've made the decision to do that themselves; and then doctors should monitor them to see if the lower dose has started working well.
"Still, at least that proves that pill organisers really do help old people take their medication every day."
One of the others said, "That reminds me a bit of something I read in a book once, about a man who was a doctor for years in Vietnam a few decades ago. He said he had a lot of trouble persuading people who came to him for help when they had diseases that they ought to take the tablets he gave them one at a time over a period of a week or two, since they naturally assumed that the more they took at once, the more powerful the effect would be, so it would get rid of their diseases sooner. I thought, 'You could have compared them to food, - you know, like saying to them that if they were really hungry, or if they were going to be really busy soon so they wouldn't have much time to eat, they wouldn't scoff a whole week's food in one go, thinking it would last them a whole week, since they'd know that if they did that, they'd feel really ill afterwards; so you could say it's the same with tablets - if you take a load in one go, your system won't be able to cope, so you'll just end up feeling much sicker than you did before.'"
One student said, "I heard that one thing that's caused unintended bad consequences is where people have been starving, and people have given them the amount of food that you'd get in a normal meal, but their bodies couldn't cope with it because their stomachs had shrunk because they'd gone so long without proper food, and they died, or had severe stomach cramps. I think that happened quite a bit just after the Second World War, when some people who'd been in concentration camps where they hadn't been given nearly enough to eat were given quite a bit of nutrition, but their bodies couldn't cope with so much at once and they died. Imagine going through all the hardships of concentration camp life, and then being really pleased the war had ended, only for that to happen!
"I heard that it's best to give starving people tiny amounts of food to start with, and gradually build it up, even though that seems to go against common sense, because if you didn't know why you need to do that, you'd have thought they'd need as much food as possible to decrease their chances of dying as quickly as it was possible to do that."
One of the group said, "That's sad. You know, I wonder if there would be no more wars in the world, and less starvation, if women ran it, or if men were trained to bring out their feminine sides from an early age."
Another student said, "I don't know about that. But I did hear an interesting story about how accidents were reduced on oil rigs a lot when the men who worked there were trained to express their emotions more. It might sound as if emotions and working on oil rigs are completely unrelated. But actually, it turned out that part of what was making accidents more likely was that - I don't know if it's still the case on a lot of oil rigs now; it might be - but it certainly used to be the case, at least on a lot of them, that even after witnessing a horrible accident where friends got injured and killed, the men were expected to just get on with the job as if nothing had happened, maybe having a break for a very short time to get over the shock - the standard period of time allowed for mourning was fifteen minutes at most, I think; but then they were expected to just push any emotion they had down and concentrate on their work as normal.
"But because it wasn't so easy to concentrate with such strong feelings of shock and upset and sometimes anger churning around in their systems, it was easier to make mistakes that would lead to other accidents. Just one careless move could sometimes lead to something drastic happening that could even kill people. One man who was interviewed for this story said he'd known seven people who were killed over the course of his time working on oil rigs.
"But they were used to being expected to just carry on working as normal after accidents, so they thought of it as just the manly thing to do, and didn't make a fuss about it. It seemed as if the oil companies had the attitude that since it cost so much to set up the oil rigs, the work really needed to keep going efficiently so they could get the money back that they'd spent on them.
"And there was a culture there where the men were just expected to be obedient to the bosses without question. Somehow it was just seen as the macho thing to do. So people didn't really think they had the right to protest about poor safety standards, or to suggest improvements to make accidents less likely to happen. It was just seen as the manly thing to do to just work in the conditions that existed regardless.
"And the men didn't dare admit to anything that might seem like weakness, such as feeling strong emotions. If they made mistakes, they felt as if they needed to keep it secret; and if they didn't know how something worked, they felt as if they needed to just pretend they did, so as to come across as competent and reliable.
"I actually heard something on the radio once where an ex-oil rig worker was being interviewed, who said they had to fill in an accident form whenever there was an accident, to explain what had happened; but if it had been caused by someone doing something wrong, they would often lie about it, because anyone who made two mistakes on the oil rig was fired, so people didn't admit to them, but just blamed other things. It's understandable that people would be sacked after making mistakes, because they could so easily lead to injuries or deaths; but an unintended consequence of that was that people didn't admit it to the management when they'd made them, so the root of the problem sometimes wasn't discovered. I don't know what the best thing to do about that would be.
"Anyway, this story I heard said that in the 1990s, the job got even more risky, because oil companies decided to drill for oil in deeper waters, and much bigger oil rigs were built that had lots of new technology the workers weren't familiar with, and the new oil rigs had lots more men working on them than the older ones had. So the risk of accidents went up.
"Then a new massive oil rig was built in the Gulf of Mexico, and a new manager was employed to take charge of it. It was a dangerous place to work, probably like all oil rigs are, but even more so since it was set up to pump twice as much oil as ordinary rigs, at a much faster pace. The manager was concerned about how to reduce the chances of accidents happening. He and other bosses gave a lot of thought to it.
"He'd started off as just an ordinary oil rig worker years earlier, rising up the ranks; and the culture of not showing emotions and not supposedly looking vulnerable by admitting to not knowing something and needing help had become so ingrained in him he was even like that at home, and his son grew up being afraid to ask him questions about things he didn't know, because he thought his father would think he was looking weak because he didn't already know the answers. It sounds a bit strange to me, but somehow, that's the way it was.
"So the boy grew up feeling as if he couldn't communicate well with his father, and they didn't have a good relationship at all. The father, - this new manager, - had a feeling that things could be better at home and at work, but he didn't know how to improve things.
"But then out of the blue, he got a phone call from a French businesswoman who was a leadership coach, looking to expand her business in America. He agreed to meet her to discuss whether she could help him improve safety standards on the new oil rig.
"When they first met, he started off by just talking about the mechanics of oil production and work routines. But she stopped him and said they needed to talk about how the people there communicated and expressed their feelings, since they needed to be open with each other about their concerns for things to be safe. She asked him what his fears and concerns were, saying it's just normal to be scared, and that discussing worries can help to increase safety. She said she could help him.
"It turned out she had this therapy technique where she got people together to discuss their deepest emotions and the problems they had with each other. The manager started going to the meetings she held to get people to do that, and then one day he brought his teenage son along, and she asked the boy what the most unbearable thing was about his dad. After some hesitation, the boy said it was that he'd make the atmosphere tense all the time by not tolerating any signs of weakness, but just giving instructions all the time, being really demanding.
"The therapist asked the manager what he thought of that, and he had to admit his son was right, and he realised it did ruin their times together.
"Once he'd realised that, he changed his ways, and their relationship got a lot better.
"Then, since the manager had found the therapy had helped with things at home, he thought he'd see if it helped improve the atmosphere at work, and if safety really could be improved as a result.
"The oil rig workers took a bit of convincing to go to the meetings, since they weren't ones for sitting around discussing their deep emotions and concerns. They thought it was a daft idea at first. They didn't think there was any point in it, and didn't want to go. But they were told to by the manager, so they thought they'd better. Or at least, a lot of them did.
"It took eighteen months to build the massive oil rig before the men could work there, and during that time, a lot of their time was spent meeting up for sessions that were designed to encourage them to be more open about their emotions and worries, some run by the French woman, and some run by others. They were asked to do such things as drawing pictures of their families if they could, that somehow captured the way they felt about them. And each one was asked to get up and tell their life story.
"It turned out that a lot of them had unhappy backgrounds, like having alcoholic fathers, going hungry as children, or having failed relationships as adults.
"Some of them didn't like standing up and telling the others about that kind of thing, because it gave them a feeling of vulnerability. But they revealed some things about themselves; and once one of them did, the others started finding it easier, because they knew they weren't the only ones doing it, and that people were supportive. So the men gradually started to say more. One of them started crying when he told the others about his teenage son who was dying of a rare disease. But no one mocked or criticised him as weak, which is what he would have worried would have happened before.
"Therapy exercises like that brought out emotions in the men that they didn't like, because they were reminded of bad things.
"Some of them refused to take part, not seeing the point, and not wanting to show weakness. The manager didn't insist they went.
"But he got the men who were going to be the team leaders on the new oil rig to go on an even more intensive course than the others. One thing they did on that was to pair up, and each partner in the pair had to ask the other one questions about what they thought of them, and how they'd like them to change, and the other one would have to give honest answers. A lot of the answers weren't at all complimentary. The men didn't enjoy doing that. But it did help them understand how they came across to others, at least when a few people ended up saying they thought the same things about them. And they could talk it all through, and have a good think about any criticisms so as to decide whether to try to change.
"The team leaders' course might not have been entirely healthy. The hours were very long, day after day for nine days; and some felt as if they were being pushed too far. One had some kind of breakdown, whether because of exhaustion or because his emotions got so strong they were hard to cope with; and he completely lost his memory for a while and had to be taken to a doctor. He eventually recovered though and became a good supervisor on the oil rig.
"There were two researchers, one from Harvard Business School and one from a university in another part of America, who heard about what they were doing, and decided to study what happened for a few months after the men started working on the oil rig, to see if it had made any difference. And they concluded that there were eighty-four per cent fewer accidents than there tended to be on other oil rigs. Or something like that. I don't know how they calculated that. But they also said the oil production rate was a fair bit higher than it was on other rigs too. The men on the new oil rig produced more barrels of oil than the company expected them to.
"The big reduction in accident rates was explained by the fact that the men weren't just more open about expressing their emotions than they used to be, but more open about telling others they needed help, for instance if they weren't sure how something they needed to use worked, or if they couldn't lift something on their own and needed assistance. The men were more willing to admit their mistakes and ask for help to solve problems. So they learned to be more efficient, and that made the place safer than it had been when they'd all felt under pressure to keep up an image of being too tough and competent to need help, or to admit it if they weren't sure how something worked.
"And almost all the men who were asked said they liked themselves better the way they'd become. And they preferred the new atmosphere on the rig.
"And the manager who'd got the men involved in the course said he was really grateful for what the experience of being made to examine his own way of thinking and habits had had on his own life, leading him to change his ways and end up having a much much better relationship with his son than he'd had before."
One of the students said, "That's interesting. Maybe it would be good if other businesses tried something like that. Or maybe some do.
"I heard about a survey of bosses that found that some of them think demeaning workers, like by shouting at them a lot, motivates them to try harder to get on the good side of them, like by working harder; but actually, it's been found that the stress caused by being belittled and shouted at can make people less productive, partly because if people think the efforts they do make aren't appreciated, they won't see the point of making more. And it's partly because if they're miserable, they're more likely to want to escape whenever they can into doing unrelated things like checking Facebook. Some of them might also slack off as a form of revenge. And also, when people are depressed, it's just in the nature of depression to slow people down, while if they're feeling appreciated and enthusiastic, it's just in the nature of those feelings to make people feel like working better and faster, and like concentrating more.
"It's been found that what really makes people want to work harder is making them feel valued and appreciated, so they think it's more worth doing what they're doing, and they feel happier to do it."
One of the group said, "I wonder how many bosses would be willing to change their ways and try expressing their emotions more. Maybe business schools could teach that kind of thing, if they don't already. But imagine if lots of bosses had to go on a course where they were taught it was a good thing to cry in front of their employees. I wonder if some employees would think of them as more human and approachable if they did that, or if most of them would start worrying the place was falling apart."
Another student smiled and said, "I go to a forum where someone whose username's Peppermint, for some reason, started a thread with a joke opinion poll in it, where he asked people to vote on who they think I am in real life. Most of the poll options people could choose from weren't complimentary. There's someone I've argued with a lot on there, and just for a laugh, I twice asked him to vote. Peppermint said to him, 'yeah, don't make the kid cry.'
"I joked, 'Yes, you'll make me cry if you don't vote on this poll. I'm only 2 years old, you know, after all.'
"The poll options were things like this:
"'A doctor - a specialist in Psychopaths
A terrorist - with an organisation called the Global Viral Freedom Alliance
A politician
An author - of a book called Ten Best Ways to Kill Humans
A supermodel - Miss Universe
A professor - of modern viruses
A gangster - in a gang dedicated to spreading viruses
A clown - called Super Virus Clown
A psychopath - with no cure
A virus - a junk virus.'
"The thing about viruses came about because when I joined the forum, just for a laugh, I registered with the username Goodtimes Virus, after I'd read about a hoax virus warning that was a spoof of lots of hoax email messages that were being sent around warning of really scary computer viruses that don't actually exist. I know there are loads that do exist, of course; but people have got spammy emails warning of ones that don't. This spoof of them said there was a new computer virus called the Goodtimes virus that could do much scarier things than all of them. It said things like:
"'Goodtimes will rewrite your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, mess up the tuning on your television, and scratch any CD's you try to play.
"'It will mix Kool-Aid into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer and leave its socks out on the coffee table when there's company coming over. It will put a dead kitten in the back pocket of your good suit trousers and hide your car keys when you are late for work.
"'Goodtimes will make you fall in love with a penguin. It will give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will pour sugar in your petrol tank and shave off both your eyebrows while dating your girlfriend behind your back and billing the dinner and hotel room to your credit card.
"'It moves your car randomly around car parks so you can't find it. It will kick your dog. It will leave creepy messages on your boss's voice mail in your voice! It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.
"'Goodtimes will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up. It will plant a glob of mould in your bathtub and then leave bacon cooking on the stove while it goes out to chase school children with your new snow blower.'
"I put a link to a web page where that was quoted on the board when I introduced myself, joking that that was where they could find out more about me.
"One day I said something to tease Peppermint, and he said something to me like, 'What would you know; you're just a junk virus.'
"I joked, 'Us viruses are very clever. If you think you're as clever as me, you try getting into places as tiny as the ones viruses can get into.'
"Peppermint said, 'Getting into places doesn't make anyone especially clever.'
"Then he said, 'Goodtimes is clever. There, I said it; now stop crying like a three year-old human.'
"I joked, 'Come on, you've got to admit that a virus who can cry like a human is clever!'
"Peppermint said, 'Yeah allright, five per cent clever. That's the best you can hope for.'
"I joked, 'Oh but I can do so much more! I just put my name into Google, and thousands of results turned up! See how famous I am! You don't get famous without doing some remarkable things!'
"Peppermint said, 'Notorious maybe.'
"There was another time when Peppermint accused me of always making a 'desperate attempt at sarcasm'. I wasn't doing that, actually. I joked, 'No, it's just the way I naturally debate with people who invoke my displeasure. But a sarcastic Goodtimes virus isn't too bad as viruses go. I mean, when you think about what I Could be doing: ... I'll give you an idea. You'll be very pleased that all I do is sarcasm after that! Here's what a few of my brother and sister viruses get up to. If some of them come here, ... be scared! Be very, very scared!
"'If they get into your home, they might make all the walls of your house morph into plywood. They might turn your roof to paper. They might cause your washing machine to jump out of its place when it spins and chase you across the room. They might make your kitchen table tip up so everything falls off when you're having a meal.
"'They might make holes in all your socks. They might turn all the meat in your house to dog food. They might cause your alarm clock to wake you up in the middle of the night by rising into the air, positioning itself above your head and shouting, "Get up, lazy bones!"
"'They might turn your hair into straw. They might make you get stones in your shoes when you aren't even anywhere stony. They might make your radio only ever play one song without a break, and it’ll be a song you don't like.
"'They might cause a cold wind to blow all around your house even in summer, so it never gets warm. They might make clouds just outside all your windows, - yes, just yours, so the sun never comes in. They are terrible to behold!'
"Peppermint accused me again of just saying useless sarcastic things, saying it was all that could be expected of a junk virus like me though; and I joked, 'Oh come on, if I was being sarcastic, I'd say nice things about you, wouldn't I. I wouldn't tell you the straight-up honest truth about what my virus friends might do to you.
"'Or if you're defining the word sarcasm as telling the truth now, I wonder what other words you've changed the meaning of. Could the word "flower" now mean chair, for example, or the word "coffee" mean blood? So if I was to say, "I'm going to arrange some flowers in a vase and put cups of coffee on the table", you'd think I'd said, "I'm going to arrange some chairs in a vase and put some cups of blood on the table"? What horrifying and impossible-sounding rituals must go on at my house, you'd wonder!'
"There was someone on the forum for a while who called himself Tom, and claimed he was a colonel, although I'm sure he wasn't really, since we found out he claimed to be other things under different usernames. But one day, someone on the board I'd argued with quite a bit, who liked to put tasteless smutty stuff on there, who I'll call Crash Burp - it's not his real username, but it's not all that far off; anyway, one day he said, 'Hi Tom.'
"I joked, 'Careful! In colonel slang, the phrase "Hi Tom" is a declaration of fierce and eternal enmity, and a challenge to take up arms and fight, as well as being a slur on the other's manliness. You've done it now!'
"Crash Burp said, 'Hi Goodtimes.'
"That sounded abnormally friendly for him. But I think it was just a declaration of the fact that I wasn't going to stop him saying hi to people.
"I joked, 'Right! You really Have gone and done it now! In Goodtimes virus slang, the phrase "Hi Goodtimes" means, "I'm on a committed mission to eradicate all Goodtimes viruses from the earth, starting with you." You Just try!'
"Crash Burp said, 'Here, take this umbrella, shove it up your bum and open it.'
"I joked, 'Is this your most technologically advanced method of dealing with Goodtimes viruses? You haven't got anything more sophisticated? A Goodtimes virus will not be lulled into a false sense of security by pretend friendliness and then fall for such a shabby trick as that! You've got a lot of catching up to do if you want to get to the latest Goodtimes-destroying techniques. Possibly centuries worth. Perhaps you could start with learning to use stone-age spears and work your way forward through all the centuries of advancing technology till you've reached today's standard of Goodtimes-destroying techniques, and then come back and try them on me.'
"Crash Burp said, 'I'm just trying to communicate. Uhg, THAT sounds offensive.'
"I'm not sure what it was about that sentence that he thought sounded offensive. And I don't know if he meant he was just trying to communicate by saying hi. But I thought he meant the umbrella thing was just him trying to communicate, and joked, 'What? So is that umbrella thing your standard means of communication?'
"When I joked about the phrase 'Hi Goodtimes' meaning, 'I'm on a committed mission to eradicate all Goodtimes viruses from the earth, starting with you', someone else on the forum, who I'll call Catnip, joked that he was already on that mission. I told him his mission was spectacularly failing, and asked if he might even be one of us - an insider just pretending to be hostile to cover up his real intentions.
"He replied with what might have been a typo, saying, 'I hardly ever fail and I am not here, so.'
"I joked, 'You hardly ever fail what? You're not here? And yet you're still posting messages here? Do you have a special remote control device that enables you to post from far away then? Is it so technologically advanced that it can read your thought waves and translate them into words that it can post here? ... Or haven't they invented those yet?'
"Catnip joked, '*Pulls out Goodtimes-destroying ray gun and pulls trigger.*'
"I joked, 'Catnip, your Goodtimes-destroying gun is old and inefficient. You missed! In fact, it's a relic of the Soviet era, when as we know, atheists were created in a laboratory and rose Frankenstein-like till they ruled the Soviet Bloc, and wanted to take over the world and turn us all into Frankenstein foods! Now they have been defeated and it will never happen! But I believe all atheists would still like to do that to us! They must be thwarted with Goodtimes!'
"There was another time when I made a joke, and then I said, 'By the way, don't take much notice of what Goodtimes viruses say. They don't really know what they're talking about half the time.'
"On another day, I put a joke on the board about the military and said it was to bait this supposed colonel, and someone said he didn't believe he really was one. I wasn't sure at the time, but joked, 'Well, that's what he Says he is ... but of course, he could be exaggerating his rank, or something different entirely ... or perhaps not even a man. Maybe he's in fact a 12-year-old schoolgirl just pretending. In fact, maybe almost all of us on here are pre-teen schoolgirls. How can anyone be sure either way?'
"Another man on there joked, 'I'm a bomb technician; if you see me running, try to keep up.'
"There was another time on the forum when it got infected with malware, like pop-up windows telling us our computers had been infected with spyware and we needed to click a link they provided to download a program that would get rid of it. I suspect the program was spyware itself. Crash Burp complained about it, and I joked, 'Yeah, it would be good if we could have special viruses programmed to destroy spyware and the viruses people try to infect computers with. They could prowl the Internet, sneaking onto infected websites and then pouncing on the infections to destroy them. They could even power their way through cyberspace onto the computers of those who make the viruses. They could look like little elephants on the screen, and all of a sudden, anyone making viruses would hear a little crunching noise, and see the little elephant virus-destroyer eating the viruses they were making. They would look in horror as all the viruses they'd made disappeared bit by bit, till nothing was left.'
"Eventually, the malware was got rid of, thankfully.
"There was another day on the forum when Catnip said I'd said unfair things about him, and criticised me, not entirely fairly. I joked, 'Aww, thank you, Catnip! In cat language, Catnip just said, "I think everything Goodtimes writes is intelligent and thought-provoking and I love it. I think she makes a lot of good contributions to this forum and I'm really pleased she's here." Thank you, Catnip. That's really nice of you!'
"That was actually pretty much the opposite of what Catnip really said.
"Another man on the forum said to me, 'Stop saying you're a she; it's getting annoying.'
"I think he must have assumed I'm male. I suppose pretending to be a destructive virus is probably much more of a male thing to do.
"I joked, 'It's not my fault. It's because there are no gender-neutral words in the singular in the English language that people in general find it acceptable to refer to me as. Most viruses would be referred to as "it". But it's not my fault if people refuse to address me as such on here. I tend to find it easier to go along with them rather than to keep correcting them all the time.'
"This man who pretended to be a colonel on there pretended to be a scientist under another username. One day after we had an argument, I joked, 'It's funny how, claiming to be a scientist, he has a wholly unscientific, and some would say superstitious, inclination to think of viruses as human! He calls me a she and gives me a name!' (He knows my real first name and called me by it.)
"I carried on, 'Viruses, as all Real scientists know, are "it"s! Certainly in this language. Perhaps he thinks of all viruses as human? Maybe if a friend of his had a severe case of the flu, he'd do that, saying, "I bet this virus is called Tim! I've never liked the name Tim. I hope I don't catch him!'"
The students giggled.
They chatted some more for a while, before leaving to go their separate ways.
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