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The dangers of computerisation Computerisation is the most entrenched and accepted business tool worldwide. It is a latter-day paradigm that no one ever would consider shifting.
It has allowed captains of industry and particularly salesmen to play golf during the week and still be able to take phone calls, respond to e-mails and produce nifty PowerPoint presentations in between holes.
They can make it sound as if they actually are sitting behind a desk in an office. Unless, of course, they are unfortunate enough – while on the phone – to have a Hadeda squawk in the background or their partner yell “Yeehah!” after sinking a hallelujah putt.
But, actually, the real beauty of it all is that the need for many people to sit in an office is diminishing.
More managers and employees now can work from home. Or a game lodge, beach or bordello.
But is that ultimately what we all want?
Picture the scene: It is the year 2024. Thanks to Globovideonet, that son of the Internet, as well as holographic conferencing and other electronic wizardry, business travel has declined – intercontinental commuting is so expensive that no one bothers. Not even sports teams.
Cricket Test matches are being played via satellite on user-friendly keyboards. The famous Ashes has been given up in favour of the winners receiving a demagnetised 1983 floppy disk.
Violence in sport has been eliminated, unless one takes into account a rather clever Australian underarm tactic of sending 6 000 volts through the system to electrocute the English bat operator manning the Test and County Cricket Board’s computer at the Oval.
In the northern suburbs of Joburg, a leading South African business magnate – the great-grandson of the famous Tony Factor – wakes to a clear, sunny Monday morning.
“Silicon Factor”, as his friends call him, wakes his wife by zapping her in an erogenous zone with a 275-terrabyte IBM diode.
Tapping out a routine binary code on a keyboard set into her bedside radio-telephone-alarm-tape-deck-philharmonic-orchestra console, she orders breakfast for her man. This consists of a coffee-cum-cigarette tablet followed by a pill combining Jungle Oats, two eggs, one rasher of bacon and three slices of toast, which he swallows with two litres of Eno fruit salts.
Without moving a muscle from his supine position in bed, he voice-activates his personal executive PC and in 18 minutes, he creates a national chain of cut-rate travel agents and a discount coffin-manufacturing company.
Shagged out from this burst of business, he switches over to communications mode and calls up his closest friend, Garth “Darth Vader” Kerzner, the owner of the very first casino on Alpha Centauri, for a round of golf.
They decide to play on St. Andrews in Scotland, simply because neither of them owns Scotland yet.
For 16 holes, their respective video terminals crackle and spark with phenomenal drives and putts to leave them all square with two holes to go and R20 trillion on the game. It is not the money that has them both sweating in their thermojamas, but the unacceptability of losing.
After all, a loaf of bread costs R300 billion, so coming second would not break either of them financially. Particularly when one considers that the new coffin business has brought in R5 trillion by the time they have played the third.
Silicon Factor decides that fair play is one thing, but losing a golf game something else. From the depths of his RAM, he calls up an old Arnold Palmer three-iron shot to the green to give him an albatross on the par-five 17th.
Two minutes later, it is all over. His opponent accesses his number-three account in Geneva and transfers the winnings to the victor’s dummy corporation in the tax haven of Gauteng.
Feeling guilty about playing golf on a Monday, Silicon gives his wife more of the 275-terrabyte treatment and after wolfing down a toasted-cheese-and-Appletizer pill for lunch, he settles down for an afternoon of work.
He accesses his secretary in her time-share apartment at Umhlanga Rocks.
His wife is instantly suspicious – quite unfounded, of course. She simply cannot grasp computer terminology.
A board meeting is called. Within seconds, a massive screen replaces the quarter-acre wall of Silicon’s bedroom, revealing 32 directors, all supine, in 32 bedrooms, all feverishly activating compatible PCs and giving 32 wives 32 275-terrabyte diode treatments.
The board meeting is more of an audiovisual extravaganza than a business meeting and they whizz through the agenda in four minutes flat to prevent severe ocular haematoma.
Silicon’s wife asks him to take a break from his heavy workload and put out the cat.
He steps out of bed and falls in a heap on the floor. Muscles, unused for years, have not the vaguest idea of what they are supposed to do.
The development of the computer has arrived at its logical conclusion.
Chris Moerdyk
