When you work in an advertising agency, there are some horrors you have to be prepared for – your creative ideas getting stolen, insecure cohorts, reporting to people with an intellect slightly less than that of a prawn, ‘I-want-this-yesterday’ deadlines, clients who want to put a child in every ad, microscopic increments and overly effective air-conditioners.
Ok, it’s like the plague. The air conditioner in the agency I work for has successfully managed to abolish human productivity. It’s a 40 ton central-cooling monster that is no doubt well distributed, but someone forgot to attach a freaking thermostat to it! It starts humming at 9 every morning and doesn’t stop unless you p-p-p-plead with th-th-the office boy to ttturn it offff. No really, the air conditioner was invented by man to rid him of excessive heat, not to find out the temperature at which blood freezes.
The devastation this contraption has caused is not just frightfully bad ads. (How can you think of great ideas when your brain is waiting to thaw?) Its worse. The loos are always engaged. People’s wardrobes have changed. Coffee has replaced water. The cumulative sick leave of employees has increased. And if you don’t have constant goose flesh, you are abnormal.
The next time you laugh, cry, get indigestion or don’t get syphilis on seeing a hoarding, press ad or TV commercial, you know the brutal conditions under which it was conceived.
Technology and its various manifestations have been the hallmark of our generation. But technology has an alter-ego. It is that part of technology that man hasn’t been able to conquer. It is what happens when technology solves a problem but creates another as a by-product. The alter-ego of technology embodies the risks of technology. It is when your ipod suddenly refuses to come on. It is when you can chat with your boyfriend who’s 2000 kms away, at the same time sending him a virus. It is when you cannot switch on your mobile phone in a flying aircraft…
Ok I’m philosophising. Didn’t mean to. I do that when my fingers get frozen.
3 comments:
"Alter-ego of Tech" hmm.....deserves a thought. Planning to invent something with which i can telnet in to the airconditioners and controll them,as I am also a victim of "regulated/conditioned/moderated" air.
I loved the leash with which that was written. The end, though, could do with some subtlety, and subdued gyaan.
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