Around this time of the year I usually hit a bit of burnout. It`s chronic.
It got so bad at one stage (in 1999) that I started finding it impossible to turn my neck in traffic. In that hideous summer (I didn`t have aircon), my neck remained unyielding for such a long time that I eventually lost any urge to find out whether there was ever actually anyone behind me as I reversed out of cramped parking bays. In fact, were I to ram someone, I think I might have welcomed it as a way to take out my pent-up road rage, PC user rage and having overworked myself to the point of catatonia for months - all pretty much par for the course in the days of the pre-bust hype.
The upshot of it all being that I finally left Johannesburg that year, and went to chill out in Cape Town for a while, where there`s less driving. But because nobody who has ever worked in Joburg knows what to do with time on their hands, next thing I knew I was back, and I`ve been back ever since.
It`s no different post the dot-bomb fallout, of course. In fact, it`s worse. There`s less money to go around and you have to work harder for it. I still work myself to a standstill, though fatherhood has knocked some sense into me. I still dream of being left alone for just one hour every day, to sit in a big soft chair in a quiet study, to think and maybe write a bit. I still worry that I never have a moment for the important things.
Commoditisation
They offered us an end-to-end curtaining solution and claimed to be a true cradle-to-grave one-stop-shop for all our decorative needs.
Carel Alberts, special editions editor, Brainstorm
So when the time came to write my (now twice-monthly) column, I thought it might be nice not to write about technology or the business of IT at all. I would write about the first thing that came into my head, in the interests of leading a balanced life (someone else`s words).
The first thing that came into my head is that we`re moving house soon, and that I`m probably being roped into buying curtains this weekend, as penance for watching the rugby. The reason we`re buying curtains when the old ones ought to do is because the old ones aren`t compatible with the new rails. And the reason the rails won`t interface with the curtains is because they`re from some proprietary vendor who won`t subscribe to hanging standards. How they survive with closed systems in a commodity space is beyond me. This after they offered us an end-to-end curtaining solution and claimed to be a true cradle-to-grave one-stop-shop for all our decorative needs. I think I`ll vote with my feet. Who told them to reinvent the wheel?
Something about this train of thought bothers me. A throbbing vein appears on the side of my head as I coax myself along to the next thought with the hallowed boardroom phrase: "Moving on!"
But I can`t get away from it. The new neighbourhood, I find, is not all it was cracked up to be.
Instead of being allowed to use the first lazy Sunday afternoon we`re there to sleep or read, we listen to the neighbour gunning the engine of his Beamer incessantly, yet seeming to learn nothing from it. This disruptive technology leaves me in a trough of disillusionment about the new ecosystem of neighbours we find ourselves in.
When we run into them at the local superette I mutter something about taking it offline with him, but our respective wives smile sweetly at each other, squeeze our forearms in repeatable, predictable, almost algorithmic iteration and add value in the form of buy-one-get-one-free items to our respective trolleys.
All is well again, our family systems will remain disparate, and thanks to the diversion, I`ve had my bit of escapism.
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