YamdaBlam!

Not an extra-ordinary day by any means.
I am on my afternoon 15 minute break from work and still sitting at my desk.

I think the entire idea around the fifteen minute break must have come from the top as they would have done studies to show that continuous work would result in poor performance when people get tired and start to make mistakes. So the cost of fixing these mistakes would far out weight the price of having each employee take a fifteen minute break in the morning
and in the afternoon. This also includes the fact that people need to eat so they get a lunch hour chucked in for good measure!

Its courious that the lunch hours is not really enforced in the working environment. The same can be said for the two 15 minute breaks. Sure, you’ll hear a manager every now and then saying its lunch time. Generally because they have gotten the same conditioning as everybody else.

The very practise of wearing watches on your wrist gets its origin from the industrial revolution. Factory owners needed people to work for them, so they engineered the situation where people had to come into the cities and large towns to get work. They would generally end up in large dirty factories working 18 and up hours a day. Basically slaves.

People at that time didn’t have a need to keep the time as they generally did not need to be keep a schedule. The result of this is was they were constantly late for work. Again industrial factory owners pulled a few chains which resulted in the next generation of factory works being taught how to read the time in school. This ensured that every generation would be punctual just the way the big Bosses needed them.

In fact a lot of what we were taught in schools has to do with how we are needed in society for industry. I’ve read from university sources that alot of courses are actually sponsered by local industry. Depending on the amount of funding they can just about dictate to the course boards what should be taught. This is all based on what they think they will need in the next coming years. Very clever.

There a lot more sinister reasons too, but I want to keep this post light hearted so I’ll save that for another time. For those who would like to know now, get hold of Educational books from Bertrand Russel and Julian Huxley (founder of UNESCO).

Education does not stop at the schools either. All media goes towards educating en mass.
The big media players are TV, Internet and pring media such as newspapers and magazines.

The next time you buy a newspaper or magazine, examine it from the view that it is trying to educate you. See what happens to you view point. Alot of people today do not critical examine the information which they read. Take fiction for
example. I’ve often heard people describe films as “brain candy” whereby you sit and are just entertained. This type of entertainment should be critical examined as it is a well know fact that when you enjoy something you tend to remember it better. What does that mean for entertaining fiction which we consume? It means that we take on board the various messages that are contained in the entertainment. This does have an effect on your behavior.

So be careful of the information you and yours consume as it does have an effect on you especially when you are being entertained. I’ll leave you with a quotation:

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
– Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946)

But what is common sense?