When Machines Refuse to Comply

This time of year in Victoria Australia, teachers across the state sweat, sometimes sweat bullets, because the Reports are due: these reports are the academic results of their students. This may sound like complaining, but in some cases, in secondary school, a teacher will have over 250 students, (a lot of work) and each report must reflect the student’s progress and achievements. What happens every five years is the Department of Education decides the current system of curriculum and reporting is not up to standards, thus they change everything. Looking back on these “changes” over a period of time, one finds “change for change sake” as the foundations remain the same – similar to the old cliché, “Same wine, new bottle.”

The Reports were due today, organized to be handed out to the students by 3:00 p.m., and as the day progressed, it became more and more obvious to me that the deadline was not going to be met – we were dead because those in charge of the new software had been hitting problems, one after the other, and continued to hit the wall until I left, around 5:00. If it wasn’t the network shutting down, it was the software not doing what it was designed for; everything that could go wrong did, and the exasperation on my colleague’s faces told their true feelings at that moment, despair and utter exhaustion.

While driving home, I began to think about Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and his interesting biography, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections.” There is a section in the book where he has just finished building his little house by the lake down about a kilometre from his home on the hill. On the walls of this interesting structure are his many murals of his dreams and the characters that inhabited his dreams. When Jung finally moved into his new home, his first port of call was to “talk” to his tools, that is to say, pots and pans, the poker for the fire place, and the old stove he’d brought down from the main house especially for cooking.

Paraphrased: Now my good and important friends, we must live with one another, and in order to live in harmony, we must work ‘together’, so let us celebrate our new relationship.

This may sound like the illusions of an old man, but Jung understood that harmony with material objects, particularly tools for survival, was absolutely necessary.

As my father would say, when manually working, attempting to repair a car, screen door or a toilet, “You have to make friends with it son, or it will fight you all the way.”

Maybe, just possibly, my colleague’s should have made friends with the new software, accepted the five year change and flowed with it.

The machines might have cooperated, making our lives a little less of a burden.

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As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.

Diane Frovlov and Andrew Schneider