Control + C = copy. Control + V = paste. If you want to paste special values, you can use some additional keystrokes to use a shortcut. How many young workers are out there carrying out this ritual in Excel spreadsheets all across the great U.S. of A at this very moment? I daresay hundreds, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands. Their jobs are secure for the time being. They are your everyday Excel jockeys. Professionals…copying and pasting thousands upon thousands of cells per hour. Formatting and reformatting to their managers’ contents, they are always responding to the whimsical and fickle demands of senior management.
People often speak of job creation, as though it is the most important thing. Job security is sought after as well. Today, we do not hire people to dig holes, fill them back in with dirt, only to re-dig them. That analogy for sheer waste is outdated. The computer offers a new one for our generation. It’s called copy and paste. How wonderfully efficient this ritual is in comparison to the days before spreadsheets! And yet, it is also woefully inefficient. I guarantee you that there is someone in Delhi, or a bored teenager somewhere in Kansas, who could write some basic Visual Basic script to do the work of all these Excel jockeys.
So what prevents this from happening? Obviously there are proprietary concerns and privacy issues. But what really stops people from automating all of these mindless copy and paste processes? I will tell you right now: the lack of other engaging challenges and opportunities, the fact that there might be nothing else to do, and well, the fear of sheer boredom. If we were to automate everything, we would destroy our 9 to 5 livelihoods. We would become irrelevant. We wouldn’t have to work and we would thus be unemployed. And well, unemployment is a horrible fate. So, naturally we have two fates. One, be presented with something more challenging to do, or two, continue to copy and paste.
The more complicated we make a process, and the more we isolate and concentrate the responsibility associated with that process, the greater the job security. It’s quite clear that incentives do not compel us to achieve our goals in the most efficient manner possible. If we automate too much and are unable to find a new process to automate or adapt some other skill, we become irrelevant. We don’t get paid. If we continue to mindlessly copy and paste, we are very relevant. We are needed. We keep getting paid. We continue to work our 9 to 5.
What’s the net benefit to society? Absolutely nothing. We effectively lose 8 hours of whatever this spreadsheet jockey would have done with that extra time. And we lose that, strictly because incentives to automate processes are not in proper alignment. The corporate world seems to be quite irrational at times. Bureaucracy cripples and undermines creativity and efficiency. But this automation conundrum that we Excel jockeys face is certainly the greatest waste of all.- JP
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