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| The walking dead | | Date Created: Dec 01, 2005, 08:00 AM |
One of my favourite movies of all time is M Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense. The idea that the dead walk among us, not knowing that they are already dead appealed to me in a more literal sense because I am like the young Cole Sear who see the walking dead.
I see them everyday when I come to work. They walk into the lobby, shoulders drooped, clutching their over-sweetened cups of sugar with coffee or tea. They shuffle their feet and plonk themselves at their grave of a cubicle. Devoid of any organisational energy, they go about their daily work much as they have done for the last 20 years. It has become a reflex action --- taking files, checking files, throwing files into out-trays. They only briefly burst into life during meal-times when they chat with fellow zombies about much the same things that they have talked about over the last decades of their somnambulant lives.
They are kept on death-support by the personnel system, which should be called inhuman resources instead of HR. Supervisors who never bothered about their development when they were still alive kept them in the organisation until the dead became so much a part of the furniture that they turned indispensable, much like the altars we see in so many homes. Supervisors realise only too late that the zombies have hoarded so much institutional knowledge that the organisation is forced to keep them on for fear of angering the dead. Like ghouls, they scare off the living such that the ratio of the living to the dead keeps falling.
All this is of course contextual. I am sure that many of the walking dead get new leases of life everyday after 5 when they transform into role model parents or exemplars in church. But isn't it a shame that they allow themselves to lead this sort of existence for the better part of everyday? |
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