Speaking of cats . . . . A few years ago I had a kitten named Mina whom my then-wife termed my “little princess.” When she was maybe 2 months old I started taking her outside, where I would sit down on the front step with her on my knee, and watch her as she contemplated the world. She would look everywhere, mostly with her nose--sniffing the usually light breeze, amazed and awed and intimidated by things I could neither see nor otherwise sense.
Mina died last year, and now, in addition to two other dogs (and five cats), I have a 6-month-old boxer/beagle-mix puppy, Cecil. Every night Cecil and I go sit out on the porch for a while. He LOVES to sit on my lap and sniff at the world, at once intrigued and intimidated by whatever he smells on the air; Nina’s (other dog) furious barking from all corners of the yard; distant headlights coming up the highway. I cannot even imagine how the world must appear to him when it is dark, yet he can smell and hear and see so much more than I can, and he has so little experience with this little universe.
Cecil runs and plays with Nina during the day, but at night, when Nina is all guard-dog, ferocious and protective and constantly vigilant, she must seem an entirely different, and in some ways, frightening creature to him.
With so much continuous and possibly seemingly contradictory--the dog he knows as playmate when it is light outside, fierce wild creature at night, for instance--incoming information, life must be confusing for Cecil sometimes.
Maybe he would be happier if he had never been exposed to “fierce Nina,” if he still knew her only as playmate.
That’s the trouble with information, I suppose--how can you know when it becomes too much. Or conversely, when you don’t have enough?
I get that feeling when wandering about the web, sometimes. For every “fact” you find, every opinion, there are countless contradicting “facts” and opinions. Trying to sift through it all and find some sense-making “thread” tying it all together, can be as overwhelming as all the sounds and smells and sights must have seemed to kitten Mina, sitting on my knee in balmy Mississippi air, so many years ago, or to Cecil, sitting on my lap a couple of hours ago.
Too much information, too much stimulation.
But the flipside of that particular coin may be as bad, or worse.
Came across a term the other day, “isolation paranoia.” I don’t know--couldn’t figure out from whatever Google found for me--whether that is an actual psychological condition or not. Basically it means that when you’re isolated from other people, specifically in a work situation, you tend to become paranoid. You start wondering what it “means” if you haven’t received a daily communication from your supervisor, for instance. You wonder about phantoms, essentially.
Example: I am part of a team of “remote” transcriptionists working on several accounts scattered across the country (the accounts AND the transcriptionists). One of our larger accounts recently underwent a changeover to an electronic medical record, EMR. We were only told that the account was switching over to a new platform, something like that, but then, suddenly, all the transcriptionists assigned to that account were finding “no job available” when they signed on for their shifts. After a few days of utter confusion, they finally informed us about the switch to EMR. Now, on most accounts and in most remote transcription jobs I’ve had until now, we--the transcriptionists--have never really been able to communicate with each other. We’re hundreds or thousands of miles apart, no longer have even regular conference calls. On this team, though, the supervisor decided to create a virtual “water cooler” for us--she made a private Facebook group and invited us all to join.
I don’t know if her bosses would have approved of that--communication among employees in most companies is generally discouraged, but from what I’ve seen so far, it has been a godsend to a whole bunch of people who work together yet never see or chat with each other.
And I’m seeing “isolation paranoia” in action.
Perceived “non-communication” becomes as fraught with meaning as actual “communication.” When you’re a “remote” employee, working in more or less a vacuum, you start to “see,” or sometimes “imagine,” things going on which are somehow just out of your reach, just outside your field of vision.
You start to get used to hearing the fiercely barking Nina, then she goes suddenly silent--ohmigod, is she hurt??? What’s going on???
The daily stat reports you used to receive and be pissed off by? Suddenly they go away, but nobody tells you why. What does that mean?
At our virtual water cooler, our Facebook group, the term “mushroom treatment” has popped up a few times recently. You know, “I am a mushroom. I must be a mushroom--they keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.”
Then the company president sent out a memo that was supposed to “inform” us, but left most of us--and we are ALL language specialists, remember--mostly confused.
Too much information, too little . . . It is becoming increasingly difficult to know one from the other.
No comments:
Post a Comment