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Townsman, 1991-02, Page 42ktk Efficiency? Mast of us can't wait to be inefficient BY KEITH ROULSTON Well I see we're into a new round of Free Trade talks for I guess we can expect to hear a lot about "efficiency" and our lack of it in the coming months. I don't know about you but efficiency ranks right up there with "meaningful relation- ship" one of the terms of the late 1980s and 1990s I'll be glad to see pass from everyday language. For one thing there's the sense of inferiority it gives you. Efficient is always what somebody else is and we're not: the Japanese or the Germans or the Americans. Heck to listen to some people just about everybody in the world is efficient but Canadians. You start looking at your lifestyle and how you haven't seen the kids at supper for a month and how you've got to the point you can't tell hamburgers and other junkfood you eat over the desk from real food, and you start wondering how all these more efficient people manage it. The thing that irks me, though, is that the guys who are always lecturing us on how inefficient we are don't have to be very efficient themselves. One group that hands out the talks on Canadians lack of productivity are the academics, the professors of economics and busi- ness administration who spend a few hours lecturing to students each week and the rest of the time reading up so they can lecture the rest of us. Let's face it, there has never been close ties between the 40 TOWNSMAN I FEBRUARY -MARCH 1991 academia and efficiency. One of the whole points about universities is that they're supposed to give you time to think and there's nothing very efficient about thinking, in the short term at least. Thinking may mean reading for hours to get one idea. It may mean staring blankly out the window until inspiration strikes. Of course the thinker may discover something that will revolu- tionize our lives, making us more efficient but more likely he'll just go home at night and talk about what a tough day it was. The other people always lecturing us about inefficiency are the busi- ness executives. They're generally making these statements while giving speeches to other business executives at dinner meetings in expensive hotels. They have been driven to those luncheons in chauf- fered limousines. The speech has been typed out by one of their numerous secretaries, probably. written by one of their innumerable assistants. They've got the time to make the speech because hundreds, maybe thousands or tens of thous- ands of their employees are keeping the wheels turning back at the office or plant. The business people listening, over their miniscule portions of food at ridiculous prices, will nod their heads in solemn agreement how it's too bad Canadian workers aren't more ambitious, how they've just got too fat. They'll complain about our unions and our social safety nets and how Canadian industries just can't compete under the circum- stances. Then after they've congra- tulated themselves on a few hours well spent, they'll climb back into their limos and go back to the office to make sure all the vice presidents have seen to it that the assistants to the vice-presidents have had their secretaries keeping the memos flowing out to the plant managers to give to the foremen so that the men and women on the assembly line will keep on producing the thingamagees that keep providing the money for the company to send its president to expensive lunches. At the end of the day the executive will tell the chauffeur to deliver him to his "efficient" home. This home will take up enough prime real estate to provide non- profit housing for half the city's homeless. It will mean heating 2,000 square feet of space per person, including servants. It will keep a pool maintenance person busy full-time keeping the indoor and perhaps outdoor pool clean, probably averaging out to about 15 hours of salary for every hour that some member of the family actually spends in the water. Or the busi- ness leader may decide to spend his night on his yacht which will sit at dockside, paying expensive dockage fees for an entire summer for the average 3.2 hours a week anybody spends sailing. Let's be honest: nobody really wants to be efficient. Nobody wants to work at the level we'd need to be efficient these days. What we all strive for, from the business execu- tive to the peasant working for $1.60 a day in Mexico, is to get to the point where we can sit back and relax now and then and not have to worry about making a living. We all live for the day we can be ineffi- cient. The problem is when too many of us get inefficient we start endangering the lives of the people at the top. They want us to keep being efficient because it allows them to have the trappings of inefficiency: the houses, the yachts, the servants. A new spirit of giving A national program to encourage giving and volunteering