My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #42, May 24, 1999

WE'RE ALL WITH STUPID

I had a bit of a jolt the other day when the office of a local veterinarian sent me a postcard suggesting that I schedule a check-up for my cat Nickaninny. You see, the only time I ever brought her to them, the doctor found a large tumor that was killing her, and suggested I should just take her home and make her as comfortable as I could for her last few days, which I did.

I suppose the office staff had been asked to update patient records and send reminders to clients to bring their animals in for check-ups, which is fine. But apparently it didn't occur to them to look at the records to see if the animals were alive before they sent the reminders out.

It's just one example of a kind of creeping mindlessness I find worrisome, but there are plenty more. Newsweek reports that a teacher who suspected his test had been stolen and distributed to his students gave them a different test. He was amazed at how many students still used the answers from the original test, even though they no longer made any sense at all.

Now it's true that we can get through about 90% of our lives on automatic pilot, without any thought required at all. When we get up in the morning, we usually go through a set routine -- get our coffee, bathe, eat breakfast, get dressed, etc. These routines save time because we don't have to think about them except when something is out of place or when we need to make choices like what to have for breakfast, or wear to work.

We've also transferred a whole lot of functions to our autonomic nervous system. Once we've been driving for a while, our body automatically does all the things we used to have to think about -- switch on ignition, check rear view mirror, release brake, etc. -- and our mind is now free to concentrate on plotting our route, paying attention to the traffic, or moving over to the right when we hear an ambulance siren behind us. (Unfortunately, it's also free to concentrate on cell phone conversations, the movie on the in-car entertainment system, or notes on the Palm Pilot.)

Even much of our normal social interaction is automatic: "Hi, how are you?" "Fine, thanks." Does it matter that the correct answer would be that your back is killing you? Not at all, most of the time, though we do need to remember to go beyond the standard script when we know the other person has just gotten out of the hospital, or has just lost his mother. The scripts we follow are supplied by society, and we hardly even notice their silliness until something patently absurd happens -- I once saw a Moslem greet a Jew with a hearty "Merry Christmas!" and neither of them seemed to realize that was kind of odd until I giggled.

There's nothing wrong with having routines and habits and scripts for basic social exchanges. They free our mind for thinking, and for making decisions about the things that count -- at least if we choose to use our minds for that. But it seems to me that far too many people are trying to put the remaining 10% of their lives on automatic pilot too. They apply their routines and scripts when thought is required. Worse, they may not even recognize when thought is required.

In January, when my son traveled back to Massachusetts, he checked his bag and never saw it again. Six weeks after he filled out a claim form with Greyhound, he got a notice that they had found the bag and had shipped it to him. And then Greyhound managed to lose it yet again. Did they fall all over themselves apologizing, promising to track it down immediately?. No way. Just "fill out the claim form and if we haven't found it in 2 months we'll send you some money for your lost belongings."

Now, if my library had lost another library's book, we would immediately try to track what happened to it. If we couldn't find it, we would apologize and offer to pay for it. But if we somehow lost it again, we would have to re-examine all our procedures to see how such incompetence could have occurred. At Greyhound, though, people just mindlessly followed the rules and procedures. The didn't understand that when you DON'T apologize after your system screws up this badly, your customers will assume that your incompetence is so commonplace you don't even notice it anymore.

True automatic pilot systems have manual overrides -- cruise control is all very well when you're out on the open highway, but when you're snaking through heavy traffic, you're going to need to pay attention and adjust your speed. The mind is our manual override, and we need to recognize when the time has come to switch over to it.

Why are we so dissatisfied with the quality of the products and the service we are given these days? Because so few people go beyond the rules when it makes sense to. When that plane was stranded on the runway in Detroit for six hours, why couldn't Northwest have gotten a bus out to the plane to get the passengers off? And if that was impossible, why couldn't they at the very least have explained to the passengers what they had tried to do but found impossible because of the snow. People will bear hardships much more gracefully when they understand what is going on, and when they think somebody is at least trying to help.

A contributing factor in mindless ness is that we have turned some decision-making over to machines, which is why so many people in computer-controlled "smart buildings" are almost always too cold or too hot. It's also why the verbal errors you now see in newspapers are so often "spell-check errors" -- the words are spelled correctly, but they're the wrong words, as in a story about the internet in public libraries that said the public would "demand that librarians reign in the smut." (I rather like my mental image of that.)

Another thing we often do is mistake statistics for the things they represent. We measure our successes in numbers, of billable hours, reference questions answered, saxophones manufactured per hour, and forget that the real measure of success is whether the product or service is any good. If the lawyers don't bother to call witnesses in our behalf, the librarian gives us books on cellulite when we asked for cellulitis, and most of the saxophones are rejected by quality control at the end of the line, all the statistics prove is that people showed up for work (or at least their bodies did). Sorry, Woody Allen, but just showing up is NOT 90% of life.

And nowhere near enough people weigh the evidence before making decisions, or think about possible consequences of their actions. Some people buy an SUV without understanding that it handles differently than a car, and wreck it. Some people believe the sweet-talker who tells them they're going to collect a fortune but first they have to put a few hundred dollars down. Other people drop large rocks off highway overpasses, or drop drugs whose power they don't understand into somebody else's drink .

Which is to say, it's not just fools who suffer for their mindlessness. We are all at risk from the mistakes of people who don't think, or don't care about doing their jobs mindfully and well. Whether we like it or not, we're all dependent on the weakest links of the human chain.

So, render unto automatic pilot only those things that belong there. For all the hard stuff -- decision making, planning, considering possible consequences -- we need to switch to manual override, and turn on the human mind, which is indeed a terrible thing to waste.