Four Corners of Suburbia

My wife and I have talked about Frederick Taylor before. He's the guy who spent all his time timing workers with a stopwatch in order to increase efficiency. This is a good documentary on his work.

I think the most interesting tidbit came at the very end. Apparently, Taylor had a recurring nightmare that he was trapped inside a machine, and he was resisting its control. What's ironic is that he devoted his entire life to conceptually trapping everyone else in a gigantic machine in order to improve efficiency. What's really depressing is that society itself acts as a giant machine that we're trapped in: work, eat, sleep, repeat. It reminds me of a famous poem:

Nothing in Heaven Functions as it Ought

Nothing in Heaven functions as it ought;
Peter’s bifocals, blindly sat on, crack;
His gates lurch wide with the cackle of a cock;
Not with a hush of gold as Milton had thought;
Gangs of the slaughtered innocents keep huffing
The nimbus off the Venerable Bede
Like that of a dandelion gone to seed;
The beatific choir keep breaking up, coughing.

But Hell, sweet Hell hath no freewheeling part:
None takes his own sweet time, nor quickens pace.
Ask anyone, “How come you here, poor heart?”
And he will slot a quarter through his face—
There’ll be an instant click—a tear will start
Imprinted with an abstract of his case.
--X. J. Kennedy