On the subway last night,

[flexagon]

I pulled my hat-in-progress from my purse along with a yard or so of its periwinkle yarn, and started knitting.

"Congratulations!" said a random guy who walked over to me.

"What, why?"

"You're MAKING something and not just looking up information!" ...and I was treated to a short diatribe on how job satisfaction is down because we've lost manufacturing jobs, and knowledge work doesn't provide the same level of tangible feedback. "Sitting and typing, all you do is move your fingers. Working 12 hour days, what's that?"

Mind you, I'm not sure he was wrong.

Comments

[kaigex.livejournal.com]

I'd say he's surely at least partly right. One might also suggest a lack of direct connection to customers, lack of genuinely identifiable individual contributions (systems built on systems and all that), and that being in the business of writing poetry in code to enchant young computers into dancing as desired and generally mercantiling abstractions sometimes gets tedious.

But really, he was probably just ruminating out loud on one of the article's from today's Metro. (http://www.metronews.ca/halifax/live/article/413717--survey-says-us-workers-can-t-get-no-job-satisfaction-recession-partly-to-blame)