Saturday, January 27, 2018

Chaos or Order - What's Better?

While I was sunbathing on the beach in Egypt, a lady next to me was blasting the German radio. At the time, the traffic info was announcing that somewhere in the particularly organized country a ladder was lying on the Autobahn and urging drivers to be careful. Sitting in Egypt, I couldn't help but smirk: the amount of times some shit lies on the biggest street in Cairo, or the street just ending without warning, is untraceable. A similar smirk happened when I saw that someone tried to put up a trash can on Dahab corniche. Like, a trash can is a great idea but it needs the process of emptying as well. And that's how I got to my thought: Process: good or bad? I'm arguably the best person to comment. I lived and worked in utter chaos and now belong to a company that finds a process for "making mistakes", in other words, a process that can never exist. So what is better, letting the ladder lie on the Ring Road or stressing over how it can never happen again, only it will?

Spoiler alert: I definitely prefer process. Order. Rules. At least when comparing them to the chaos of Egypt that made me, the German German, cringe so much. But: Egypt definitely left its traces. Working at Amazon, a place that can only survive as well as it does because those thousands of people are processed like it's goods, I often think "yo, let's get on with it." At the same time, I'm not sure just chilling out once in a while is the better way and I'm not ignorant enough to think that I would manage a situation better than a tech giant that very visibly did something right to become, well, Amazon. But it annoys me. And it's not like me. My performance suffered sometimes because I wasn't keeping a note diary, so I started doing that, or because I wasn't scheduling my day at 8.30 (I'm not doing that, but I probably should). It's a personal challenge rather than a professional one but that's cool, I think. Makes me reassess what I'm doing, and a job should do that.

Many things in Egypt don't work because they're not managed or corrupted. At the same time, I know dozens of people that love that about Egypt. Many Germans, raped by bureaucracy to get everything you need in life, like they can bribe their way out of situations because it's unarguably easier. They like that in Egypt you can do things and then think, and that you don't have to plan every step. It's true, flexibility is great, even Jeff B. would agree. But with flexibility comes chaos. A city council is where dreams and passion go to die, but they put them trash cans in the street and empty them. Without those dark creatures in the concrete buildings, we'd have no trash cans. No process, no trash cans. And trash cans are good 

I like flexible working times, that I can go home early sometimes because I worked five hours longer last week (although I leave early, like, never) but in Egypt, "flexible" just meant I was working at ten at night every other Saturday. In the UK, process, the law and my bureaucratic right as an employee made sure I'm sitting here at the beach relaxing although I procrastinate taking holidays. These processes and rules make it easy for me to check if I'm doing ok although I hate checklists with a passion. However, just having an apathy towards something, as I do, doesn't mean it sucks. Take the biggest party in Germany, for example: I detest them and would never vote for them due to my personal apathy but they quite obviously don't actually suck. Evidence? The German state. Point made!

I see the chaos in Egypt and although it has left its mark on me, I will never miss it. I love my order and the processes I work with every day. Most of them don't come naturally to me but I see their value. Many of them make me roll my eyes and I struggle to see, as an individual, where they will actually lead to change but I'd rather see ten useless processes than the chaos I saw only this week. I'm not kidding, last night at dinner, my company was discussing the right spelling of the word "Maalesh" (or, is that how you could spell it?), a word used by me every day at least five times. Mindboggingly, there is no right spelling because, guess what, centralizing spelling is a process that has never taken place in Egypt. Between what is right and what is wrong, chaos leaves too much room for interpretation. But some things shouldn't be left to interpret. 

For me to prefer order obviously doesn't mean it is the better way, yet, it has proven the more successful one. Apply the management of the Egyptian state to any company and you will see it fail. If Donald Trump can manage the only superpower on this planet like a multi-million-dollar company, then we should probably refrain from reversing that motion when the blueprint is a country with 90 million people completely unaware how to show up somewhere at two oclock if that's when they said they'd be there. Being late is not a problem for many but when has a person who is always late ever been promoted. Even Beyonce has to be on time, as the Super Bowl Halftime Show certainly won't wait even for a Queen. So don't be like Egypt, don't be chaotic and unreliable. Or do, but please don't work with me then. 

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