The Art of The Workaround

I recently pitched over the front of my bicycle and broke my collarbone which forced me to find ways around the limitations that the injury presented. As soon as I could dress and undress myself I was back doing exercise at the gym. I had to work around the steel plate with screws that held my shoulder together. My rotator cuff hadn’t fared well in the fall either. Looking around the gym, I realized that I wasn’t the only one with a handicap. Most of the rats had wrapped knees and wrists, or wore belts, but like any injured athletes, they didn’t stop training. If they had to cut back on leg exercises for a while to favour their bad knees, they concentrated on upper body workouts until they could add some lower body to the routine. I took to calling my workouts, my workarounds. Because I had to back off my weak spots until they were healed, there were tedious hours of light weight lifting, feeling like I wasn’t making progress, but I couldn’t stop. I had to baby my injuries until they were better and build up slowly once they were. The clavicle and shoulder were gradually less painful and the doctor they assured me that the fix was stronger than the original bone, though I wasn’t convinced, now that it had so many screw holes in it. Anti-inflammatories were also useful.
Having the ability to find a workaround requires both vertical and horizontal thinking, an important skill in a host of professions from the petty thief, to the holder of a corner office. Problems arise in the real world and conventional systems suggest straightforward logical AI remedies, which when dealing with humans are not always the best idea. In order to advance, a society needs to let its past injuries heal in peace. Every citizen needs to work around the handicaps he is given. Some people rail against their limitations and bang their heads on the sky, others surrender and drown in substances, while others sweat like unheralded paralympians to show, if only to themselves, that there is a way around. Our society often stumbles, but we always find a way forward, a fix, a path learned the hard way through false starts. If we aren’t ready to alter the structure of our society, we need to connect the unifying elements in the wreckage of the present to build bridges, otherwise we will shake each other to pieces in never-ending, mutually damaging war. The body, the soul, society, and even the marketplace run on compromise, or as I like to call it, the Workaround.
An early parallel to the Workaround is the Jury Rig, which brings to mind ship repairs, with sailors lashing a broken booms with rope so the ship can sail home There is a theory that the Jury part of the phrase comes from the French word for day, jour, implying that the repair might only last a day. One of the weaknesses of the workaround is that putting undue pressure on a fix may cause another system failure. The ship needs is a new piece of uncompromised timber.
A Jury Rig, given full rein, can end up as a Kludge, defined as an “ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole." A mechanism like this may continue to function but it is clumsy and temporary, and related to the words bodge or fudge, which brings to mind MacGyver, the king of the workaround.
Hackers are in the business of workarounds. Software developers build systems, and hackers, from curiosity, notoriety or profit, delight in finding holes in the system that they can slide into, like cars merging on a freeway. Before the system is aware, it finds itself serving another master. Programmers know that to block hackers, they sometimes have to burn down their houses and start again.
In the world of entertainment, Prince called himself a symbol because his name had been sold to Warner Brothers. Networks routinely bleep words they don’t want viewers to hear, leaving the impression of free speech intact except for the odd forbidden word. The act of censorship itself is a futile attempt to cover up the truth, but the reality still exists behind the fig leaf. An iconoclast would destroy the offending statue, but the humanist finds a workaround that saves the entity and appeases the censor.
We see products on supermarket shelves that are designed to imitate original brands and skate close to the wrong side of patents and trademarks, so that only the original producers of champagne and parmigiano reggiano are allowed to use those names. Shady producers sell merchandise with brand-similar names and imitative packaging, though any attempt to sell a McDonalds burger or a puppet mouse with a particular face, brings down the legal weight of ferocious brand defenders. An obvious and clumsy workaround can be easily dislodged.
In some countries, people who build houses leave unfinished construction rods poking out of their roofs to indicate that the building is not finished, because completed buildings are taxed at a higher rate. To an outside eye, the rusted corner ornaments are a cultural curiosity, but they are visible signs of a broader social breakdown. The authorities suspect the building may never be finished, but they have no certain knowledge of the owner’s intentions, and can’t prosecute uncertainty. Until a government realizes the need to rewrite a law, people will find ways around it. In this same country, cynicism is rampant. People believe that when the government decides to make a law, that they make an escape window or workaround for themselves and their friends, then build the law around it.
Recently it has been brought to light that rich parents can have their children accepted into name universities even if the applicants don’t have the qualifications for admittance. Because those caught were celebrity parents the story had more traction than it might have in another time and place. Not long ago, an English aristocrat would have assumed he could purchase a place for his son at Cambridge or Oxford by making a large enough donation to either University. His son could learn eventually. That’s what tutors were for. The workaround practice of buying university places isn’t new, but it came as news to some.
Workarounds are used so often in our lives, that we hardly recognize them for what they are. Objects that have been invented to help us, like eyeglasses, originally started as workarounds. Somewhere in history a man noticed that rock crystal in the right shape could become a tool for starting a fire. The best fire starters had magnifying qualities, which over a thousand years of refinement were ground into eyeglasses or even contact lenses. We have adapted materials like quartz, silica and petroleum to make a smart phones that exceed the thinking speed of the human brain. The use of these building blocks began as a way to overcome difficulties, like distance, speed, and human frailty. If one day soon we can’t go outside, it won’t take long for tinkerers to adapt VR and drone technology to let our eyes go out to explore while our bodies are indoors, safe and protected. Whatever happens we will find a way around.
Some basic social supports like daycare began as workarounds. It was a logical fix in early societies that the duties of motherhood could be shared with a network of sisters and relatives, so that more women were able to participate in activities that benefited the group, like agriculture and hunting. The children benefited by having an extended family with its broader range of educational input.
The best of intentions can have unintended consequences. In Italy, the government passed a bill to protect worker’s rights. The new strict labour laws applied only to companies with more than fifteen employees. As a result, many companies limited their growth to avoid being subject to the new rules. The change worked well for artisans and unionized employees, but economic growth stagnated. To fill the gap in industry, the government courted multinationals who initially performed well, but were in turn subject to the pressures of worldwide supply and demand. When the markets changed, the big companies were as loyal to the country who courted them as a hen is loyal to an egg. The hosts had been used, but they should have seen it coming. They had shot themselves in the foot in the first place with flawed rules that business found easy to work around. The original ill conceived law, a workaround in its own time, had been a detriment to everyone.
One of the most lucrative markets in modern times cashes in on the problems people have in coping with their lives. Solutions that range from anti-depressant medication to wellness marketing, are nothing more fixes to get around our feelings of inadequacy and sadness. We turned coping methods into big business, but in the end the offered solutions are all workarounds that prop up something temporarily but do not fix the original problem. If someone suffers trauma, there is no way to reverse the original injury, so we find ways to work around it and live with it, but the memory and subsequent pain will never disappear until we learn how to cancel memory.
There are a wide range of coping techniques involving drugs and therapy. Humour is one method for exorcising pain, perhaps because we can transfer our pain to someone else. Their misfortune is our healing laugh. When I was young, I often went to the movies on Saturdays with my older sister. To stop myself from crying during sad passages in the film, I would look over at her, sure that she was well ahead of me in tears, and the sight of water running down her face would make me laugh. It kept the sadness on the screen from entering my heart. I didn’t want to be sad, so at that young age was already learning to find ways around the embarrassing phenomenon of tears. .
When politicians suggest imperfect fixes for long term problems, they may not be aware that they are stacking one jury rig on top of another. Social democrats wish to eliminate the flaws in a system that permits inequality but are less inclined to accept a patchwork of temporary fixes than traditional politicians. Those on the more radical left, advocate changing the system from the ground up, advocating for fundamental change rather than putting more fingers in a failing levee to protect territory that is already under water. The wisest of those who resist radical change, probably know that their wilful blindness will come back to bite them.
Temporary fixes and workarounds were never meant to solve problems permanently. Sooner or later structural changes need to be made. When change comes, any workarounds in place become unstable or fail altogether. Workarounds are brittle constructions. They are not positive or negative in themselves, but are tools that can generate beneficial or disastrous results.
The further we go into our future , the greater the effects of stress become apparent. Stress has always existed, but its force has grown in proportion with our ever expanding shared knowledge. It is useful to understand your adversary, but when you know that he has a 500 kiloton bomb that he can drop on you if he is in a bad mood, it can be stressful. Throughout history people have shouted that the sky is falling, and it has not happened. Now we know that it could happen and how it will happen, but so did the prophets know, based on hearsay of all sorts of celestial rain. Probably the most well known and used stress reliever is religion, followed by alcohol. People find ingenious ways to cope. Making beer is an art.
Tobacco, since its worldwide diffusion, is another method of dealing with stress in an instant. A quiet cigarette is a moment to stop and reflect, and a nicotine hit on the run, is for someone who has no time, but needs a calming top-up fix. But we all know what many years of using cigarettes as a stress reliever does to the lungs. As can happen, that particular workaround might be worse than the monster it is trying to avoid. Alcohol plays a similar insidious part.
The obvious way to relieve stress isn’t to find new coping mechanisms, but to eliminate the stressor that causes so many to turn to workarounds. Historically, people have taken the drastic step of leaving home for better economic opportunities, and because of wars or natural disasters. Climate change will provoke new generations of refugees. The outside forces that cause people to pull up stakes, are either because they are persecuted in their homeland, or because there is no way for them to produce enough to stay alive there. Whether the reason for flight is violence or hunger, the main driver behind these migrations is always money. Wars are fought over control of territory, because territory generates wealth. In a new world order, people would not need to move to stay alive, because they and their neighbours would have the same benefits of clean running water, electricity, transport and communications. The proliferation of mobile phones has all but accomplished the latter, the evidence being that a video can be posted online from a dot on the map in Africa, and be seen immediately by the rest of the world. Food, water, and employment are taking longer to catch up. When a man who lives in that dot on the map sees how the rest of the world lives, he wants the same benefits for himself. Along with the promise of adequate food and productive employment, he also wants health care, education, infrastructure and a fair rule of law. Regardless of what the Bible says, it is natural to want something that is better than what you already have. If you have a broken down, jury-rigged plough, you wish that you had a sturdy, unbroken one. When they want more and can’t have it right away, people become jealous, vindictive and make bad decisions. To attain the promised land, people who don’t steal from others, are forced to work as wage slaves because that is the only road open to them. They hope it will be a temporary solution, a fix, but they end up living the rest of their lives living with the workaround.
Men have tried to construct societies where nobody suffers from want, but it has been demonstrated that uniformity kills initiative. In the end, these utopias fail, because people have a tendency to work around the rules to reinstate a hierarchy of wealth. They want more than their neighbour and are willing to become outlaws if that is what is needed to achieve their objectives. In an unjust society we look for fixes to the system. In a just society we look for workarounds to destabilize the equilibrium if we think it will improve our lot.
The cautionary sting in the tale of workarounds is that we should not depend on them, and if necessary, should consider discarding the entire Kludge and rebuilding a sound structure from a new set of plans that do not totally revolve around money. If we ever manage to conquer our petty jealousies, envy and greed, war will be relegated to an awful curiosity of the past.