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 my injury presented. As soon as I could dress and undress myself, I was back at the gym, having to work around the steel plate with screws in my clavicle. My rotator cuff hadn’t fared well in the fall either. Looking around the gym, I saw I wasn’t the only one with a handicap. Most of the gym 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 pamper 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 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 wisdom suggests straightforward remedies, which are not always the most helpful. In order to advance, a society needs to let its past injuries heal in peace without pushing too hard against the pain. People learn to work around the handicaps they are given. Some people rail against their limitations and bang their frustrated heads against the wall, others surrender to substances, while a few apply themselves like unheralded paralympians to show, if only to themselves, that there is always a way around. Our society often stumbles, but we find ways to move forward, often a path learned the hard way through false starts. If we aren’t ready to alter the structure of our society to fix recurring problems, we need to glue together the salvageable elements from the wreckage of the past to build bridges to the future. Otherwise, we will shake each other to pieces in a never-ending, mutually damaging war. The body, the soul, society, and even the marketplace run on compromise and innovation, 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 boom 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 this workaround is that putting undue pressure on a fix may cause another system failure. A permanent repair to the ship would require 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 poorly constructed houses and start again.
In the world of entertainment, Prince called himself a symbol because his very name belonged to Warner Brothers. Television 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 similar names and imitative packaging, though any attempt to sell a McDonald's burger or a puppet mouse with a particular face brings down the legal weight of ferocious brand defenders. Obvious and clumsy workarounds like these can be easily dislodged.
In Greece, those who build houses often leave unfinished construction rods poking out of the 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 cannot 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, 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 buy their children's acceptance into big-name universities even if the applicants don’t have the qualifications for admittance. Some of those caught were celebrity parents, so the stories had more traction than they 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 eventually learn. That’s what tutors were for. The workaround practice of buying university places isn’t new, but it came as a shock 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 crystals 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 smartphones 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 outdoors, it won’t take long for tinkerers to adapt virtual reality and drone technology to let our eyes go out to explore while our bodies are indoors, safe and protected. Whatever happens to poison our world for human habitation, we will find a way around it.
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 food preparation. The children benefited from 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 workers’ rights. The new strict labour laws applied only to companies with more than fifteen employees. As a result, many burgeoning businesses limited their growth to avoid being subject to the new rules. The new law worked well for artisans and family businesses, 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 supply and demand. When the markets changed, the big companies were as loyal to the country that courted and supported 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 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 existence. Solutions that range from antidepressant medication to wellness marketing are nothing more than fixes to get around our feelings of inadequacy and sadness. We turned coping solutions into big business, but in the end, the offered workarounds did not fix the original problem. If someone suffers trauma, there is no way to reverse the original injury, so we find ways to push it to the back of our minds, but the memory and subsequent pain will never disappear until we learn how to cancel memories, which will not be a good step forward.
There is 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, I was already learning workarounds to avoid the embarrassing phenomenon of crying in public.
When politicians suggest imperfect fixes for long-term problems, they refuse to think 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 more reluctant to accept a patchwork of temporary fixes than traditional politicians. Those on the radical left advocate altering the system from the ground up, calling for fundamental change rather than putting more fingers in a failing levee to protect territory that is already underwater. Those who resist radical change probably know that their willful 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 temporarily 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 an atomic bomb he can drop on you if he is in a bad mood, it can be stressful. Probably the most well-known and most commonly used stress reliever is religion, followed by alcohol. People find ingenious ways to cope. Making beer is an art.
Tobacco, since its worldwide diffusion, has been a method of dealing with stress. A quiet cigarette is a moment to stop and reflect, and a smoke on the run is for someone who needs a quick nicotine top-up. We know now what many years of using cigarettes as a stress reliever does to the lungs, but if soldiers in the 20th-century wars chose that over going out of their minds with shell shock or having a smoke, the cigarette was the clear choice. As can happen, a particular workaround might be worse than the monster it is trying to avoid. Alcohol plays a similarly insidious role.
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 because of wars, natural disasters, religious persecution, or for better economic opportunities. 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 healthcare, education, infrastructure and a fair rule of law. Regardless of what the Bible says, it is natural to want something 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 people want more and can’t have it right away, they 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 spending the rest of their lives in the limited options offered by the workaround. Is poverty in Peru worse than poverty in the United States? Climate change will provoke new generations of refugees hoping to change the trajectories of their lives.
Men have tried to construct societies where nobody suffers from want, but it has been demonstrated that mind-numbing 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. People want more than their neighbours have, and are willing to become outlaws if that is what is needed to achieve their objectives. We look for workarounds, honest or dishonest, 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 jury-rigged kludge and building 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 being an awful curiosity of the past.
