Labor/Tools Anti-Symmetry

I suppose it's been obvious since I got here, but it's never really sunk in until just now. Labor here is cheap, we know this. We expect this. And we've experienced this since the day we arrived. (Yes, I've gradually moved from the collective "we" to the royal "we" in this paragraph. Deal with it.) Additionally, I've observed that electronics and other such items are not noticeably cheaper here, as I'd hoped they would be. Indeed, many things are considerably more expensive here. (Books are a prime example, which is most unfortunate.)

It finally hit home when I had to print something at the office today. I'd been here for a week and a half and hadn't needed to print, which is not uncommon. After all... paper? Dead trees? Why would I need that? But I'm giving a presentation today and, until I come up with a more compelling and still mobile technology setup which can include presenter notes from my slides, paper it is.

Installing the printer was... an ordeal. The IT guy had me tied up an a full hour (this is not an exaggeration) while he fiddled with the network, fiddled with printers, and tweaked and prodded until I was able to connect to what is apparently the only printer in the office. This was a bit annoying, to be honest. What sort of semi-baked network infrastructure has been cobbled together in these halls? Will I find cabled duct-taped to walls and ceilings to support this infrastructure? Will it be imitation duct-tape because the real stuff is just too expensive?

After all, installing a printer should be trivial. This is an enterprise environment, is it not? At some point, upon putting the printer on the network, it should have been set up as part of the Windows domain and just... available. Right? I should just be able to locate it on the network and print to it, right? Sadly, no. This process involved chants and ceremonies entirely unknown to me. Indeed, the printer was installed on a "local port" (I always thought that option was just for backward compatibility and didn't serve any purpose these days) which was actually a custom network path to this or that and something else and what-have-you until finally printing had been achieved.

So I printed. I have slides and presenter notes. Lots of them, actually, because I go slide-crazy on my presentations. (I'm a big fan of moving through slides quickly rather than dumping a ton of content onto a small number of slides.) So I ended up printing 86 pages. Black and white, of course. Even if it is a color printer, I don't need color for this, so I could be considerate in that regard.

86 pages produced an interesting reaction from the IT guy. It seemed like a lot in his eyes. Is... Is it a lot? I never really thought so. Maybe I'd consider it to be excessive when printing something on my little deskjet at home, but not in an office. Office printers these days can practically spit out 86 black and white pages in the time it takes me to walk over to the printer.

Oh, my naivety. For walk over to the printer we did (he had to show me where it was), and before me was a surprising sight to say the least. The printer was... not what I had expected. It was at least a laterjet, that much is good. But it was a small personal deskjet version of a laserjet, visibly yellowed with age. I could hear it churn out a page at a time with great effort. 86 pages was going to take a few minutes. The pages themselves were even curled and unnatural as they were ejected from the printer, as though it was bestowing upon them its age and decrepitude so that it might steal their youth and vitality as might a witch from a fairy tale to prolong its life.

And beside the printer sat a man. There were two of them there, in fact. The printer was apparently on the first man's desk. Indeed, it was a significant focus of his desk. He is apparently the "printer man" or so at least it seemed. I couldn't quite discern the function of the second man, though it may have been printer-related. These men were fully engaged in facilitating my print job. They were removing the pages from the printer, loading in new ones (because 86 was beyond its tray capacity), trying to un-warp the visibly warped pages as they left the printer, making sure they were collated, providing a binding clip on the entire stack upon completion, and in general just... helping to print.

Was this their job? Was this their primary function in the office? I can understand a service-based culture bent on pleasing others, but come on. A "printer man"?

The observations all fell into place at that point. And they can be summed up thusly:

• Back in the US (or at least at my employer), things are cheap and people are expensive.
• Here in the Philippines, things are expensive and people are cheap.

It's completely counter-intuitive to how members of my profession live our daily lives. Sure, we're told this fact in various ways and as such we're tangentially aware of it. But it doesn't really sink in until we actually experience it. In an office environment in the US it would be absurd to waste the time of highly-paid people on issues which can be solved by simple technology. That time is precious and expensive. Spending $5,000 to $10,000 on a good printer and a one-time intuitive network installation of said printer is nothing. It's background noise in the grand scheme of office expenses. What is of paramount importance is to not waste the time of the people, because they are the crucial component.

Here, the inverse is true. Thousands of dollars (potentially hundreds of thousands of pesos) for a printer is a dream. They might see it on television or in an advertisement, but it doesn't actually happen in real life. The justification of saving a little bit of personnel time here and there would take decades to add up to any considerable monetary figure. The labor is practically free. They could hire a guy to just sit by the printer and be the printer guy for a mere pittance. They could hire a secretary for the printer guy. They could hire a babysitter to watch the secretary's children while she worked for the printer guy. These people, these resources, are so inexpensive as to be almost free. But an office printer, that's expensive.

As I said, it's completely anti-symmetrical to how we live our lives in the US. It's entirely unintuitive to us. We don't really understand it, at least not until we're standing next to the printer guy and watching the old printer on his desk churn out our PowerPoint slides in its agonizing death throes.