superblankmindedness | 1 points | Feb 13 2021 10:10:49

（CCJ评论）Wasting time as a society

As one does when they drink too much and need to sign their name into a loosely enforced sign-in registrar where the baoan has no means of verifying identity, there is time for reflection. Post Covid, I have done this a lot. As most baoan's have little grasp of English I've adpoted a Prince-inspired naming convention, in part because I hold a pen less than three times per week, while my right hand inscribes a small picture of involuntary thought on the box of the page of the sign-in book which is far too small to write any name in a western script.

The baoan has authority for 20 seconds until a representative of someone that pays their salary comes to pick me up. That's their 20-second chance to not be on the bottom of the food chain.

I have several friends that are teachers, doctors (I do not teach doctors), public service workers. This is their experience, and my numbers.

In a city of 10 million, there are around 1 million school age students and public service workers.

They have 3-4 people living with them - kids, parents, grandparents, siblings, just a guess at an average. So, that's 3-4 million people that need to send a health code to their school or workplace every day. A screenshot. Sometimes from two ayepeepee providers. Not even sent to the workplace or school, to a delegated worker or parent that needs to check and aggregate this, so that's several hundred checks per day per delegated parent.

Around 30 seconds to send the code per person. So, that's 90,000,000 seconds per reasonably large city per day, just sending it. That's 25,000 hours. Per day.

Anyone that's done a rudimentary level of technology will understand the workplace, or even throwing the boat out there, the local government, could query the database with a one line statement. And this is done, check your WeChat for your [local city name]waishi account, there's a daily update of no change in numbers.

25,000 hours per day could be saved by just pressing a button running an automated query WHICH IS ALREADY DONE BY ANOTHER AGENCY.

I am not the first to have this observation. It happens all over: Meet with your manager? No, you have a middle person to deal with the foreigner. But it's far from foreigner exclusive, all staff have the middle person, grafting and shifting, telling their story selectively as they see it.

Please don't get me wrong. There's a value in contact tracing. This is not how to do it. This is Chinese management in delegation. Just as the security guard asking for sign-in, push any aspect of accountability down to the level that it can't be pushed down to further. Then they're accountable.

/rant

I may come back to edit when less pissed off.