Female: Let’s get ourselves connected.
Female2: Got to get yourself connected.
Mike: We got Jack Kapica on the line from the Globe and Mail, thanks for joining us Jack.
Jack: Hey, hi, how are you doing?
Mike: Great, well, I hope I’m doing okay, because I’m very much into technology, I’m reading something that you’ve written here recently, you’re saying that technology might be killing us?
Jack: Yes, so you’re gonna die aren’t you? Maybe I am to. No, what we’re referring to here is the study that came out of university college in London that took a look at people who work on technology like computers basically for their job, for their office and came to conclusion that they are under tremendous stress and that in fact we’re getting an awful lot of cases of a coronary heart disease which are happening at a much younger age than they thought. People in their 40’s tended to be getting it more than people in their 60’s, perhaps because people in their 60’s were no longer under that kind of pressure anymore.
Mike: They’ve thrown their computers out the window already.
Jack: I think they’ve thrown their careers out the window, you don’t care anymore.
Mike: And are they, are they basing the study on past studies they’ve done on work place stress?
Jack: They did their own study, it was a 12 year long study involving more than 10,000 civil servants in England, and that to me strike as being very enthusiastic and thorough bit of research, you know, I tend not to like all surveys of this nature, but this one has gone so far and of course, it rhymes completely to everything I’ve been feeling about technology myself. The question is now why are people who are working with computers all day long is suffering coronary artery disease. Well what the study did is connected the stress to the disease which is something that we’ve all sort of known before, but there’s never actually been any proof, this is the first time we’ve had it. And secondly of course, we’ve all known that sitting in front of a computer all day long and not moving butt tends to do things like widen your butt, you know, add to your waist line and therefore, you know, start off with coronary heart disease that way. But this case, it was the stress part that they connected which is quite interesting.
Mike: Well, it’s funny coz, you know, we always hear that technology’s making things easier for us.
Jack: Yeah, that’s interesting isn’t it. Those people who are old enough to remember that back in the 60’s and early 70’s there was a truesome and everybody absolutely believe it, that once technology came in, and a future shock kind of world, what would happen is we would get our jobs done in one fifth of the time that it took us before and that what would we do the other four fifths of our time? Well, of course we have an awful lot of leisure time and be a leisure time crisis in this, in the society, and people are saying that, you know, what are we going to do to this extra time, it never occurred to them of course that what would happen is that important is we sit back and say, well, okay, you’ve done your job in one fifth of the time so we’d give you four times more work to do.
Mike: Oh, my goodness. Well Jack…
Jack: You no longer doing what you used to do, you’re now doing, you’re now doing four, five times more than you use to do before and you’re suffering the consequences of it, but that of course never ended the equation.
Mike: Well, I think I have to throw my blackberry away, Jack, thanks so much for joining us.
Jack: Thank you.
Mike: That was Jack Kapica from Globe and Mail, you can check out more of his articles and blogs at globetechnogy.com.