A bus queue can tell one a lot about the future of work. Traditionally work was arranged around rigid hierarchies of landowners and peasants. Everyone knew their place, which for the overwhelming majority of us was wherever our overlords told us to be. There were stations in life that we arrived at, and it was simply not done to get above our station. There were lines determined by our masters and woe betide those that stepped out of line. By the time buses were invented, we had already had thousands of years of practice at keeping in line. Buses were simply a response to our need to form orderly queues.
The simple principles of time-honoured social etiquette ensured that the bus queue was a marvel of our capacity to form self-organising systems. The unspoken rule was that tenure determined precedence. I got here first so I am at the front of the queue. Organisations reflected this fundamental law by operating a last in, first out policy when downsizing. Generally it also worked in the other direction, with first in, first promoted as well.
Try telling that to your contemporary bus traveller and you'd most likely receive a momentary flicker of confusion before they reimmersed themselves in their Insta-tweets and Facebook chat. The social rules of bus stops have broken down. Technology draws us into a world of virtual social cohesion. We are so busy learning the new rules of netiquette that the old rules of IRL interactions have been lost. Bus stops now resemble chaos! There is no sense of community at the bus stop, because the commuters are immersed in their own online social worlds. Thus freed from any social ties – often even eye contact, and with the advantage of knowing almost to the second when their own bus will arrive, there is a continual jockeying for position with little sense of relationship or consideration of others.
There is a bus stop on George Street that should be avoided by anyone with a sentimental attachment to the joys of an orderly queue. It is not just Sydney, commuters at Parliament tram stop in Melbourne make the evacuation of Saigon look like a military tattoo. Naively one might think that standing closest to a sign marked bus stop afforded the refined traveller certain privileges. But this would be a fatal miscalculation. For lurking behind the bus shelter are chancers ready to pounce when their travel apps alert them to an incoming bus. Blindsided and distracted by using old school methods of looking down the road for the approaching vehicle, traditional travellers suddenly find themselves at the end of the technology-driven and opportunistically reorganised swarm.
As work becomes more technologically immersed and enhanced, virtual relationships can appear to matter more than real ones. Groups and teams form, reform and dissipate as circumstances dictate. The concepts of being at the front of the queue, of hierarchy and predictability, are rapidly diminishing. However, in the bus queue all is not lost. Unlike the hapless modern worker, the antediluvian commuter still has one devastating weapon: the well furled umbrella with a sharp point is just the thing to fight off the IT bus throng.
Jim Bright is professor of career education and development at ACU and owns Bright and Associates, a Career Management Consultancy. Email marked clearly "for publication" to opinion@jimbright.com. Follow him on Twitter @DrJimBright
