The world will end in a flood of pointlessness

How will life on this planet end – a deadly pathogen, intense heat? Oh no, something much more pointless, says Russ Swan I have seen the end of the world, and it isn’t pretty. It comes not through the heat death of the planet, whose inhabitants ignored consistent warnings about the way they were treating the place. It comes not through a deadly strain of some virulent pathogen – not Ebola, or Sars, or Aids. It doesn’t even come with a spectacular thermonuclear fireworks display in a grand finale over who gets to live on a particular piece of dirt. It comes, I'm afraid, in a flurry of pointlessness. When the blizzard of tiny tasks that must be completed before, during, and after any actual work gets done exceeds the time available for the whole enterprise, and the signal-noise ratio of life finally reaches zero, the whole of human existence simply shudders to a halt. I was recently required to undertake a special form of 'training' in order to satisfy some corporate mandate that I was certified as capable of being let loose in charge of a desk and chair. This involved sitting at the desk, on the chair, and being educated about the correct posture I should adopt and the ways I could improve my working environment. Nothing particularly wrong with that, except for the sting in the tail. Having completed an identical training course 12 months earlier, and being capable of retaining simple information for at least that long, I resolved to see how quickly I could despatch this moderately futile task. Click, click, next frame, click, click. This is hardly onerous or time consuming. Just the final test section to complete before I can go for lunch. It occurred to me that these tests, so beloved of modern management, are rather like the warning labels that proliferate on anything that comes packaged. The sachet of airline nuts with the carefully-worded caution that the contents 'may include nuts'. The simplest item of electrical equipment which comes with a leaflet of several pages, most of which are about… well, nobody knows. Nobody has ever read them, ever. It might be something to do with safety, but for all I know it might be a recipe for flapjack. Straight into the recycling bin without a second glance. We're no better off in the laboratory – in fact, we're probably worse. After all, a good part of the lab industry earns its keep by providing the information necessary for those labels. I've never yet seen a lab win a contract to determine the nut content of airline snacks, but I'll bet it's happened. Meanwhile the rest of us are dealing with the ever-more complicated procedures laid down by well-meaning bureaucrats who genuinely believe we need to be saved from ourselves. Even a simple operation will have been risk-assessed – or if it hasn’t, the assessment becomes the first part of the project. I'm sure we are all religious about sourcing the Material Safety Data Sheets for all the components of a reaction, and that these are carefully scrutinised and inwardly digested each time. That's what the book says, so that's what we do. Ahem. If you have an idle moment in between filling in forms and establishing that every item of equipment on your bench is protected by a sticker saying it has been PAT tested, check out some MSDS for potentially hazardous substances. Hit your favourite search engine and try to keep a straight face while you seek vital information on the correct handling and emergency procedures for distilled water (H2O), or sodium chloride (NaCl). You may be amazed to learn that water is a colourless and almost odourless liquid which is stable under normal conditions but that exposure to high temperatures, sunlight, or frost should be avoided. It is, remarkably, soluble in water, but it is reassuring to note that its toxicity is low. Table salt, on the other hand, does have a LD50 for mammals, and is mutagenic for somatic cells as well as for bacteria and yeasts. A measure of its relatively high potential for harm is that a typical NaCl MSDS runs to around six pages, compared to only two for water. The question is this: does that make you more or less likely to actually read the thing? The answer may be connected to my own recent 'elf & safety' experience. Having whizzed through the pointless 'training' module in record time, I approached the test with confidence. It was easy, and I got them all right. And then the damned thing failed me, claiming I had scored below the required pass mark. The computer and I both knew that this was a lie, and that the only thing I had failed to do was spend the designated 20-30 minutes on the task. Nevertheless, I am now required to do it all again, more slowly. This might have a measurable effect on my productivity. And this is how the world will end: not with a bang or a whimper but under the subtle smothering effect of a blizzard of pointless bureaucracy.