Clocks I Hate

I have an extensive collection of antique clocks that my daddy collected during the final fifteen years of his life. I love those clocks, They are an echo of a different, slower culture. And they remind me of my daddy, who will have been gone 25 years in December.

But this is a clock I hate. It hangs on the column outside my director's cubicle, and I pass it everytime I walk from my cube to the kitchen or the restroom. It displays the time in India, where we have a team of workers rewriting thirteen years of code, cleaning it up, making it run cleaner and faster.

The handwritten note under the clock states that the time in the city where these programmers are working is 10½ hours ahead of the time in Akron.

Whenever the director discusses this activity, he refers to it as "offshore". The offshore work, the offshore office. It makes it sound like people are sitting on the beach in Jamaica, laptops at hand. But it's not an island. It's India. It's sending income to India, rather than keeping it in Ohio.

It angers me. Does he not know how many jobs have been lost and not refound in Ohio and adjoining states in the past year? Doesn't he know how many talented, hard-working, dedicated programmers there are—just in Akron alone—who would be so relieved to be contracted to this six month job?

Would it really cost that much more to hire local workers as contractors rather than send the work to India?

I find this action to be unAmerican, unOhioan, thoughtless, and cruel.

There's absolutely nothing I can do about it. The action has been taken and is not changing. My mental cries of "think about Ohio, hire Ohioans, hire Americans" would make no more difference than my mental cries of "think about the environment, let us work remotely one or two days a week".

I believe that America will pull out of this economic crisis—in time, in much time—but not with repeated thoughtless actions like this on the part of American executives.

As we used to see written on the signs hanging on the walls everywhere in IBM sites: "THINK".