Tizio Dei Tizi is a full professor at a prestigious public university in Northern Italy. He is 68 years old and has recently been appointed dean of the faculty. In about 7 years he will retire, but he has already found ways to secure some academic positions even after the age of 75.
He doesn't use the computer, not even for e-mail or to write short letters; and he wouldn't even know how to insert paper into the printer anyway. He never learned, too caught up in much more important and intellectually higher issues than learning certain things from ordinary mortals.
After all, what's the problem? Nobody; so there is the department secretary who lends herself to dictation anything, or even to transcribe entire articles, documents and resolutions written in pen by the professor.
She is the one who has the professor's e-mail passwords and manages every communication on her behalf. This means that every time a message arrives, the secretary prints it and takes it personally to the professor's desk who can read it calmly and then throw it in the big and always full waste paper bin. And if the message requires a certain urgency, then she takes care to call the professor to read the message aloud to him, and obviously she calls him on his cell phone because he can't afford to be in the institute all the time; after all, he also has a professional studio to run… Sometimes he himself gets confused between the studio and the institute, because in the studio there are sometimes doctoral students and post-docs who work on professional consultancy files, while in the institute there are the trainees of the studio who work on the proceedings of the last meeting and layout the drafts of the posters.
But returning to the question of computer use… one wonders: is it still acceptable? The use of the computer at a minimal level (e-mail, navigation and word processing) has been in common use for more than 15 years. So although it is understandable that the elderly have a certain difficulty in approaching new technologies, their conservative and snobbish entrenchment towards technology is not acceptable, which only hides laziness, mental rigidity and reluctance to get their hands dirty.
What makes me wonder, especially in a period of austerity like this, is how much money is wasted to support the activity of this authoritative (???) exponent of the Italian scientific world whom I have here called Tizio Dei Tizi? Hours of work of a secretary who essentially becomes a personal secretary from a department secretary; paper and ink for printing communications that do not need to be printed; calls on private numbers that could be avoided; bad mix between private collaborators and "intellectual workforce" paid instead with research funds (and which therefore should deal with research projects and not with consultancy activities for a professional studio). It's really time to end it.
If we remove the question of the use of doctoral students and research fellows for private purposes (which is actually the most disgusting thing) and remain on the aspect of the only reluctance towards the use of technologies, the same reasoning could be made for the world justice and public administration in general. How many judges and how many managers are in the same conditions? How many resources wasted because of their "ah I don't use the computer"?
Now, the simplistic solution would be the classic "all at home and off to the young" (which doesn't even shock me much). But there could be some intermediate and less socially destabilizing ones.
For example, let's try to impose by law the overcoming of a basic computer suitability TO EVERYONE, even to those on the upper floors (we need to begin to understand and make people understand that in this historical moment nobody is untouchable). Anyone who does not pass it or does not intend to support it, automatically suffers a reasonable reduction in salary. With the sums saved in this way it will be possible to pay for the resources (human and technical) to fill the technological gap of these people.
We can no longer afford to justify or underestimate.
(inspired by a true story. indeed, by too many true stories)
Adapted from: http://aliprandi.blogspot.com/2012/02/la-ritrosia-verso-la-tecnologia-un-vero.html
