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Phanteur, whole no. 2, Spring 1946
Page 2
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2 P H A N T E U R 2 HITTING THE PIPE. In which Francis Tea Laney indulges in some wholly fantastic musings as to the nature of a world in which there were no unpleasant jobs. DB and I have been carrying on, via correspondence, a rather hypothetical yet thoroughly enjoyable gabfest about almost anything under the sun. Somewhere in the course of it I made some rash and drastic remarks in answer to a statement of Don's: "...work will still have to be done; some of it work that few people would willingly choose..." I even went so far as to offer to do the lad an article on the subject. I rashly figured that this should about hold him, but oblivious to the threat hanging over the erstwhile high standards of PHANTEUR (formerly PHANNY!) Don actually seemed anxious for me to do the article. So here we go, a sort of tea for two in stef-time. My postulation is that it is theoretically possible to constitute a civilization in which there are no unpleasant jobs. A few points should first be made. For one thing, many jobs which would be unpleasant as the devil for you and me, might prove very fascinating to someone else. Many of the things done by doctors and surgeons, to name just one example, would be far less pleasant to me than emptying garbage cans professionally. (And I'm a lad who will walk across the street to keep from getting downwind from a garbage can!) I must also postulate a civilization in which there is no profit system, and abundance of manpower and materials, plenty of technical skills and experimental backgrounds, and a complete cessation of international rivalry. As will be seen in a moment, many of these job eliminations involve the use of tremendous quantities of both manpower and materials, and it seems reasonly obvious that a civilization comprised of rival nations operating under a profit system could not for a moment support this program. Certainly any nation which did not adopt the entire system would very likely be put in a position where it could dominate the world in short order. These considerations immediately take the problem up into that tenuous never-never land where stefnists spend much of their time. In actuality, the whole underlying philosophy of the world would have to be revamped before such a system could be adopted, for the elimination of unpleasant jobs indicates strongly a world designed for the greatest happiness and pleasure for the greatest number of people. I question if anyone will seriously maintain that civilization is so constituted today, or that there is even any great desire to so constitute it, apart from daydreams like this one. I'm trying here to list unpleasant jobs--as many of them as I can think of--and see what could actually be done to eradicate them. GARBAGE COLLECTING AND DISPOSAL. Even today there are available electric grinding attachments for the sink drain pipe, into which all garbage, including bones, can be placed, ground up, and flushed down the sewer. With one of these in every home and public eating place, and a population conditioned always to use them, there would be no garbage problem. RUBBISH DISPOSAL. Dismissing the possibilities of atomic converters, there is much rubbish which could be ground with the garbage and flushed down the sink. In a concentrated city, it would not be impossible to build a system of pneumatic tubes which would such rubbish to central sorting and disposal stations where it would be sorted electronically. Burnables could be carried by conveyor belts into automatic electric furnaces, the ashes from which could be blown out periodically by compressed air into a chamber where they would be mixed with water and washed down the sewer. Metals could be accumulated and squashed into bales which could readily be hauled away by trucks for resmelting. Glass, china, pottery, bricks, stones, and the like could no doubt be ground up, carried by belts into dump shutes, loaded automatically onto dump trucks, and hauled somewhere for dupmping. wottalottawoidswottalottagarbagewottalottarubbishwottawaytofillupspacewottalife
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2 P H A N T E U R 2 HITTING THE PIPE. In which Francis Tea Laney indulges in some wholly fantastic musings as to the nature of a world in which there were no unpleasant jobs. DB and I have been carrying on, via correspondence, a rather hypothetical yet thoroughly enjoyable gabfest about almost anything under the sun. Somewhere in the course of it I made some rash and drastic remarks in answer to a statement of Don's: "...work will still have to be done; some of it work that few people would willingly choose..." I even went so far as to offer to do the lad an article on the subject. I rashly figured that this should about hold him, but oblivious to the threat hanging over the erstwhile high standards of PHANTEUR (formerly PHANNY!) Don actually seemed anxious for me to do the article. So here we go, a sort of tea for two in stef-time. My postulation is that it is theoretically possible to constitute a civilization in which there are no unpleasant jobs. A few points should first be made. For one thing, many jobs which would be unpleasant as the devil for you and me, might prove very fascinating to someone else. Many of the things done by doctors and surgeons, to name just one example, would be far less pleasant to me than emptying garbage cans professionally. (And I'm a lad who will walk across the street to keep from getting downwind from a garbage can!) I must also postulate a civilization in which there is no profit system, and abundance of manpower and materials, plenty of technical skills and experimental backgrounds, and a complete cessation of international rivalry. As will be seen in a moment, many of these job eliminations involve the use of tremendous quantities of both manpower and materials, and it seems reasonly obvious that a civilization comprised of rival nations operating under a profit system could not for a moment support this program. Certainly any nation which did not adopt the entire system would very likely be put in a position where it could dominate the world in short order. These considerations immediately take the problem up into that tenuous never-never land where stefnists spend much of their time. In actuality, the whole underlying philosophy of the world would have to be revamped before such a system could be adopted, for the elimination of unpleasant jobs indicates strongly a world designed for the greatest happiness and pleasure for the greatest number of people. I question if anyone will seriously maintain that civilization is so constituted today, or that there is even any great desire to so constitute it, apart from daydreams like this one. I'm trying here to list unpleasant jobs--as many of them as I can think of--and see what could actually be done to eradicate them. GARBAGE COLLECTING AND DISPOSAL. Even today there are available electric grinding attachments for the sink drain pipe, into which all garbage, including bones, can be placed, ground up, and flushed down the sewer. With one of these in every home and public eating place, and a population conditioned always to use them, there would be no garbage problem. RUBBISH DISPOSAL. Dismissing the possibilities of atomic converters, there is much rubbish which could be ground with the garbage and flushed down the sink. In a concentrated city, it would not be impossible to build a system of pneumatic tubes which would such rubbish to central sorting and disposal stations where it would be sorted electronically. Burnables could be carried by conveyor belts into automatic electric furnaces, the ashes from which could be blown out periodically by compressed air into a chamber where they would be mixed with water and washed down the sewer. Metals could be accumulated and squashed into bales which could readily be hauled away by trucks for resmelting. Glass, china, pottery, bricks, stones, and the like could no doubt be ground up, carried by belts into dump shutes, loaded automatically onto dump trucks, and hauled somewhere for dupmping. wottalottawoidswottalottagarbagewottalottarubbishwottawaytofillupspacewottalife
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