The Corposexuals (or, Marriages are made on whiteboards)

A few hundred years ago, the idea of having a "conversation through pressing some buttons" would have sounded alien-ish. When IM clients started spring up a few years ago, most people couldn't believe that users would actually type in their thoughts into a text box, and communicate with someone they knew. Over the last few years, IM (in its many different incarnations), has emerged as the chief communicating metaphor for a generation of IT savvy corporates. Is it a manifestation of man's need to connect in a severely fragmented universe?

Almost as a parallel development, the notion of "worker's union" vanished from the tech industry, although most other industries in India still have to deal with it. In its pristine form, the worker's union used to look after the benefit and well-being of the labour force as a bonafide entity. However, they brought in their own unspoken baggage, so their disappearance was considered a good thing. However, alongside, the employees work hours started climbing steadily. There came to be an unspoken rule that the 40 hours mentioned in most offer letters was just to keep the beaureucrats happy, and that reality was quite the opposite.

A colleague recently joked -- when a human being spends 80% of his waking hours at work, does his sexual and emotional being seep into his professional one? Does he become unduly "touch-feely" about his work? Is that something the behavioral analysts (read, psychiatrists) should worry about? Do the cliched childhood traumas manifest themself in some way at workplace?

I wonder.

Another colleague has the habit of calling mergers and acquisitions, marriages. "If we get married to X Inc... if Y divorces with us, we will have...". Heh.

Perhaps we are seeing the emergence of the Corposexuals? Asexual humans whose primary relationships are in their workplace. Relationships where the dynamics emerge from workplace roles. A relationship that's fast replacing all others in its intensity and devotion -- marriages, families, everything.