Escapism

I often believe that many art forms require recognition. When I use the term ‘art form’, I do not necessarily always mean it positively.

Escapism; is an art form hardly brought clearly into the limelight. From my work experience, escapism is a phenomenon that is very predominant in the workplace. I assume it is so in any kind of workplace. Maybe its too early for me to comment on escapism in the workplace since I only have 1.5 yrs of work experience. But in these 1.5 years, I have come across different kinds of escapists. And something tells me that my thoughts on this will not change for a long time to come.

I define escapism at the workplace as a situation where a group of people is assigned to complete a task but only one or two in the group actually get involved in the assigned task. The rest of the inactive people only merely appear to look and act busy and hence escape from doing any work at all. I refer to the inactive people as “the escapists”.

I find it quite amazing how the escapists manage to look and act busy without doing anything important at all. Such people also manage to create an impression that they fall into the ‘intellectually smart’ category. The real shock comes in when you actually interact with this set of people. Poor souls who don’t have a voice of their own to protest against these people are the ones who get burdened with work, not just with their own but also bits and pieces (read as chunks) of the work left undone by the escapists.

I love to analyze behavioural patterns of people and if I do it with full dedication, I reach a stage where predicting a person’s reaction to a particular situation is as easy as a pie.

Escapists have generally the following behavioural characteristics:

• They always have a smile and are socially very active. Hence, the first impression one would have in mind would be a very good one.
  
  
• They most likely would be the popular characters of the team. This makes it the perfect cover for escapism as it would be very difficult to pinpoint the flaws of escapism in them.
  
  
• They would be excellent at cracking jokes or giving small treats like chocolates, sweets, etc to the rest of the team from time to time. Giving these people the harsh word will be difficult.
  
  
• Unfortunately, their behaviour will be such that the boss would definitely have a soft corner for them irrespective of whether they do their work or not. At times, this soft corner helps the escapists get a good rating too!!
  
  
• They most likely will be the most helpful people you would come across. I guess the indirect favour they expect in return is not to report to the boss of what they have actually done, work-wise.
  
  
• They would almost always have lunch with the boss.
  

I am sure the above list could be endless but for now, this is all. I wonder how long these people can manage to escape from the realities of hard work. But I am sure a day will come when they will have a lost look on their face; I can assure you that’s the day they will be loaded with so much work that they will be unable to unload it to anyone else.