Who do you work for?

Who do you work for?

I had occasion to recently take on a contract position with a local company.  I wasn't particularly looking for anything, but the opportunity came to me and it looked like a nice way to pick up some extra spending money and we all can always use that.  Right?

So I reported to work and after three days of orientation and training, I received an assignment that I discovered was 180 degrees opposite of everything I believe in and I almost at once recognized that there was no way I could do this sort of work.  The work has to do with a website dealing with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).  It really behooves us to discover the source of these diseases and disorders as they sure didn't exist until that last decade or two.  This is how it works:

Behavior is observed that is deemed inappropriate in some way.  A person who manifests certain symptoms (such as fear, anxiety, stress, depression), gets labelled with the disorder that matches the symptoms.  The psychiatric profession, in particular a board of psychiatrists, literally votes these diseases into existance at a meeting and there you have a new disease or disorder.  A newly voted in disorder now has a name and drug companies develop medications to "treat" the disorder.  What they never mention is there is no way to diagnose such disorders; a psychiatrist simply says this is your disease, i.e., he slaps a label on you.  There is no blood test.  The claim is the blood chemistry is out of whack.  The reality, however, is there is no way to prove that.  Hence, no test.  This is perhaps the largest scam ever perpetrated on a population.  People are led to believe they have a disease and they will always have it and they need to be medicated indefinitely.

So what did I do?  I left the company on day four.  I never wrote a single line of production computer code for them and I am very, very relieved that I am not contributing to such an endeavor.  The reality is this company isn't a criminal company.  The people that run it are just myopic.  They look at how they can earn a very good living, in this case by developing websites for various branches of the US military.  I don't think it ever occurred to them that their work causes an impact on the society and that people's lives can be harmed.  This particular contract was for a part of a website and the amount of funding was just shy of a million dollars.  From what I can figure, I was the only developer that was going to be assigned.  The company has it's own home-grown CMS system that enables them to develop content websites quickly but I found it also had the audacity to pat itself on the back in its own promotional materials that it develops software at a fixed price and they are somehow fiscally responsible.  A million dollar website for the Army is way too much money, regardless of the content.  I believe the Terminator 3 website was around a million dollars as well, at least that's what I heard.  It was very Flash rich, high multimedia content and one can see how such a site would require several developers and artists.  In this case, it's very much like any government contract I've ever seen: cash cows for the company that provides the service and the rest of us taxpayers foot the bill.  It just bothers me more when it's in support a large scam with many vested interests.

I learned something.  One should never just do a job for money.  We should really look deeply at what it is we are asked to do and then make an intelligent decision on whether that work is worthwhile and should be supported or whether it really should be attacked.  If everyone took that viewpoint, missles would never get made, uranium would never be enriched, many newspaper stories would never be published and the world would be a much better place for all of us to live.  But to do that, one needs to look beyond their own life and see what effects they are creating on the planet.  That takes some responsibility.  Some day we will get there - that is my hope.