Follow-up On the Computer Lab Incident.

The act of describing my response to the computer lab situation in my school shamed me into at least trying to do something about it. So I downloaded schematics of a couple American engineering universities' computer labs (Eastern Illinois and Purdue) to show that people who probably know what they're doing sometimes put computers together and not facing the wall. I gave them to the vice-principal, who ignored them because a journalist was present, and my stumbling Kazakh prompted a torrent of admiration that precluded all other subjects of discussion. A couple days later I asked if they were useful. "Oh yes," she said. "We're showing them to people." "So do you still have to change the computer lab layout?" "Of course!"

I tried, and in a sense that is what is important. But outside of existentialism, one can see from this how resistance to a bureaucracy's stupidity - and consequently it effectiveness - is dependent on the faith that resistance can achieve something. Fighting is expensive, and its cost must be weighted against both the individuals desire for the common good and the likelihood of success. In a system where most people have lost hope, people pursue anti-productive means of resolving wrongs, which makes the bureaucracy more impossible, which discourages more people.

Politeness, another social phenomenon that even locals agree is lacking, is the same way. I have come to realize that in America, I readily apologize for my mistakes because I have faith that the person I accidentally wronged isn't going to take advantage of me. The other day I was taking a printer away from a computer where someone was working, and I accidentally pulled out the computer's power cable, causing the secretary to lose her work. To my (retrospective) embarassment, I didn't even apologize until I established that she hadn't lost anything and didn't seem angry -- I was afraid of being chastised for what I thought was an honest mistake.

The flip side of this is that when someone in Kazakhstan does apologize to you, it's like a heavenly ray of light. I accidentally took the extra keys to a classroom home with me one day. Since the teacher I had borrowed them from didn't really use the room that they were for, I didn't worry about it, though I remember idly thinking that were she to need them, I would be responsible for going back to school, since it was my mistake. It happened, though, that another teacher had left her coat in the room the keys were for, planning on borrowing the keys from the teacher I had borrowed them from. She found out that I had them, and called me in my apartment to ask me to come back to school, because if I didn't, she couldn't really get home.

Of course I went -- but I grumbled uncharitably to myself the whole way about how the teacher shouldn't have left her coat in a room that she didn't have the keys for in the first place. In fact, though it was actually my fault, I felt prepared to give her a lecture when I got to school. But when I saw her, the first thing she said was, "Oh, I'm so sorry you had to come back for me!" and I suddenly felt enormous relief. "No, no," I was able to say completely sincerely and without effort, "it really was my fault. You don't need to apologize." She got her coat and I went home much happier than I left, thinking about the good that can come from taking chances against cynicism.