Industrial action by Wellington train workers shut down the whole network for a day last week, leading to inevitable warnings of carmageddon on Wellington's roads. In the end, the traffic were fine for much of the day, and many commuters were convinced they even got into work a little faster.
But even though it really wasn't a problem, any snarky comments blaming the media for over-reacting to the issue - and there were inevitably a few - can be ignored for the bullshit they are, because if the media didn't report on it, it definitely would have been a fucking problem.
This is a different issue from the moaning about the media hyping up potential issues with upcoming weather patterns - that's an issue where nothing really could happen, because nobody can 100 percent predict which way the wind is going to blow. But in those cases, it's still far, far better to be safe than sorry - better to have the inconvenience of moving out of a danger area, than being taken unaware by a sudden flood and drowning in your fucking bed.
In the case of the Great Wellington Traffic Jam That Wasn't, the strike was definitely going to happen - both sides made that clear they couldn't reach an agreement the day before it all kicked off - and it would have been a complete fucking mess if everybody hadn't been warned about it. If the capital's commuters hadn't seen the news on TV or heard it on the radio, or found it on the web, or read about in the paper, they would have been totally fucked.
Still, we're talking about Wellington here, so all it really took to save the day was the public service telling everybody to stay home, and that reduced the congestion by a tonne. But those public servants - and the people making the decision to keep people home - still had to be made aware of how bad it could get.
The fact that it didn't go all Mad Max on the white line nightmare of Wellington's mean streets showed that getting the message out through the mass media still worked, even in this attention-fragmented age.
The ultimate example of all this is the good old millennium bug, which is still, 17 years into the 21st century, held up as the greatest beat-up in history.
For a lot of the 90s, there were all sorts of breathless warnings in the news media about how critical computer programs weren't going to recognise the difference between 1900 and 2000, and that was going to fuck us all up - nuclear power stations across the world could melt down, planes could fall from the sky and everybody's porn was going to be deleted.
In the end, nothing much happened - there were a few hiccups, but in general, life in the 21st century carried on, same as it always was.
And ever since then, there has been endless whining about how it was such a waste of time, and the entire news media made a big deal out of nothing, and it's all such crap.
It was precisely because of all those warnings that something was actually done - giant companies saw the coverage and were spooked enough to hire huge IT teams to scroll through their code and fix the issue, so it didn't become a problem. All vital systems needed to keep the modern world ticking along were the first thing searched and repaired, and literally billions of dollars were spent sorting out the problem.
The fact that nothing happened meant the system fucking worked. The warning prevented the problem from happening.
This can't keep happening indefinitely, and it won't matter how much warning you're given if the Wellington bus company can't agree with its staff - things will go full-on road warrior really quickly, because people could only hold off heading into town for so long.
Warnings will only go so far, but they do sometimes work. Moaning that something didn't happen doesn't mean it should have been ignored. We'd all be screwed then, no matter how shiny and chrome things get.
- Margaret Tempest
Posts
