Bureaucratic Baryogenesis: You ‘Can’ Do It

There is an interesting colloquialism used in the GCC to describe a person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning — قوطي — (Qouti) which translates literally into ‘can’ (of the tin or more recently aluminium variety). The phrase is originally Turkish, coming from the word ‘kutu.’
A few years ago, a friend of mine did an interesting “Employee Productivity Project” for a local GCC government agency where they classified workers into five distinct buckets:
- Super Productive — these workers went above and beyond the call of duty and typically excelled by overachieving when it came to their set targets
- Productive — these workers regularly met their targets/requirements
- Limited Productivity — these workers failed to meet their targets, but they were still (net) productive
- Zero Productivity — these workers simply did not produce any work of note. They were the personification of the dog that didn’t bark in the night (sorry Silver Blaze). Basically — قواطي
- Negative Productivity — (this shocked me as well). How could someone be negatively productive you ask? Simple, just imagine that annoying co-worker that keeps coming to your desk menacingly with the sole objective of distracting you from your own work (we all have one…if you don’t then maybe you are the one doing the distracting). These guys really put the ‘can’ in cannot and convert good productive employees into limited or zero productivity. I like to call these people — سوبر قواطي or Productivity Zombies — they don’t use brains, they eat them!
To borrow a term from theoretical physics, they are productivity’s antimatter. Interestingly enough, a particle and its antiparticle (e.g., proton and antiproton) have the same mass as one another (both super producers and super qoutis take up the same amount of space in a company), but we all remember that a proton has positive charge while an antiproton has negative charge. What we might not all remember is that a collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner is known to lead to their mutual annihilation, giving rise to various proportions of intense photons (gamma rays), neutrinos, and sometimes less-massive particle-antiparticle pairs.
This annihilation is not negative necessarily and usually results in a release of energy that becomes available for heat or work. The amount of the released energy is usually proportional to the total mass of the collided matter and antimatter, in accordance with that famous mass-energy equivalence equation, E=mc2. So there is hope after all, in dealing with these Productivity Zombies, but only when diligent vanheslinger managers force their super qouti employees to collide with those super producers.
Otherwise, just as antimatter particles bind with one another to form antimatter (or just like a Zombie’s zoonotic bite), super qouti employees have the ability to mold into one super qouti organism — call it a committee or holding company. The good news is that ordinary (positive) particles bind to each other as well to form normal matter. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron) and an antiproton (the antiparticle of the proton) can form an antihydrogen atom.
In modern physics, there is considerable speculation as to why the observable universe is composed almost entirely of ordinary matter, as opposed to an equal mixture of matter and antimatter. This asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe (technically known as baryogenesis) is still one of the great unsolved problems in physics, along with the problematic persistence of the welfare state mentality, political strife, and rabid unproductivity of the local workforce amongst the GCC nations.
