Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

What do Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) have to do with engineering, project management, systems development? I am afraid that the answer is “too much.”

Intellectuals are taking PEDs. College professors are the latest to join the crowd. They are using ritalin to extend and focus their concentration. I suppose the professors are merely learning from their students who were given ritalin in the first grade. Caffeine isn’t good enough anymore.

Well, that’s just college, and colleges have long been the place where people experimented with things that no one else in society would touch.

Wrong again. How much Red Bull have you seen in the cubicle farms? Why do they sell Red Bull and other “energy” drinks in office building cafes? I have yet to see someone run a marathon in an office building. At least Red Bull is not amphetamines or something really strong. Amphetamines have their history in the office and the lab.

One of my sons worked in restaurants in the fast-paced Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. while earning a degree in Biology. The connection? Trace amounts of cocaine are common in the bathrooms of expensive restaurants in the area. The movers and shakers of business and finance need a little energy boost now and then as well.

If you thought this blog post was going to be about Alex Rodriguez, I am sorry to disappoint you. A-Rod is paid a lot of money to go to a park every day and play a game. He and hundreds of his colleagues have set a bad example for kids, but again, he just plays a game. He doesn’t build and maintain the technical threads of today’s society.

I hope that the people in the cubicle farms, meeting rooms, and class rooms will stop using PEDs. That isn’t easy in our world full of chemical synthesis, but it is worth a try.