We always want to be herd…

If you observe a little, you will find that many of us tend to follow what the others do, without blinking as much an eyelid. I find this particular trait more prevalent among my colleagues and millions other in the league – the IT professionals. Here I present 3 cases to argue my point about this new age phenomena (whatever..) called the ‘Herd Mentality‘.

Case 1:

The company bus stops at a signal, which is 500 metres away from the scheduled bus stop. Now assume there are 20 of them who want to get down at that particular stop. And suddenly, one guy thinks that he can get off at the signal (which doesn’t last for more than a minute at the max.) and walk the rest of the way.And so he gets off. And as though waiting for the cue, the remaining 19 immediatley jump up from their seats and follow suit, without looking at the timer at the signal which says that you have 10 seconds left before the signal turns green and the traffic moves on.

And then they wait at the signal so that they can cross the road whereas the bus would have travelled a mile or so beyond the bus stop.

Case 2:

At the signal, the same 19 of them are waiting in the middle of the road for the signal to turn red. Again one smart ass sees a teeny-weeny break in the flow of traffic and jumps into the road and crosses it. The remaining 18 take the cue, the signal which is still in green be damned, and jump into the oncoming traffic. And what follows is left to your imagination.

Case 3:

Now let us say, this bus goes to Thiruvanmiyur and not Thiruvanmiyur RTO. The same 20 passengers who get off at that stop are well aware of this. And usually a trip sheet is passed amongst the passengers to note down the stop at which each one alights. So one fine day, inadvertently, one guy amongst the 20 writes Thiruvanmiyur RTO instead of Thiruvanmiyur as his destination. And true to the Herd Mentality, the remaining 19 follow suit and write the same.

The above arguments can be extrapolated to numerous other situations, with the outcome being the same in all cases.

I don’t understand. Do these people always leave their brains at work ? Don’they have some common sense of their own ?! I can accept it if some uneducated guy does this. But when you see all of them wearing those fancy tagged ID cards and do shit, you are left wondering how on earth we can even talk about being innovative and creating products for the World.