Now I Know More (30 page)

The city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, is the sixteenth most populous in the state, with just under 75,000 people according to the 2010 census. Like many Michigan municipalities, Kalamazoo's population has been shrinking over the past few decades; in 1990, it was home to more than 80,000 people. (Detroit, the largest city in the state, was at 1.027 million people in the 1990 census; per the 2010 census, Detroit's population is now just under 720,000.) In 2000, 24.3 percent of Kalamazoo's population was below the poverty line, including 26 percent—more than one out of four—of those age eighteen and under.

To help fix this, at the November 10, 2005, Kalamazoo Board of Education meeting, board members announced something dramatic: free or drastically reduced college tuition to many of the city's schoolchildren.

The program is called the “Kalamazoo Promise.” Any student who attends the Kalamazoo public school system for at least four years and graduates receives a scholarship—including mandatory fees (but not room and board)—to any of Michigan's state colleges (and a dozen or so private colleges as well). The scholarship starts at 65 percent of one's costs and goes up 5 percent for each additional grade the child spends in the Kalamazoo school system. A child who goes to Kalamazoo's school system from kindergarten through twelfth grade, therefore, is eligible for 100 percent of his or her college tuition via the Promise. The Promise is backed by a group of anonymous donors, believed primarily to be comprised of members of the Stryker (of the Stryker Corporation) and Upjohn (of the Upjohn Company) families. There are rumors that former New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter (who grew up in Kalamazoo) is also involved.

The goals of the Promise are not just to encourage children to attend college (and to make that possible), but also to encourage families and businesses to relocate to Kalamazoo and keep a failing city moving forward. (In fact, the
New York Times
asserted that the Promise is “primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo's economy.”) As of October 2010, almost five years after the Promise was announced, enrollment in Kalamazoo Public Schools was up 3 percent from the prior year, bucking the statewide trend. There are anecdotal reports of the school system improving and the real estate market rebounding; in the latter case, homeowners are regularly advertising their places as “Promise eligible,” “Promise qualified,” or the like, signifying that their home is in the geographic area covered by the Promise.

As of 2010, the Promise had paid out $18 million in tuition to roughly 2,000 high school graduates and shows no signs of stopping. The effect on students has been mixed, but shows—pardon the pun—promise. Kalamazoo is seeing measurable and positive results at the high school level, with jumps in college readiness rates that are markedly larger than statewide averages—and a reversal from the losses other urban centers in Michigan are experiencing. However, roughly half of those students who received scholarships (through 2011) dropped out of college before completing their program. The Promise's leadership is looking toward ways of better preparing eligible students for college.

It's fifth period biology class, maybe an hour after lunch. The professor is droning on about the Krebs cycle or something—you have no idea. While you're sitting upright with your eyes slightly open, you slowly drift off into a nap until your head falls forward, waking you suddenly. You look around, dazed, unsure of where you are or what just happened, but before anyone really notices (or lets on), you recover, barely, and are passably engaged with the class at hand.

This happens all too often—students, exhausted from class, homework, and the tensions of being teenagers, find themselves barely awake at their desks. So in 2006, a handful of high schools experimented with a straightforward approach—teachers encouraged students to take a brief after-lunch nap.

Not only that, but the high schools were actually behind the times. That's because they were in Japan, where sleeping at work is not only accepted but, at times, a sign of one's dedication and vigor. There's even a word for it—
inemuri,
which literally translates as “sleeping while present.”

The theory is pretty straightforward: People who work hard get tired. On-the-job fatigue, therefore, is considered a sign of a productive employee. When you're tired, sometimes your body overrules your mind, and you fall asleep, even at work. While that's probably not acceptable in the United States and in other Western cultures, Japan is different—so different, that people will often take fake naps, just so their coworkers think that they've worked themselves to exhaustion. (One expert the BBC spoke with likened the practice to a UK worker sending an after-hours e-mail for the primary purpose of demonstrating that he or she is working well into the evening.)

Traditionally, only executives are permitted to practice
inemuri
, and when they do, they need to appear to be ready to wake at a moment's notice—sleeping upright, as if paying attention but for the fact that their eyes are closed. However, in recent years, these cultural restrictions have waned. Many retailers now sell desk pillows, explicitly marketed toward those who wish to take a snooze during the workday, and nap salons have emerged across the nation, charging the equivalent of a few dollars for a thirty-minute rental of a daybed within the confines of the spa. Some places also sell coffee designed to kick in with a jolt of caffeine twenty or so minutes after drinking—an office worker imbibes, naps, and is woken up by the drink in time to get back to work.

Most telling is how institutions are adopting the trend. It's not just schools such as the ones noted previously, nor are these small businesses. In 2006, the
Washington Post
reported that Toyota's offices (not dealerships) in Tokyo turned off the lights around lunchtime, and workers took fifteen- to thirty-minute power naps—with the approval of top brass. A company spokesperson told the
Post
, “When we see people napping during lunchtime, we think, ‘They are getting ready to put 100 percent in during the afternoon.' Nobody frowns upon it. And no one hesitates to take one during lunchtime either.”

In 2006, a report published by Inc.com concluded—ridiculously—that productivity losses cost U.S. employers more than half a trillion dollars—$544,000,000,000, to be a little more precise. The report found that in an eight-hour day, employees spent an average of 1.86 hours “on something other than their jobs, not including lunch and scheduled breaks.” Of those surveyed, 52 percent “admitted that their biggest distraction during work hours [was] surfing the Internet for personal use.”

The data is garbage, of course; the idea that employees should be always-on and that anything less is going to result in productivity losses isn't based in science or reality. But every once in a while, there's an example of an employee who goes to the extreme, not doing much work and perhaps none at all. Take, for example, a former software developer identified only as Bob. According to a report by NPR, Bob's schedule—determined by a retrospective look at his Internet browsing history—consisted of the following:

• 9:00
  A.M
  .: Arrive and surf reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
  
• 11:30
  A.M.
  : Take lunch.
  
• 1:00
  P.M.
  : eBay time.
  
• 2:00-ish
  P.M.:
  Facebook updates – LinkedIn.
  
• 4:30
  P.M
  .: End-of-day update e-mail to management.
  
• 5:00
  P.M
  .: Go home.
  

Curiously missing? Work. Apparently, Bob didn't do any.

That didn't match up with Bob's performance reviews, though. As TheNextWeb reported, Bob “apparently received excellent performance reviews, even being hailed the best developer in the building: his code was clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion.” He was, somehow, producing great work without actually working. Bob's employer didn't seem to notice that he wasn't doing any work, because from the corporation's vantage point, he was productive.

However, Bob's employer did notice something else—weird traffic coming into the company's servers through Bob's remote login credentials. The traffic seemed to be coming from China. To make matters even stranger, the Chinese connection via Bob's remote connection was active while Bob was sitting in the office. Baffled—why would Bob be logging in remotely from China while at his desk?—the company contacted Verizon, its telecom services provider.

The company assumed that some odd sort of malware had infected their systems, but that wasn't the case. Verizon determined that the problem was Bob himself—and it explained how a guy with great performance reviews matched up with that schedule of cat videos and shopping on eBay.

Bob had outsourced his work to China.

Verizon later determined that Bob had probably been doing this for a few years, using about a quarter of his pay to buy the services of lower-cost overseas providers. Bob was fired, of course—beyond the obvious fraud he committed, the employer was working on developing software for the U.S. government. Outsourcing that to China wasn't acceptable. But Bob probably laughed all the way to the bank. According to the Verizon security team, this wasn't his only job—and it probably wasn't the only job he had outsourced. Bob was making “several hundred thousand dollars a year,” according to Verizon, and “only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually.”