Many companies in Japan have a special room for their employees which is called, in free translation from the Japanese, a “letting off steam and bile” room. The room looks something like a gymnasium but, instead of exercise machines, it is kept constantly replenished with flimsy plywood furniture and ordinary pottery.
The idea is that an employee feeling frustrated or angry for one reason or another should enter this room and relieve his pent-up feelings by running amok amidst the crockery and wood-work. Having vented his wrath in a glorious outburst of broken china and smashed furniture, the frustrated worker emerges a calmer human being and a better employee to the benefit of both himself and his company.
We can learn from the Japanese. Corporations, Government Agencies and companies should immediately set about establishing “letting off steam and bile” rooms for the use of employees and the general public. I urge the Consumers Association to press hard for this facility.
These days we need nothing so much as to be able to vent our wrath and frustration in the least harmful way possible. We need to be able to walk in somewhere and have a glorious time hurling things on the floor with the maximum of noise and smashing chairs against cardboard walls to bring them crashing down, as a reasonable substitute to going in to an office somewhere and wringing the neck of the nearest bureaucrat or useless pen-pusher.
There are immense possibilities for developing this idea in CARICOM and we in Guyana can be pioneers. We should first of all find a suitable local name and I suggest we might call them “RR” rooms, the RR standing for Raising Rass.
They could be introduced gradually but eventually every Region would have a network of RR rooms and certainly no company could afford to be without one. Think what hundreds, thousands, of persons frustrated to the point of madness by the time-wasting, willful, unfair and stubbornly foolish behaviour of those whose duty it is to serve and give value for money – think what balm for the soul it will be to indulge in legal and harmless mayhem.
The Mayor and City Council could with advantage set up a number of these booths as safety valves in the metropolis to draw off the citizens’ righteous ire and frustration when, for the umpteenth time, the administration of this fundamentally lovely city fails them.
The Water Authority, GPL, and GT&T should certainly have RR rooms all over the place to cater for the hundreds of citizens who are constantly plagued by maddening grievances.
And in the end no Government Department or Agency could possibly afford to be without an RR room to permit employees and the general public to let off steam in a harmlessly destructive way. Special rooms for pensioners should be constructed near Local Government offices. They would be furnished with particularly flimsy disposable items and especially fragile throw-away crockery making it easy for our senior citizens to wreak havoc whenever plagued by yet another inexplicable error or delay in obtaining their due pittance.
I commend the idea of the RR room to the authorities. A highly profitable business could be established to provide and replenish stock. The rooms wouldn’t cost much to set up and they wouldn’t need staff to run, maintain, or guard them.
Indeed they could become an income-earner since people would soon be quite willing to pay a small fee to raise rass peacefully. And as the idea is developed further we can graduate to establishing RRR rooms, Triple R rooms, “Raising Rass and Retribution” rooms.
Here, in addition to the normal crockery and furniture, particularly culpable servants of the public would make their appearance to give the ordinary citizen the opportunity to pelt them with rotten eggs and oranges and other bits of rubbish collected from time to time in our Garden City.
