The Minimum and Minimal
Growing up in Germany, I remember there was a store a few blocks away. It was your basic convenience store blown up to look like a supermarket, something it really wasn’t. Good old ‘Minimum’, where I also used to pump gas at their service station outside - I still am not sure why they chose that name. I would like to think that it referred to their prices, not the fact that you could get by on their rather minimal item selection. Needless to say, Minimum today is no more – it was bought out and now has another name (I’m not sure which), replaced by something better and more profitable, I am guessing.
When you think of the word minimum, or minimal, a few things come to mind. There’s the minimum wage, rightfully long a source of outrage among the working poor. There’s minimalist art, music, design, you name it. According to www.dictionary.reference.com, minimalism is defined as the ‘use of the fewest and barest essentials or elements, as in the arts, literature, or design’. I accept it, but I think we need to rethink that expression for Jordan. Minimalism here should be dubbed as ‘the barest essentials’ for life in general.
Specifically, minimalism here pertains to people applying the necessary to sustain certain projects. As numerous countries with a history of natural disasters can confirm, applying the minimum will eventually result in maximum damage, as a few cases here in Jordan will undoubtedly illustrate.
A few blocks from our Embassy, a private company was given a permit to build a shopping mall. Looking at the construction now in progress, it’s quite clear this will be a huge structure. The problem was that they dug the hole for the foundation a FEW FEET from the street. I’m sure any inspector here will confirm that the engineers abided by the law. The recent snowstorm here was not so forgiving with this minimalist approach, and the sheer weight of the snow and then water running downhill from the Embassy area caused the entire right side of the street to cave in and collapse like a row of scaffolds built of cardboard. Nice going. Of course, that street is now virtually inaccessible from the city center area. I wonder if people have ever heard of a buffer zone around here.
Somebody mentioned to me that the inspection code for construction here is thirty years old. In a place like New York, that might sound like peanuts. In a new city like Amman, we might as well be discussing the norms that might have been omnipresent during the Bronze Age. Minimalist planning will invariably give you minimalist results in the end.
Years ago, I can also recall that people had built a railing on the street leading to the Dead Sea, a place known for its low altitude. Very logical, considering that in some of these places there are drops hundreds of meters deep that could quickly unite you with your vehicle in ways you’ve never imagined upon impact. And yet, there were still dozens of accidents. Looking at the structure they put in place, it wasn’t hard to see why. Finally, hundreds of dead Jordanians later, the government understood that, while a railing strong enough to withstand the impact of a runaway baby carriage might be sufficient, an elaborate system robust enough to hold the force of a tornado might just be preferable.
And just how prevalent is this type of thinking around here, I wonder. If you knock out a patient for a surgery that is to last 55 minutes, do you give them enough of the anesthesia to last exactly 55 minutes, knowing that people here are never on time with anything anyway?
I have literally seen guards here place their chairs right on the edge of the road where common sense would dictate to put the chair on the sidewalk. Cars here like to block my driveway and give me the minimal space to leave it. Why jeopardize the safety of your own car like that? I have seen people throw down their rugs to pray in big rooms in front of the wall, where just a little slip would send their bowed heads crashing into the wall and leave Allah with another temporarily disabled worshipper. Why not pray in the middle of the room where there is all the space in the world?
I get the ‘less is more’ proverb. Not a bad thing, really. Here, it might essentially amount to ‘less is less than zero’, meaning you’ll end up losing in the end.
When you think of the word minimum, or minimal, a few things come to mind. There’s the minimum wage, rightfully long a source of outrage among the working poor. There’s minimalist art, music, design, you name it. According to www.dictionary.reference.com, minimalism is defined as the ‘use of the fewest and barest essentials or elements, as in the arts, literature, or design’. I accept it, but I think we need to rethink that expression for Jordan. Minimalism here should be dubbed as ‘the barest essentials’ for life in general.
Specifically, minimalism here pertains to people applying the necessary to sustain certain projects. As numerous countries with a history of natural disasters can confirm, applying the minimum will eventually result in maximum damage, as a few cases here in Jordan will undoubtedly illustrate.
A few blocks from our Embassy, a private company was given a permit to build a shopping mall. Looking at the construction now in progress, it’s quite clear this will be a huge structure. The problem was that they dug the hole for the foundation a FEW FEET from the street. I’m sure any inspector here will confirm that the engineers abided by the law. The recent snowstorm here was not so forgiving with this minimalist approach, and the sheer weight of the snow and then water running downhill from the Embassy area caused the entire right side of the street to cave in and collapse like a row of scaffolds built of cardboard. Nice going. Of course, that street is now virtually inaccessible from the city center area. I wonder if people have ever heard of a buffer zone around here.
Somebody mentioned to me that the inspection code for construction here is thirty years old. In a place like New York, that might sound like peanuts. In a new city like Amman, we might as well be discussing the norms that might have been omnipresent during the Bronze Age. Minimalist planning will invariably give you minimalist results in the end.
Years ago, I can also recall that people had built a railing on the street leading to the Dead Sea, a place known for its low altitude. Very logical, considering that in some of these places there are drops hundreds of meters deep that could quickly unite you with your vehicle in ways you’ve never imagined upon impact. And yet, there were still dozens of accidents. Looking at the structure they put in place, it wasn’t hard to see why. Finally, hundreds of dead Jordanians later, the government understood that, while a railing strong enough to withstand the impact of a runaway baby carriage might be sufficient, an elaborate system robust enough to hold the force of a tornado might just be preferable.
And just how prevalent is this type of thinking around here, I wonder. If you knock out a patient for a surgery that is to last 55 minutes, do you give them enough of the anesthesia to last exactly 55 minutes, knowing that people here are never on time with anything anyway?
I have literally seen guards here place their chairs right on the edge of the road where common sense would dictate to put the chair on the sidewalk. Cars here like to block my driveway and give me the minimal space to leave it. Why jeopardize the safety of your own car like that? I have seen people throw down their rugs to pray in big rooms in front of the wall, where just a little slip would send their bowed heads crashing into the wall and leave Allah with another temporarily disabled worshipper. Why not pray in the middle of the room where there is all the space in the world?
I get the ‘less is more’ proverb. Not a bad thing, really. Here, it might essentially amount to ‘less is less than zero’, meaning you’ll end up losing in the end.
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