10 rules on how to work better

“10 rules on how to work better”: what does it mean? A comment on an earlier blog showcases the best of the Internet – or seems to.

My blog of January 2016 recorded the discovery of a handwritten list of ten rules of behaviour amongst my father’s papers, two years after his death in December 2013.  The title of the list was: “How to work better”.

You can see the list itself, in my father’s handwriting, at the link above.

The rules seemed profound – or were they?

Research revealed a mystery around the words.  Did they represent, as some believed, wise slogans from a Thai factory?  Or were they actually a project by some Swiss conceptual artists?

A reader, @mrRooBKK, has brought to my attention this photograph:

He (or she) accompanied a link to the picture with this comment:

I think it’s original. It’s definitely Thai, I think it’s unlikely that anyone would have translated the English one into Thai and then photographed it in a factory, and is named as Fischli/Weiss: How to Work Better, 1990, earlier than any other versions: archivelikeyou.com/en/node/24523

What do you think?  Thoughtful insights from a Thai factory?  Or an art project?  If the former, where did the list originate?  Is it Buddhist, or what?  Thoughts welcome.

You can read my original post here.

@mrRooBKK’s intervention, incidentally, strikes me as symbolising the best of the Internet.  You send something into the ether and nearly four years later, someone comments.  Of course if @mrRooBKK is actually a Russian bot, or a Swiss conceptual artist, I may have to revise this opinion.

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