Last time I checked, I was human.

In January this year, NFL player Damar Hamlin had a cardiac arrest after suffering a chest injury during a game.

For about ten minutes, doctors were doing CPR on the field, before he was resuscitated and driven off the field in an ambulance. He went on to make a full recovery and is still on his team’s extended roster.

After he was sent off, a decision was made to continue playing the game. This is the normal practice when someone is sent off in an ambulance for a broken leg, or a concussion, or literally anything else. But this situation was obviously different. People started warming up and giving speeches as if they were going to play again.

They did that for about five minutes, but then it became clear that the players were very upset and shaken up by seeing their teammate in such a poor state, and it would have been more respectful to cancel the game, so they did.

The next day, there was a lot of criticism towards the league officials for asking the players to re-start the game.

People said they were insensitive and they should have been quicker to cancel the game. Soon after, Rich Eisen, a radio show host and commentator said this:

In the same way that it was totally unprecedented for us as fans, and for the Bills and the Bengals as players to see what was happening to Damar Hamlin… is it possible that the officials on the field and the league officials watching from wherever they were, had the same reaction and were spinning their wheels too?

Because it’s being cast at the moment, that somebody, whether it’s the Commissioner or somebody in the league office was sitting in their smoky room, looking through the blinds like it was a scene from The Natural saying “you’re going to go out there on the field, we know somebody just died, but too bad, we’re playing tonight.”

And I just know too many people in the league office who wake up every morning dreading what happened last night to believe that.

I think that logic can apply to a lot of situations. People forget that they are dealing with a human being.

Qantas is a great example. Yes, they had some unethical business practices and there’s work to do there, but people are making them out to be this evil, greedy alien. But then when the Australian government sent repatriation flights to countries who were being locked down, who did they call to organise them? They were Qantas flights, that sent people back to Australia. Qantas are running repatriation flights at the moment, but I didn’t want to mention the circumstances.

I work for an investment company, and one of our funds were terminated recently due to poor performance.

A lot of clients have been upset by that, and are questioning the company. But a human being made the decision to terminate it, which is exactly the right decision by the way.

Our company also does investments to help clients manage their funds when they have an accident and they get a lump sum compensation payout. We have another area of the business that does investments for philanthropy. We have another area of the business with trust managers that help disabled people with their living expenses. They’re dealing with human beings every day.

In the AFL, they have been talking about being more transparent about people’s salaries. But human beings make those salaries, and knowing someone’s salary leads people to treat them differently. Not to mention, I worked in retail for six years, and my managers were bullies. Part of their argument, though, was “you’re on good money”. Uh, no, actually.

I don’t know why this bugs me so much. I guess I don’t know how I would feel if, for example, I was a claims manager in insurance, or I was a senior executive, and people forgot that I was a human being.