Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Efficiency in Action
One of the best things about working in an office is that there’s very little time for actual work, what with all the baby showers, birthday lunches, and quality seminars. It’s like living in a really lame commune where nobody believes in free love and someone’s always bitching about whose turn it is to clean the coffee maker. For instance, I spent a good hour of my afternoon today explaining to co-workers that I simply had too much work to do to join them on their various jaunts to the dry cleaners, the yoga center, or the erotic bookstore, before caving in under the enormous weight of peer pressure and engaging in some highly centered erotic dry cleaning. Not really. But my point is that it’s pretty easy to blur that line between work and real life, especially when you consider that work generally takes up a good half of our waking hours.
Which is basically my whole problem with it. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if we could just work as long as it takes to get the stuff we’re paid to do done instead of filling eight hours a day with work, obsessive e-mail checking, and an office romance here and there? Just imagine how it would be if Margie, the hatchet-faced woman in accounting, could just crunch those numbers as fast as her little calculator-punching fingers could carry her and then head off for home to make those seven or eight calls seeking hypo-allergenic shampoo for her terrier, Mitzie? Wouldn’t we all be happier? And what if Chuck the janitor were allowed to mop at his own pace and then go off to build some model trains or something instead of interspersing intermittent swipes at the floor with mumbled swipes at passersby in an eternal struggle to fill his hours for the week? Actually, that wouldn’t work too well for me, because I’ve stolen a lot of Chuck’s material. Of course, I could always go back to stealing from Gallagher. It’s a tradeoff.
Anyway, as it is, there’s a lot of wasted time in the workplace. But I guess that’s true of life, too. And come to think of it, even saying that time can be "wasted" at all presumes that there’s some sort of greater purpose to our lives that our time ought to be devoted to, which is far from certain. Which means that all of this discussion is pretty much, well, a waste. Let’s just all try to pretend that that’s poetic rather than sad. And that we even know the difference.
One of the best things about working in an office is that there’s very little time for actual work, what with all the baby showers, birthday lunches, and quality seminars. It’s like living in a really lame commune where nobody believes in free love and someone’s always bitching about whose turn it is to clean the coffee maker. For instance, I spent a good hour of my afternoon today explaining to co-workers that I simply had too much work to do to join them on their various jaunts to the dry cleaners, the yoga center, or the erotic bookstore, before caving in under the enormous weight of peer pressure and engaging in some highly centered erotic dry cleaning. Not really. But my point is that it’s pretty easy to blur that line between work and real life, especially when you consider that work generally takes up a good half of our waking hours.
Which is basically my whole problem with it. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if we could just work as long as it takes to get the stuff we’re paid to do done instead of filling eight hours a day with work, obsessive e-mail checking, and an office romance here and there? Just imagine how it would be if Margie, the hatchet-faced woman in accounting, could just crunch those numbers as fast as her little calculator-punching fingers could carry her and then head off for home to make those seven or eight calls seeking hypo-allergenic shampoo for her terrier, Mitzie? Wouldn’t we all be happier? And what if Chuck the janitor were allowed to mop at his own pace and then go off to build some model trains or something instead of interspersing intermittent swipes at the floor with mumbled swipes at passersby in an eternal struggle to fill his hours for the week? Actually, that wouldn’t work too well for me, because I’ve stolen a lot of Chuck’s material. Of course, I could always go back to stealing from Gallagher. It’s a tradeoff.
Anyway, as it is, there’s a lot of wasted time in the workplace. But I guess that’s true of life, too. And come to think of it, even saying that time can be "wasted" at all presumes that there’s some sort of greater purpose to our lives that our time ought to be devoted to, which is far from certain. Which means that all of this discussion is pretty much, well, a waste. Let’s just all try to pretend that that’s poetic rather than sad. And that we even know the difference.
