space time continuum vs the office
As a child the time taken to get from 25 November to 25 December is a lifetime.
As an adult the time taken in a standard office to get from lunch time to home time is similarly static, however the time taken to get from Friday evening to Monday morning whooshes past faster than you can inhale a pizza, watch a DVD, down a bottle of red with friends, read the weekend papers and iron a shirt.
Which leads me to my current position: that Newton’s law needs work.
It’s a well known fact that time as a child drags on forever. And that the older you get the faster time moves, to the point where you can wake up one day and discover that it’s 3 weeks to Christmas and your mental calendar is about five months behind time.
However, when applied to a work situation where a large portion of your day is spent mentally preparing lists of who of your colleagues you would cull first, time is anything but hasty. The 15 minutes taken from arriving at the office to getting your first coffee seems to last about 5 hours, the 4 hours from office arrival to lunch similarly takes 2 days, and the 4 hours from lunch to packing up your pen set and shutting down your email conversations/google searches takes anywhere up to a 36 hours, depending on what you had for lunch mostly.
Which means in any standard 8 hour day, by my calculation I am actually working a full mental week. No wonder by the time Friday comes I have no desire to have convivial chats about nothing with half of my colleagues, as I have just spent the equivalent of a mental month already doing it.
As the Christmas season heads towards with manic speed, the cubicle farm conversations are already focussed entirely on the silly season. For the record, I hate Christmas. Everyone gets given gifts they don’t need, and would never buy for themselves, children tear open box after box after box of toys to the point where they forget to say thankyou and invariably become so overwhelmed with their bounty that they end up playing with a sock puppet from several years prior; we eat enough to qualify for classification as force fed farm animals and we settle into watch a rerun of a rerun of a Christmas special before retiring to bed thoroughly stuffed and vowing never to do it again.
So, to have to be an unwitting witness to the cubicle farm conversations about what useless gift to buy for one’s partner is already bringing out the “bah humbug” in me.
As a tip to other office dwellers, if your colleagues have never met your partner and, more than likely, have no intention of remediating this, don’t ask them what you should buy for your partner. On the upside, to this pointless question, I always say “gold fish”.
It’s odd enough to ensure you never get asked again, yet provides a response such that you’ve not ignored them and engaged in elective mutism.
I don’t care what you buy for your partner, and quite frankly, why would you ask effectively a random stranger for advice about something so intimate? I feel like inquiring as to whether the bus/’tube/train also becomes a platform for vox popping similarly disinterested people in the art of gift giving, or if it’s purely a conversation saved up to do my head in.
Given I’m working in East London, we’re geographically a long way from the stages of west end, so I find myself daily pondering why if all the world’s a stage that this office is the only green room for rehersals.
As an adult the time taken in a standard office to get from lunch time to home time is similarly static, however the time taken to get from Friday evening to Monday morning whooshes past faster than you can inhale a pizza, watch a DVD, down a bottle of red with friends, read the weekend papers and iron a shirt.
Which leads me to my current position: that Newton’s law needs work.
It’s a well known fact that time as a child drags on forever. And that the older you get the faster time moves, to the point where you can wake up one day and discover that it’s 3 weeks to Christmas and your mental calendar is about five months behind time.
However, when applied to a work situation where a large portion of your day is spent mentally preparing lists of who of your colleagues you would cull first, time is anything but hasty. The 15 minutes taken from arriving at the office to getting your first coffee seems to last about 5 hours, the 4 hours from office arrival to lunch similarly takes 2 days, and the 4 hours from lunch to packing up your pen set and shutting down your email conversations/google searches takes anywhere up to a 36 hours, depending on what you had for lunch mostly.
Which means in any standard 8 hour day, by my calculation I am actually working a full mental week. No wonder by the time Friday comes I have no desire to have convivial chats about nothing with half of my colleagues, as I have just spent the equivalent of a mental month already doing it.
As the Christmas season heads towards with manic speed, the cubicle farm conversations are already focussed entirely on the silly season. For the record, I hate Christmas. Everyone gets given gifts they don’t need, and would never buy for themselves, children tear open box after box after box of toys to the point where they forget to say thankyou and invariably become so overwhelmed with their bounty that they end up playing with a sock puppet from several years prior; we eat enough to qualify for classification as force fed farm animals and we settle into watch a rerun of a rerun of a Christmas special before retiring to bed thoroughly stuffed and vowing never to do it again.
So, to have to be an unwitting witness to the cubicle farm conversations about what useless gift to buy for one’s partner is already bringing out the “bah humbug” in me.
As a tip to other office dwellers, if your colleagues have never met your partner and, more than likely, have no intention of remediating this, don’t ask them what you should buy for your partner. On the upside, to this pointless question, I always say “gold fish”.
It’s odd enough to ensure you never get asked again, yet provides a response such that you’ve not ignored them and engaged in elective mutism.
I don’t care what you buy for your partner, and quite frankly, why would you ask effectively a random stranger for advice about something so intimate? I feel like inquiring as to whether the bus/’tube/train also becomes a platform for vox popping similarly disinterested people in the art of gift giving, or if it’s purely a conversation saved up to do my head in.
Given I’m working in East London, we’re geographically a long way from the stages of west end, so I find myself daily pondering why if all the world’s a stage that this office is the only green room for rehersals.
