Tag Archives: Work

Just a little late

Man, sometimes I really don’t want to go to work. I’m in my comfort zone right here. I’m writing. I’m getting shit done. But I have to leave this house in about an hour and a half. Which means I have to get up off the computer in like an hour. But I’m always pushing my luck. It’s a really bad habit. I’m constantly aware of what time it is, of how many minutes I have left to myself, but despite that knowledge, I’ll always just kind of willfully ignore it.

So say I commit to getting off the computer at three forty five with the end goal of heading out the door at four fifteen. I don’t have to be at work until four forty five, which, considering that I have to get there and change into my waiter’s uniform, that really means four forty. I ride my bike to work every day so I know exactly how long this whole thing is going to take.

But that’s like four steps, four different time deadlines, plus the present moment, which is all that really exists anyway, but I’m not about to get all philosophical. I have right now, then three forty five, then four fifteen, four forty, and finally, four forty five, the moment when I give up any semblance of freedom and commit to following somebody else’s rules for the next eight hours or so.

I never get going exactly when I’m supposed to. I’ll always push it. Five minutes. Ten minutes. And each step along the way, each deadline invites multiple opportunities to keep pushing it even more. So I might not get up from the computer until three fifty, or three fifty five. That’s OK, I’ll just haul ass and rush through the getting ready for work phase. Maybe I’ll make up the lost time. Maybe I’ll just run around the house extra fast and I won’t be running late anymore.

But all of that hustling, I’m frazzled, I’m frantic. I don’t want to hurry out the door just yet. I’ve got to calm down some. So I sit in front of the computer for a second, or pick up a magazine. And then my brain is calming down, and I’m getting engaged in something else, an article, a web site, whatever. And I’m still constantly looking at the clock. It’s four ten. It’s four fifteen. And now, OK, it’s four twenty. I’ve got to get going, I’m late.

And now I’m riding my bike, I’m really pushing it. This part of the commute is the most difficult to make up lost time, because while I’m always feeling up to the bike ride, sometimes I’m just not capable of really giving it my all for the entire duration. Maybe it’s really windy. Maybe it’s raining, or I’m tired, or I’m hitting a bunch of red lights.

But I could still get there on time. Maybe be exactly on time. Maybe only five minutes late. Everybody else will be lining up for the pre-shift staff meeting, and I’ll show up with them. I won’t be dressed, and so I’ll say that I’m technically not late, but my boss might disagree, seeing as how I’m not ready to go, that I am technically late. But I always punch in right away, as soon as I’m in the door, so that way if, months from now, the higher ups all decide to come at me with a list of recorded tardiness, I’ll be able to be like, what are you guys talking about? I’ve always been on time.

And say I make it all dressed, ready to go at four forty five. There’s still time to fuck around. I’ll think, well, I’m pretty good on time here, let’s get a cup of coffee. And then I’ll get a drink. And a snack. It doesn’t stop.

I think I’ve said all I can say here. But it’s just that, I have to deal with this every day. I’m always looking for two, three extra minutes, time that isn’t there that I insist on having anyway. I just need to stop working, that’s the problem. Anybody want to start donating to the Rob Doesn’t Have to Work Fund? It’s going to cost you, I’m not going to lie. I don’t have expensive tastes, but I eat a lot, all the time, and I drink a lot of coffee. So yeah, that’s going to add up. Bills, utilities. But just, everybody give me a dollar, please, and then get your friends to give me a dollar too. Come on.

Please hold

I’m kind of pressed for time here. We’ll probably have to cancel our lunch date. How about meeting up for a cup of coffee? But the lines. I don’t know. How about we just meet up at the coffee place? We’ll shake hands, I’ll say hello, you’ll say, “It’s been great seeing you,” and that’ll probably be it. I’m swamped. Barely treading water here. Great. Bye.

Cancel my two o’clock. Push my one thirty to two o’clock. Then cancel that two o’clock also. Actually, scratch that. Everything. Scratch everything. Let’s start over. Hold all my calls. Answer them, but put them on hold. Let everybody wait it out for a couple of minutes, then get back on the line, say, “I’m sorry, but Mr. G____ is extremely busy right now. In fact, if you could get off this line now, we’d be really appreciative, he’d be really appreciative, the phone company would be oh so grateful, all of these calls, hogging network bandwidth. Did you hang up yet? Just hang up, you don’t have to wait for me to finish my sentence. It’s nothing important.”

Jesus, I’m way in over my head. I need a break. Just a quick twenty-five second break. How do you set the alarm on this phone? No, never mind, I can figure it out myself. Is this the correct time? Well how does the phone know to automatically correct itself for Daylight Savings Time? Christ, I’ve gone and wasted my whole break. Well at least I won’t have to figure out how to rig a five second snooze button.

All right, back to work. Where are those forms that I needed to sign? How good is your signature? That’s actually a pretty nice signature. Change of plans, you sign all of the forms, I’ll take over on phone duty for a while.

Hello? Yes. No, I’m afraid he’s entirely too busy right now. Yes I have been told that I sound almost exactly like him. No, it’s just a coincidence. I’m sorry, but he’s still very busy. No, I’m sure what you have to say is very important. But there are a lot of people waiting … please hold.

How are those forms coming along? What? No, not with your name, with my name. This is ridiculous. I was commenting on your penmanship, not on your name. All right, let’s do another switch. I’ll finish the papers, you man the phones. Oh, but listen, line three is pretty convinced that my assistant sounds exactly like me and talks in the same exact way. Do you think you can pull that off? Terrific.

No, I’m way too busy. Did you see my pen? No, I don’t like those pens that you use. What are those, the gel pens? No, there are always too many clumps of ink that escape the tip periodically, and then it smears. It’s a big mess. No, not as big as you putting your name all over my forms. Hold on, that’s my cell.

Hello? No, I’m really not interested in taking a survey right now. Well, it’s not that I’m not interested, it’s just that I really don’t have any time here. Well, yes, well … listen, hold on one second.

OK, new plan, I’ll take over the phones again – is line three still there? – you take my cell phone. How’s your me impression coming along? I want you to take this survey. I don’t know, something municipal, something about civics. You know how I’d answer, right? Great, at the same time, I want you to keep signing these forms. But remember, my name, your handwriting. What a great combination that’s going to be. I can almost see it right now.

Hello? You’re still there? No, I’m afraid he’s even busier than he was before. If I had to guess I’d say six hours. Seven hours. Six. I’ll say six hours. You’ll wait? No that’s crazy. Just call back. I’ll have him call you back.

Hello? Yes this is Mr. … I mean, no this isn’t Mr. … I mean, shit, I answered the phone the wrong way. Enough with the survey. Get on line four and tell them I’m out to lunch, that you answered the phone in my voice and accidentally said that this is and then that this isn’t. Great? Great. I’ll be in my office. Hold all calls for the next forty-five seconds. I’ve just got to clear my head here. No, starting now.

That’s enough. I’m done.

That’s it, no more, I’m not going to work today. I’m going to wake up nice and early, take a shower, go downstairs, I’ll make my coffee like I always do, and while the coffee is brewing I’m going to take my dog Steve for a little walk, and then I’ll come back, drink my coffee, I’ll eat my breakfast, and then I’ll just sit there and wait.

And finally my phone’s going to ring, I’ll pick it up, “Hello?” “Rob, it’s your boss. Where are you? It’s eleven thirty. You’re fifteen minutes late. Lunch service is going to start soon. I want you in here now.” And I’m just going to say, “Sorry boss, but the answer is no.” Click.

And maybe he’ll try calling me back, I don’t know, maybe he won’t. I’ll still answer it. I’m not rude like that. Everybody’s always texting anyway, and so I’m always interested in hearing another person’s voice, even if it’s only my boss, calling just to make sure that he heard me correctly the first time. “That’s right boss,” I’ll confirm that he did hear me correctly, “I’m done.”

My wife’s going to get so pissed. “You just quit your job? What’s wrong with you? How are we going to pay any of the bills?” and I’ll just take it all in stride, enjoying my coffee, thinking about all of the free time I’m about to have, to really just sit back and enjoy, and I’ll tell this to my wife, I’ll say, “Honey, think about all of the time we’ll have now to spend with each other, you should do it too, just stop showing up for work and do the same thing.”

So she’ll calm down eventually and when she does, she’s going to definitely see it my way. Maybe her job won’t call her up for a few days. Maybe they’ll just say to themselves, “Huh, this isn’t like her at all. I’m sure she has a perfectly good explanation as to why she hasn’t shown up for work all week.” And she will. The explanation being, “My husband and I aren’t playing this game anymore. Done. Done-zo. No more work. Find somebody else to transfer line two to accounts payable. We’re done.”

And the bills might pile up, sure, and eventually the cell phone service is going to get cut off, and, yeah, it’ll take a while, but the city will eventually file all of that paperwork and that judge will order the marshals to forcibly evict us from our home and, whatever, that’ll take some time. Maybe something lucky will happen before we get the boot. Maybe we’ll open our arms to the universe and the universe will open its arms right back, that warm universal embrace you always see people posting about on Facebook.

Sure, we’d run out of food, eventually, but again, that wouldn’t be for a long while, because we have so many cans of tuna, so many packets of dried pasta and beans. One time I read about this lady who survived a whole winter trapped in some house only eating an apple a day. She went crazy and didn’t make it out alive, but I don’t think it was the hunger that did her in, that’s the point I was trying to make.

Actually, that’s a little morbid, maybe, we’ll run away before they kick us out, before the credit cards get cut off, we’ll find some commune somewhere, something a little culty but just slightly, nothing dangerous, none of that weird group ritual stuff like you see on TV, just something in the middle of nowhere where everybody farms and maybe gets together at night around a big communal campfire and they sing songs and pass around some old guitar that one of the older members brought from when he left his life back behind, and maybe there won’t be a B string, but we’ll make due, humming and singing along to stripped down bare-bones versions of all of our favorite nineties alt-rock hits.

And whoever winds up moving into our abandoned home, back here, back in our future-old life, or our current life, they’ll still get notices from all of the credit card companies and cell phone providers and cable companies all with variations of the same message, “Pay up.” And you know how bill collectors are. They try to collect a bill. They can or they can’t. If they can’t, they sell it to somebody else for a little less, somebody who might be a little better at collecting. The more times it gets sold, the better the collector, but also the more dangerous, the crazier, the ones really willing to take those extra risks to collect. And so these new tenants will get all sorts of threatening letters, knocks on the door in the middle of the night, “Pay up you deadbeats!” written on a note wrapped around a brick and left outside the front door, the message here being, next time maybe we’ll throw this through the window. Or maybe we won’t, but the next level of debt collectors that we’ll be forced to sell your debt to, they’re definitely going to throw it through your window, and maybe it’ll be on fire.

Enough of that harassment, enough bills, enough of this modern world, it’s all enough to make anybody want to skip town for a while, to get away, to go live on some commune somewhere, whatever, I’ll even take a crazy cult commune, even though I said I’d prefer something a little on the normal side, it’s not like these communes advertise on the Internet, and so if you’re looking for one, you just take it, because what are your chances that you’ll find another one any time soon, before your supply of tuna runs out, and those dried beans, you didn’t really think about eating them on the road, how hard it would be to find a stove, somewhere to boil them for a long enough time to where they’re tender, palatable, and so, yeah, you probably should have bought canned beans. But canned tuna, canned beans, do you know how demoralizing that can be, eating everything out of a can, every day, meal after meal, regardless of what’s inside, it always has a touch of that can taste, like something metal, like something that’s been in there for a long time.

Running really late for work

Sometimes I feel like I’m always running late, regardless of when I have to be up, or how much time I have at my disposal to be ready. For example, the other day my boss asked me to work a double shift. “No way,” I told him, “I hate working.” OK, I didn’t say that exactly, but I still said no. Not taking no for an answer, he countered “OK fine,” he told me, “How about you can come in at noon?” And I was like, all right, fine, that sounds doable.

And I started planning out how the day would go. I’d wake up at eight-thirty, get like three blog posts done, take my dog Steve for a long walk, make a nice breakfast, maybe even get some reading done. Let’s do it!

The next thing I know my cell phone alarm clock is blaring at the periphery of my consciousness. I’m trying to get out of bed but my body is completely unresponsive. My cell phone alarm is so loud, so grating. I don’t know if everybody is familiar with the iPhone alarms, but I always use the one that sounds like the red alert from Star Trek. It’s intense. But it’s the only one that even stands a remote shot at waking me from a deep sleep.

What happened? Eleven o’clock already? Jesus. I usually wake up a lot earlier. I barely had time to get up, shower, shave, and then take the dog for a walk before I grabbed my bike and pedaled to work at a pace I usually reserve for outrunning taxis I’ve accidentally bumped into in traffic. OK, that’s not really true. I don’t outrun taxis. I just got a little carried away with the length and dramatics of that sentence. Although I did love Premium Rush.

But still, I was right on the verge of being late for a shift that I was already told to come in late for. I really was biking to work a lot faster than I usually do. For the first time in the better part of a year, I had left the house without so much as putting a morsel of food in my mouth. More importantly was coffee, or the lack thereof. Brewing and waiting and sipping, it was all completely out of the question.

I made it on the floor of the restaurant literally at the very minute. And I’m not one of those guys to throw around the word literally. Like I actually punched in and it said 12:00. I made it to work and the floor manager sees me and goes, “Finally! Rob’s here. Where have you been?” That deal that the general manager made with me? That whole thing about working a double and then telling me to come in at noon? Did we seal the deal some kind of a secret handshake? Because he didn’t tell anybody else. So I had to explain myself to the other managers, telling them I actually wasn’t late, but even when I hunted down the GM, “Right?” I asked him, “Remember you said I could come in at noon?” “Right …” he had that look on his face, like I might be making it all up, like he couldn’t really pinpoint the agreement I was talking about.

The day is over. I made it through. I just can’t get over the fact that, with two extra hours added to my day, I wound up being later than ever, later than I am on a regular day when I have to be at work at my regular time. I missed breakfast, I missed coffee, and I didn’t get to write anything. My whole day at work was thrown off balance. I was having what I assumed to be a lack of caffeine induced headache, even though normally I don’t believe in those. And I was starving. I was starving and serving people delicious, delicious lunch. It was torture.

When did I become so dependent on coffee? I never drank coffee in college. I don’t even remember when it became this habit. I honestly don’t know how I got to the point where I need three cups of coffee just to feel like myself in the morning. That’s kind of crazy, right? But tons of adults drink coffee. Maybe I’m more of an adult than I’m letting myself admit. You know, aside from the whole almost being late to work at noon thing.

Working hard or hardly working? Both.

I always hear variations of the same quote, something about if you love your job, you’ll never feel like you’ve worked a day in your life. So that’s my first clue as to how I know I don’t love my job, because I totally feel like I’m going to work every single time that I’m going to work. I guess I could go through my whole work history, but as of right now I’m working as a waiter, serving food and drinks and smiling and saying things like, “Coming right out, sir,” and “Hope you had a great time, folks.”

I’m not complaining, really. I’ve had enough terrible jobs where I’m at a point that I don’t hate what I’m doing, and so that’s definitely a good thing. And regardless of what the job is, I think work isn’t a question of labor; it’s really all about time. Considering the fact that most of us have to do something considered work, I’ve found that my personal satisfaction on a day-to-day basis stems from how much time I have that I can consider my own vs. how much of my time that I have to be someplace outside of my house doing things that I really, really don’t feel like doing, which is exactly what going to work is.

Because like I said it’s a matter of time. With my current job, I have some set hours, but it’s really such a loose structure. At my restaurant we have twelve waiters working per shift. With two shifts a day, that’s twenty-four spots. On a weekly basis, I’m only scheduled to work five of those spots. Mostly every other employee at this job is some sort of an entertainer, performer, or actor, so these people are constantly looking to swap shifts and make trades.

As a wannabe writer, this always works out in my favor. Seeing as how I do my writing on my time, I really don’t have to set aside any specific hours. So every week I can basically shape and mold my schedule as I see fit. It’s great because, and I’ve been doing this a lot lately, I can work three double shifts in a row and then have off for four days. It’s like taking those thirty-five hours that I once upon a time spent sitting in an office from nine to five, Monday through Friday, and just compressing them into a pill that I can choke down in one oversized swallow.

It’s no picnic, by the end of that last shift I feel like I’ve lost just enough of my humanity, like I’m almost capable of walking outside and mugging a complete stranger, but it’s totally, totally worth it to have four days off.

And this is what I’ve been trying to get at from the beginning of this essay. That whole quote about loving your job so much that it doesn’t feel like work. I feel like it’s a great idea, and if you’re able to make that a reality for your life, then that’s amazing. Consider yourself very fortunate, because that’s the dream, right? Personal and professional fulfillment. But it’s not practical on a large scale. If everybody had that, then there wouldn’t be any garbage men or bank tellers or people who go down in the sewers to do repairs or guys who have to scoop up elephant dung at the circus or waiters and waitresses to get you another Diet Coke.

I think that, for maximized happiness, on a global scale, it would be within everybody’s best interests to find some way where your work time is never greater than your free time. I think, as a society, as a species, that’s what we should be striving for. There are enough people on this planet to make it a reality. There’s no reason that companies should set thirty-five, forty hours a week as this arbitrary holy standard of productivity. Based on my own experiences in the office world, an absurd majority of this time is spent mindlessly cruising the Internet, clicking on some bullshit spreadsheet whenever a boss walks by, but the boss probably doesn’t even care, because she’s got a Scrabble game going on in her office, and she resents the fact her bosses make her get up every now and then to walk around and make sure everyone’s being productive.

And if you think my idea is stupid, just look to the New York City Department of Sanitation. Workers have a very important, very messy job to do, but they get it done, they hustle their asses off, and they pick up all of the trash on their routes. And if they finish before it’s quitting time, then, whatever, they’ve done their jobs, there isn’t any more trash to be picked up, so they get to go home and still clock in for a full day’s work. Oh yeah, plus they get some of the best benefits in the city. Oh yeah, plus they get full retirement after twenty years. And, oh yeah, there’s something like a four-year waiting list just to get one of those jobs.

I’m not saying we should all aspire to work less. We should all be working smarter, not harder. Nothing’s worse than doing your job fast and efficient, only to have some boss turn around and go, “Oh, don’t have anything to do? I’ll give you something to do,” and then giving you some sort of a busy-work, some meaningless drudgery that’ll make you think twice about doing your original work faster ever again. It hinders productivity. Employers should be hiring people for jobs, not time. Let me do my job as fast and efficiently as possible so I can get out and go home.