Wasting Time In America: The Private Sector
Just when one hopes a professional career might be more rewarding than university, the realities of the American workplace are laid bare. Image by Joseph Nicolia.
New Fiction
Japan Waits for Godzilla
By Wayne Schutsky
Special for Modern Times Magazine
March 15, 2011 — Warning: Not for the faint of heart. Last week, I wrote about one of the ways in which the university system needlessly wastes the lives of most of its students. While that revelation was probably a little disconcerting, this next little diatribe is going to unmask a problem more daunting than the last.
The next, arguably more disturbing, problem centers on the time wasting that goes on in the workplace, long after most of us have left the realm of education.
Read Part One
Sure, wasting a couple hours a week for the four years it takes most people to finish college is bad, but it does have an upside. It is only four years. Your time at a college has a lifespan. It will eventually end. And, with it, all of the time wasting it perpetuated will also end. So, that is the light at the end of a very dark tunnel.
But I am no longer concerned with the doe-eyed college student, in all of his/her naivety. I am now focused on the worker. Someone who never went to college or a grad out in the real world for the first time.
For, in the workplace time wasting is taken to a whole new level. Bosses, big business, and upper management — essentially, the ‘Man’ — take the wasteful principles hatched at colleges and run with them.
I want to state — just as with my college argument — that none of this can be dealt with as an absolute. There are businesses out there that work efficiently, respect their employees, and work hard to use time wisely. However, I am focusing mainly, if not absolutely, on big business — the machines of our economy — that reduce people to numbers and treat them as statistics. Once the worker is dehumanized in the eyes of the employer, his/her time is much easier to waste.
Let me take a second to jump off of the soapbox and look at an example. A few years ago, I worked in the Communications Department for a certain government agency in Phoenix (I figure the government is the biggest business out there).
Every Monday, I was given a formidable looking stack of various assignments to be completed by the end of the week. I then worked on the stack at fairly regular pace and finished by Wednesday.
I couldn't just go home. I had to be in the office to earn a paycheck. Instead of leaving and using the rest of my time as I chose, I sat around and feigned interest in some press release I had finished the day before.
At first, I thought I was just great at my job, but I soon found out this was not the case. As I observed my fellow employees in communications, I noticed a disturbing trend: they too finished about three days worth of work in one week. The rest of their time was wasted completing menial tasks that served little purpose at all.
The amount of time wasted filling out a time card alone appalled me. There was literally a book of codes for every different type of work you could possibly do in a week and each minute was to be accounted for accurately.
It could take a long-time employee over an hour to fill out the timecard due to the plethora of codes:
GH519- I worked two hours out of the office, driving in my car, watching the clouds. GH456- I worked six hours in the office, sitting on my ass, bored to tears. (All of these codes are fictitious representations, of course.)
I simply ignored the codes, knowing I wouldn't work there more than a year, and coded every week the same under the most generic heading available.
And the timecards were just the tip of the iceberg. There were endless strings of two-hour meetings on what crappy products to give away at employment expos and how to attract students to the agency and the proper way to swipe an ID card at a stairwell.
There were endless seminars on what charities to give to. There were parties, organized by upper management, on every holiday that wasted hours on contests and food.
Sure, charities and parties hardly seem dehumanizing. They seem like great activities to keep employee morale high. And that is exactly what they do. They make the employees forget that the company just wasted half of their week on bureaucratic nonsense and the other half on a mind-numbing desk job.
This alternative form of time wasting is meant to pacify and numb the brain. After a little cake and a costume contest, you can almost forget that you sat in a chair for six hours without ever seeing the sun.
I know this example may seem extreme, given the fact that the government is the mother of all bureaucratic messes, but I feel it gives a nice glimpse into big business in general.
Redundant forms and codes and seminars and bullshit parties seem to be all the norm at many non-governmental companies, as well. At least that is what I can grasp from what I have heard from generic movie plots and acquaintances throughout my life — tangential as the evidence may be. But, c'mon, we've all seen Office Space.
And how do you escape this drain on the hours and days and months of your life?
You have a family or a mortgage or rent or payments of one form or another. You have to keep your job, so you have to put up with the bullshit.
The only piece of advice I can give with a clean conscience is to fight back. Waste their time. Do not code your timecard correctly. Wear your nametag upside down. Date a form wrong. Just stamp your individuality wherever you can. Keep yourself alive on the inside long enough to survive the ticky tacky forms and the TPS reports and parties you don't really want to be at.
And, most importantly, work as hard as you possibly can to keep the time wasting out of your real life, the life you live outside of school and the office.
Read Part One
Wayne Schutsky is an English major at Arizona State University.
