JavaJennifer

How do you measure a waste of time?

Pre-internet, if you needed to get licence plates for your car you actually had to drive to the DMV in some industrial part of town and sit in sculpted plastic chairs for hours waiting for a $6.00 hour employee from the Department of Motor Vehicles to call you like a bingo-number.  B-21, they’ll mumble into a 1950′s PA system and up you’d scamper on legs that tingle from falling asleep.  Going to the DMV took at least a half a day of your life and maybe more if you got there and didn’t have the right paperwork.  It was a time waster that if you wrote an equation might look something like this:

4 Hours at the DMV plus (+) 4 Hours that I could have spent doing something else minus (-) 1/2 the satisfaction of not being pulled over for having expired tags= measurement of time wasted.

When it comes to watching television which is among the educated, considered to be a terrific waste of time, the equation might look something like this:

1 Hour of Friends x 2 episodes= 2 full days wasted

The reason that you get dinged harder for 1 hour of friends than you do going to the DMV is because these are episodes that you’ve seen at least 4 times a year for the last 10 years.  The mesurement of wasted time is nothing if not punitive.

Conversely if you watch the History channel while doing something else, the equation looks like this:

1 Hour watching the History of Copper piping in the United Sates Industrail Revolution= .25 hours of wasted time.  Why?  Because you’re nerdy enough to watch the History of Copper piping in the United States Industrail Revolution.  Just because it’s on the History channel doesn’ t mean it’s not a waste of time.

And if you’re wondering, the formula for on-line porn looks like this:

1 hour of porn= zero time wasted.  Clearly.

An altruistic side of me believes that nothing is a complete waste of time.  That all of life’s experiences are such that you can absorb, learn, grow- that the measure of all time spent is never wasted.

But obviously, that side of me is a war today with the side that flew to Atlanta.  Connecting through Charlotte.  To get a rental car and fight traffic on a Sunday (!!) to arrive at a hotel where the reservation is lost.  To have a sleepless night in a king-size bed that sags in the middle to drive to a conference center where breakfast consists of sad little bagels that taste of freezer burn.  To meet would-be clients who are trick-or-treating for vendor logoed koozie cups, squishy balls and yo-yo’s.  So that Samil and Samir, the Patel brothers can tell me that the ink-jet printer they got for free from Circuit City when they bought their $399 eMachines desktop is a piece of crap and since Circuit City is out of business, I should take that printer back and…

…bend over Samil and Samir and I’ll show you were you can put it.

How do you measure a waste of time? 

Reading my blog?

Tags:

This entry was posted by javajennifer on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Bitter Grounds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.