Tick tock, tick tock, goes the old clock. They call it a "grandfather clock", and I suppose that it's even more so in this modern age where you get quartz, liquid crystal display, atomic powered, guaranteed to keep the right time for at least the next hundred or so years, dear God, as though anybody cares...
Are we perfecting our timekeeping in order to save time? Or are we all simply caught up in some crazy race against our inevitable deaths? How many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds until we've breathed our last breaths. Why do I get the feeling we're simply running scared...
Seems we try to fit everything snugly into some schedule or other rather than taking things as they come our way, happily enjoying what we're doing and not worrying whether or not we'll have enough time to do this other thing we've been planning to do...
The way we run our mundane lives, like speed freaks or something! Got to get up at 7:10, out by 7:20 or 7:30 depending on how we spent the previous evening, followed by breakfast between estimated end of shower time to let's say 7:55, and got to run for that bus going by at 8:02, and if we miss that one then we got to wait another 10 flipping minutes which will make it 8:12, and from there on we have to get to the office for 8:30 instead of 9:00 because there's much backlog to be processed. Oh boy, and that's just the first one and a half hours of the day. Does this sound like you?
If you're employed as a civil servant then you get a coffee break at 10:30 which should bring you to 10:45, but instead it brings you to about 11:15 because your colleagues had a good story to tell you about how you can get rich without working. By 12:00 you've got to be fed so you don't come back until 1:00 in the afternoon because you got to give your stomach time to digest all that trashy food and drink. By 2:00 it's time to fit in another coffee break and cigarettes to keep you going until 2:30 when it's time for some serious work at your IBM XT which can process something like 320,000 or so bytes per second. Doesn't that figure just boggle your mind?
Thanks to the magic of computers you've finished for the day kind of early, so you're history by 3:15, on the bus by 3:24 and home by 3:38 where you've got a nice hot cup of coffee waiting for you in the programmable coffee brewer. Now that your work day is done old man, what do you plan to do with all that extra time?
I suppose there's so much you could do, especially if you budget everything accordingly. Don't you ever worry about the ulcers you might develop from killing yourself so, just trying to make the most of your allotted time here on planet earth? Maybe you think that if you calculate your days by seconds they'll look longer than they really are. What's 24 hours when you can have something like 86,400 seconds! All that I can say is that if you don't think of the concept of time you'll never have to worry about running out of it...
What's that you said? You got to pick up the kids at school, they're a little late finishing today because they had a detention for not completing their projects on time…what's your world coming to?
Tick tock, tick tock, goes the old clock. Mans' wicked old grandfather who keeps his children running scared. A Frankenstein perhaps, for was he not created by mankind himself? Tick tock, tick tock, everybody's running like mad, how about you?
Copyright © 1986 Hans Raffelt, All Rights Reserved.
