athloi's Journal: Not working, "at job"

I'm striking out the phrase "working" in my usage, unless I'm referring to an actual task being performed. For what most people call "working," I'm going to say "at job." As one highly perceptive writer notes, about 1/5 of our time "at job" is productive time "working." The rest is divided into two segments:

• Bureaucratic time. Waiting on others, following procedures, sitting in committees and meetings, making phone calls, filling out forms, searching for people, interviewing people to find out what is BS and what is anything close to truth.
• Goofoffery. Websurfing, email checking, bank phoning, girlfriend/boyfriend IMing, nose-picking, etc.

As a contractor, I've always worked under the premise of being like the air cavalary in "Apocalypse Now": get in, get the job done, and let the good times roll as soon as possible afterwards. Instead, most full-time workers have a mixture of entitlement and resentment in their outlook, so they camp out at work for more hours than needed and become proportionately less effective, but justify it with the number of hours they spend there. It's a self-creating cycle, an Ouroboros of our neurotic fear of appearances.

In celebration of this realization, I'm leaving at 3pm today to unrepentantly escape the pretense of slaving away until 5 pm on nothing I won't forget by Monday at 9 am, and spending the time instead with a young lady who has earned and deserves my time (and much better things, to be honest, but don't tell her that).