More hours in my day
There wasn’t enough time to walk Loca as I had an early call to get on, so roll out of bed, make tea, eat oatmeal and hi ho, it’s off to work I go. So I thought I’d walk her sometime but the time never came and now, at the end of the day, I just wonder if there shouldn’t be more hours in the day. If the federal government can print more money when the country needs it – why can’t we add a few more hours to our day? I’d like more time to go hula hoop, walk Loca, READ – I haven’t read a book or at least finished a book in a month of Sundays, and who are these people who watch television – seriously, who has leisure time?
December 4th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
My sister pointed me to this blog and now, having given ‘extra hours in a day’ some thought over the last twenty years, I feel compelled to respond. I have thought of two approaches which may be combined if necessary for obfuscation.
You know they can give us extra hours, as demonstrated each fall when we “fall back” an hour. All we need is the political will to do so. What I propose is to eliminate the month of February from the calendar and put the hours saved into 2 extra hours of every other the day of the year. I hate Februaries, every bad thing that has ever happened to me, happened in February. It is a bleak and dismal month, I say good riddance. As for the extra 24 hours every leap year, assign them to Saturday nights in the summer, sort of a summerfest bonus! People will whine about Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day and a birthday here and there but these can all be reassigned to March without an ear wigging.
My other proposal is to decimalize time. 100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 10 hours per day. I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but I think you can see that this would be confusing enough by itself to slip in some extra time, say between 7:67 and 9:85 when no one is looking.
I hope you find these modest proposals helpful…Bruce
December 4th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
First, I like the 100 minutes per hour – really because who thought of 60? – 100 is nice and round and 100, and 10 all work much better than 60 and 12. The problem with the complete annihilation of February much as I don’t particularly like when it is a cold February is that Mardi Gras often falls in February.
Mardi Gras is in and of itself a step out of time. In New Orleans, while the rest of the world toils, here it is pure unadulterated revelry – no matter what you thought you might want to do it is impossible to ignore that the entire population around you has walked out into the streets, costumed, with a cocktail in their hand – it can be freezing, it can be the end of the world, no one could show up and Mardi Gras would be happening here in New Orleans – that’s how we roll.
So February can’t be the answer – in Europe where they took the time constraints given by our current calendar and cut back work weeks to 35 hours a week, production went down. This might not be such a bad thing since the problem with the world right now seems to be overproduction and a constant cutting back of costs to overproduce so that fewer resources are given to making more things for fewer people who can afford to buy them.
Isn’t this something more fundamental than the elimination of a month or five hours from a work week? Why not just say – not to sound socialist – we have enough, so what can we do to toil and rest if the world has enough – we can make enough wine, enough food, enough books, enough housing, enough cars, enough shoes, purses, coats, and hats – but then who decides what is enough?
What I find most interesting is that your sister pointed out my blog to you – I hope that wasn’t back in February.