Sixteen years ago – when my children were actually children – their needs defined the rhythm of my life.

6:00am — Realizing that he had only moments to be out of bed before the sun cleared the horizon, my two-year old jumped up and announced, “Is time ‘a get up now!”

6:10am — Frantic that mommy and daddy weren’t immediately fully conscious and dressed, the two-year old enlisted the aid of his infant brother by rocking the cradle violently until the baby started to cry.  This made the two-year old cry.

6:12am — With both children going at full volume, my wife and I had no choice but to get up.

6:30am – About that time, the alarm went off indicating that it was time to start another fun-filled day at the Cummings household.

6:35am — I showered, shaved, dressed for work, fed the cat, fed the fish, emptied the dishwasher, made orange juice for everyone, and ate breakfast.  By contrast, my wife took both children downstairs.  Looking back, I realize it wasn’t a fair division of labor, but so long as  my wife let me get away with the easy part, I kept doing it.

7:15am — Being the craven coward that I was, I sneaked off to my office, leaving my wife home with the kids.

7:30am — Sesame Street came on PBS and the two-year old turned into a root vegetable.

8:35am — My wife dressed the children.  After helping the two-year old get his head through the neck of his tee-shirt rather than the sleeve, she turned her attention to the infant.  As soon as that was done, the two-year old announced, “I have to go potty.”

When that was done, the infant spat up on his clothes and needed to be changed.  By then the two-year old had gotten dirty and needed cleaned up.  This cycle repeated for most of the morning.

10:00am — After giving the infant his mid-morning meal, my wife picked up the toys on the living room floor.  In the meantime, the two-year old went upstairs and removed the remainder of his toys from his closet.  While my wife cleaned his room, he scattered toys in the living room.

11:40am — Lunch time!  The negotiations which preceded lunch at my house made a meeting of the U.N. Security Council look like a ladies sewing circle.  The two-year old wanted Twinkies and chocolate milk.  My wife, being firmly convinced that very few Olympic athletes grew up eating junk food, insisted on something healthier like cottage cheese and fruit.  With the basic offers on the table, the real bargaining began.  The two-year old agreed to the fruit, but not the cottage cheese.  My wife countered with a half-Twinkie for dessert in exchange for a clean plate.  Eventually she won by virtue of her superior authority as the Mommy.

12:30pm to 3:00pm — Nap Time.  For the two-and-a-half hours of nap, the house was silent.  The infant was asleep — resting so he’d be ready to stay up all night.  The two-year old was quiet because he knew better than to disturb Mommy during her nap.

3:00pm — After waking everybody, feeding the infant, taking the two-year old potty, and dressing both kids in play clothes, my wife was at last ready to start her day’s work.
5:00pm — I arrived home, refreshed and relaxed after spending a day at the office.  At this point, my wife and I argued over which of us got to cook dinner.  It was a hard fought argument because the loser got to take care of the kids.

7:00pm — Bed Time.  Putting the two-year old to bed was an hour-long process.   It entailed bathing, putting on pj’s, reading lots of stories, and carting approximately three gallons of water from the bathroom to the bedroom…one glass at a time.

8:00pm — With the two-year old more-or-less asleep and the infant happily cooing to a plastic Mickey Mouse doll, my wife and I had a few moments for ourselves.  Before we had kids, we spent our evenings reading books, or discussing politics, or even just cuddling.  After parenthood we sat and stared at the T.V. like psychiatric patients who’d had too much electroshock therapy.  We dreamed of how much easier life would be when the kids were older and could take more care of themselves.

Pity us.  We were foolish and delusional.

Our sons are both in high school now and our schedule is measured in days, rather than hours.  Coordinating family activities begins to resemble planning a major military operation.
“I’ll be late tonight,” our youngest son says.

“Play practice?” I ask.

“Math club.  Practice is on Wednesday.”

“I thought Wednesday was student council.”

“No,” says our eldest.  “Student council is on alternate Thursdays.”

“What does it alternate with?”

“Debate.”  (The years of negotiating lunch menus permanently warped him and debate is a socially acceptable outlet for his argumentative tendencies.)

“Friday?” I ask.

“School dance,” they answer in unison.

“Saturday?”

“They’re both working that day, dear,” my wife says.

Now I’m totally confused.  It’s entirely possible that I should be preparing for a debate meet or memorizing lines for the play.  I ask, “Am I working Saturday?”
“Yes,” my wife says. “I have a list of things for you to do around the house.”

“Okay,” I say knowing it’ll be a long list.  I think my wife is paying me back for all the years I left her alone with the kids.  I don’t complain, though, because she has the schedule under control.  And, I think scheduling will get easier in a few years when we have grandkids.

Frankly, given the usual cost of a trip to my mechanic, I hoped it was a bear.  At least then I could turn the whole problem over to Animal Control.

An examination of the engine compartment revealed the usual cryptic tangle of wires, hoses, belts, gears, and greasy metal parts.  No bears, badgers, beavers or any other unexpected wild fauna.

“Yeah, we don’t see bears real often,” my mechanic said.  “We’ll take a look at it.  Have a seat in our Waiting Area.”

The Waiting Area.  The name conjures images of a tastefully appointed room – maybe something with warm wood paneling, soft cushioned chairs, ferns suspended from the ceiling, quiet music playing in the background, and espresso on demand.

In reality, it’s a space hidden behind three stacks of tires.  The hard plastic chairs have cracks in them and an extended wait in one of these chairs means an extended visit to a chiropractor later.  Their color varies from bilious green to dried-blood brown.  Stalactites made of dried chewing gum decorate their undersides creating a sugary wonderland for any pre-toddler who crawls beneath them.

As it turns out, the chairs are the least of the problems with the waiting area.  There’s no soft music.  Instead we get a tiny black-and-white TV with a broken antenna, a fuzzy picture, and bad sound.  No matter when I go to the mechanic’s, this TV is always playing Jerry Springer.  I suspect that somewhere there’s a special TV station that broadcasts Springer twenty-four hours just for mechanics.

Question:  What’s more fun than watching a group of people with a total of 13 teeth between them and collective IQ of 50 fighting over who done who wrong?  Answer:  Everything.  Including reading the tasteful collection of antique magazines that have been left to help pass the time.

According to an article I read this past week, Ronald Regan has an excellent chance of being elected to a second term.

In fairness, I have to admit that my mechanic’s waiting room does offer coffee.  It’s not espresso, though.  This coffee resembles (in color, texture and taste) pine tar.  You don’t pour it into a cup so much as scrape it out of the pot.  If you look around the Waiting Area you’ll see groups of people industriously chewing their coffee.

Maybe the point of all this is to make the experience so unpleasant that you’re grateful when the mechanic finally comes back to give you the bad news about your car.

“It’s a bearing,” he said.  “They only come as a sealed unit.  We have one in stock, but it’ll cost about $300.  The good news is I can have it changed in about twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes?” I asked, hardly daring to hope.  “Really?  That fast?”

“Yes, but it will cost $300.”

“But I’ll be out of here in twenty minutes?”

“At a cost of $300.”

“I’ll give you an extra $100 if you have me out of here in fifteen.”

Paying extra to be done early isn’t an option in a doctor’s Waiting Area.

Doctors have been perfecting the art of intolerable waiting since at least the fifteenth century when patients had to sit in muddy streets outside a barbershop waiting to be bled with leaches.  Patients could have to sit in squalor for several hours before being seen.

Of course, that was back in the days when Doctors were private practitioners.  With modern advances in Medical Management, patients sit in relative comfort waiting several days to be seen.  Your average medical waiting room doesn’t show Jerry Springer, though.  I suspect this is to prevent patients from being inspired to throw chairs across the room when they get frustrated with the long wait.

The TV in the average medical waiting room is likely to be showing some kind of family-friendly video.  After all, you never know who might be stuck in the waiting room.  And, honestly, what parent doesn’t want their child anesthetized by brightly colored images before they’re ushered back to the Examination Room where they will wait several weeks in silence until a practitioner of medicine is available to see them?

If you have to take a child to a medical appointment – yours or theirs – by the time you actually see a physician you have read all of the posters in the exam room aloud at least ten times and you are ready to beg your doctor for sedatives.  If the doctor prescribes them for the child as well, that’s just a bonus.

I should note at this point, that I’m merely talking about a hypothetical Waiting Area.  I’ve never personally had an undue wait to be seen for medical treatment.  So, the next time I see my doctor there will be no need for him to give me any additional injections or unneeded exams.

The worst of all medical waiting rooms is the one outside the Intensive Care Unit.  There’s nothing funny about being there, so I won’t even try.

The people in that Waiting Room develop a grim sort of esprit de core.  You develop sudden friendships based solely on the fact that you’re all suffering and worrying.  People exchange medical information about their loved one, talking in clinical terms about the horrible things that have happened and might happen.

Every time a white-coated member of the medical establishment comes in, every head looks up wondering if this latest dispatch from the front lines of the fight for life is about their loved one.  Sometimes it’s good news, sometimes it’s not.

In between bulletins, you wait.

Balanced against that kind of slow torture, I guess the time spent in my Mechanic’s Waiting Area isn’t so bad after all.

Each workday I start with a nice clean sheet of note paper which I sully with an ugly list of tasks I have to accomplish. This would be tolerable if I could just finish each item and cross it off. Except it doesn’t work that way; every task I accomplish gives rise to two more. And those give rise to two more. And so on until the list is long enough to publish in a handsome, leather-bound multi-volume set.

On second thought, maybe my life-movie would be Hercules vs. the Hydra. Or perhaps just Sisyphus.

If things don’t improve, my legacy to my children will be a lifetime of indentured servitude while they finish the tasks I never had time to get to. It’s not that I don’t try. I’ve purchased dozens of books on time management and fully intend to read them … as soon as I can find the time.

According to the experts the best thing to do is assign each task to one of four categories; urgent and important, urgent and unimportant, important, but not urgent, and unimportant and not urgent. In the real world these translate into things that will get you fired if you don’t get them done, things people get excited about even though they don’t really matter, things that you ought to do as soon as you can get around to them, and things that will be on your list until the day you die.

Another tip from the experts is to keep a log of how you spend your time and then see what you can eliminate. According to the experts, you really don’t have any clue how you actually spend most of your time.

Really.

Here’s how my typical forty hour work week broke down.

Adding items to my “to-do” list: six hours.

Reading items on my “to-do” list: two hours.

Categorizing items on my “to-do” list: five and one half hours.

Bathroom breaks: one-and-a-quarter hours.

Time spent waving my hands uselessly in front of the automatic, motion-activated faucets and paper towel dispensers: two and one third hours.

Time spent being grateful that the toilet paper dispensers aren’t motion-activated: four and three-eighths hours.

Meetings: twelve hours.

Trading e-mails to schedule meetings: Three and two-tenths hours.

Composing post-meeting follow-up e-mails: fourteen hours and twenty-one minutes.

Thinking about where to have lunch: nine hours and eight minutes.

Eating lunch: three and three-quarter hours.

Suffering indigestion from eating too fast: seven hours and thirty minutes.

Compiling data for the insanely detailed analysis of my work habits: eleven hours and thirteen seconds.

Actually completing the tasks on my “to-do” list: forty-two minutes.

Crossing things off my “to-do” list: forty-two seconds.

Feeling good about my “to-do” list: six-tenths of one second.

The experts were right, I was surprised at how I spent my week. I had no idea I wasted that much time feeling good about the “to-do” list. I also came to realize that I’d be a lot more productive if the company installed manually-operated faucets and paper towel dispensers. With the hours that would save, I’d have more time to add things to my to-do list.

The whole exercise depressed me. All of the stuff I was doing was keeping me from getting to the things on my list. Then the answer hit me. All I had to do to feel better was to change my list to reflect the things I was already doing. If I did that, I’d transform myself from always-behind guy to the King of the “to-do” list.

Except none of the stuff that I actually do counts as urgent/important. So I did what any sensible person would do and threw away the analysis. But I paused long enough to wonder what my analysis might have looked like if I had a different job.

For example, if I were a secret agent (like you see in the movies) my time log might say:

Time spent getting briefed by a cranky superior: two hours.

Traveling to exotic locations: sixteen hours.

Eating extravagant meals in expensive restaurants at taxpayer’s expense: twelve and one-tenth hours.

Wooing beautiful women: thirty-seven and one-half hours.

Exchanging veiled threats with the villain: twenty minutes.

Using cool (and highly improbable) technology: ninety-nine minutes.

Time spent making motion-sensitive bathroom fittings work: two seconds.

Time spent ripping motion-sensitive bathroom fittings off the wall: two minutes.

Defeating the villain: Eighteen very busy minutes.

Of course, a time-log for an actual secret agent would probably look a lot more like my work log with hours devoted to meetings, sending e-mail messages and filing various official documents.

When I showed my analysis to my wife she shrugged and told me about her typical week.

Laundry: Fifteen hours and seventeen minutes (including time for extra loads because her husband tends to leave clothes in places other than the hamper despite the fact that she has told him where it is repeatedly and has gone so far as to pin a red-and-white ringed target to the front.)

Remedial hamper training for husband: Two hours and sixteen minutes.

Preparing menus, shopping lists, shopping for food, and preparing meals: eight hours and forty-six minutes.

Time husband spends over tasty, home-cooked meals: fifty-one minutes.

Balancing the checkbook, paying the bills, and wondering about the fifty-two dollar charge from the video game store and the seventy-six dollar charge from the bookstore: nine hours.

Listening to husband complain about his busy week: four hours and six minutes.

Trying, unsuccessfully, to tell husband that her week was just as busy: three hours, thirty-nine minutes and twenty-two seconds.

She wanted to go on, but I interrupted and stopped her. I’d picked up on the subtle hints she’d been dropping. Like me, she felt overwhelmed by the many demands on her time and nothing I could do or say was going to make her feel any better. I just didn’t have the time.

And it’s not just work.

My “free time” — which is only free in the sense that I don’t get paid for what I do during those hours — is filled with engagements and obligations and errands … all of which absorb my time the way the blob absorbed most of Steve McQueen’s hometown.

The only way to keep up is to do everything with the feverish intensity of an espresso-fueled chipmunk.

Which is why the sign about the Meditation Course intrigued me so much.  I flashed past it so quickly I had to come around the block a second time just to get the details.  A whole course about mediation, about learning to relax and breathe and just … be.  It sounded delightful until I realized that I’d probably approach it with the same manic intensity I applied to everything else.

“And breathe in…” the instructor would say.

After a short, sharp inhalation which would probably sound like I’d been unexpectedly kicked in the gut, I’d look up at her and say, “Got it.  What’s next?”

Not a good way to relax.

I know I’d be like that, though, because I can’t even properly relax when I’m going on vacation.  After all, I’m an American and the statistics show that we have about a third less paid time off than our European cousins.  If we’re going to keep up with them in the highly competitive field of collecting tacky tourist souvenirs, we’re just going to have to try about fifty percent harder.

A proper vacation, for me, is planned with the detail and precision of a military incursion into unfriendly territory or a highly complex bank robbery.

The actual planning starts months in advance with a trip to the bookstore to pick up thick tomes with titles like “Yellowstone: Two Million Acres in Twenty-Four Hours” or “Rapid Touring: New York, Boston, Chicago and a City to be Named Later”.  These books are chock full of tips on how to travel efficiently; all drawn from the authors’ years of experience at sitting in office writing about travel.  The point, though, is that they tell you how to wring every last drop of fun out of your vacation the same way an anaconda squeezes the life out of a jaguar.

Using the books as a guide, I plot out our trip.  By carefully sticking to what I’ve planned, in just two or three hours my entire family can be completely ready to strangle me.

Consider our trip to a major, west-coast amusement facility.  To avoid any legal entanglements, I’ll give it a totally made-up name.  I’ll call it … Bisneyland.

If Bisneyland opens at 9:00 a.m., my plan is to have us in place at the entry queue no later than 8:17 a.m.  That way we’ll avoid waiting in lines which can stretch out as much as thirty-five minutes on a busy morning.  Once we clear the gate, I’ll urge my family along by yelling encouragingly at them.  We have to make it to the Splatterhorn by nine-fifteen if we’re going to manage to ride Big Blunder Mountain before ten.  And remember, we have to go see Call World (sponsored by Verizon) because it’s just not … Bisneyland without that dumb song ringing in your ears all day.  Then there’s The Bad Tea Party, Boarin’ Over California, Bar Tours, The Pirates of Penzance, and Innoventions … that’s a real “must see”.  If there’s time on the way out of the park, we’ll stop to visit the famous animatronic presidential exhibit, Great Moments with Mr. Clinton.  Then we’ll take the world-famous duorail back to our hotel.

The day is ruled by the clock and the schedule and, in reality, my family and I could be touring a sewage treatment plant for all the attention I pay to what’s going on around me.  So long as we stay on schedule, I’m satisfied.  The schedule actually means more to me than the safety of my own family and I’d gladly risk being run down by a parade if it got us to dinner for our four-fifty-eight reservation.

Really.

You’d think the situation would be slightly better when we schedule an outdoorsy vacation in some location that is long of nature and short of brightly-colored cartoon characters.  You’d think that, but then you wouldn’t be properly accounting for the depths of my personal neuroses.

 To me a trail map is a challenge.  If it says a hike should take three hours, I plot a route which takes two.  My wife complains bitterly that we are supposed to be enjoying the experience and I’m happy to give her ten or fifteen seconds to fully appreciate the experience at every science viewpoint.  That’s more than enough time to snap off a couple of pictures that I’ll get around to cataloging if I ever have the time.  At the end of the trail I allot a good five minutes for rest before we head back down to our starting point.  What’s not to like about that?  Doesn’t she realize that there are other trails to visit and if we’re going to get them all in on one trip we ought to get moving?

She follows along, muttering darkly, while I shoulder the heavy responsibility of keeping us on schedule.

I suppose it’s actually a good thing I only have two weeks of vacation a year.  I don’t know that I’d have the stamina for any more.

My children and I live in different time zones. They live in Teenage Standard Time and I live in the real world.

In the real world, deadlines have mass and momentum and cannot be ignored. Whenever I get a new deadline it starts making a sound like the music from the documentary film Jaws in which unsuspecting swimmers were viciously attacked by a great white cello player.

Take the annual United States Tax Day deadline. Every year on April fifteenth, I’m required to file a an extensive set of documents and a distressingly large check with the Internal Revenue Service. (Historical aside: The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912 and I think it’s fitting that America commemorates this tragic event by soaking the rich.)

Sometime in January I open my mailbox and …Baaa-dum! … I find the first of the year’s vital and deeply confusing tax forms.

The weeks pass and … Baaa-dum! Baaa-dum! … more tax forms. And advertisements for tax services, tax software, tax relief, tax refund sales, tax deferment services, tax attorneys, and tic-tacs.

By early April the flood of mail and advertising reaches a distressing pitch. Doom-doom, doom-doom, doom-doom, doom-doom. A whole orchestra joins in, playing a stress symphony on my nerves while I rush to file on time, being careful to include the appropriate copies of the appropriate forms and – most importantly – the appropriate check.

About the time the invisible musicians hit their crescendo, I drop the whole package in the mailbox, the clock hits midnight, and I’ve made it just under the wire for another year.

Of course, the next deadline in my life (say, having to maximize the actualization of my company’s core competencies to create a customer-centric experience for the purpose of increasing market share by grabbing the low-hanging fruit) will start the whole soundtrack thing all over again.

By contrast, the background music for my teenage sons more closely resembles the kind of happy, relaxing music normally associated with cartoon bunnies frolicking in some pastoral glade, free of either concern or common sense. Give a teenage boy a deadline and he’ll react with the same blank stare as a rabbit encountering a backhoe. Since he can’t eat it or go out with it, it doesn’t really seem to exist in his world.

For example, imagine that my son has been assigned to write a ten page paper on the themes of diversity and mutual respect in Orwell’s Animal Farm. The instructor thoughtfully provides two weeks for the work and my son swings into action, ignoring the assignment as hard as he can.

The date looms, the Jaws music plays for me, and my son frolics and plays video games and watches TV and generally gives the impression that he is a permanent resident of the planet of people-who-just-don’t-care.

When I press him, he rolls his eyes and says, “I know Dad” as if he thinks I don’t realize I’ve mentioned the deadline to him approximately seventy-eight times an hour for the past week. Some kind of opposite force-field kicks in and the harder I press, the more laid-back he gets. With the deadline hours away, I’m an anxious ball of stress and he’s so relaxed he is no longer capable of sitting upright.

Somehow, though, he always gets the work done on time.

Really.

That’s what’s so infuriating. If he missed the deadline I’d win massive I-told-you-so privileges and could while away a couple of happy hours pontificating about the importance of planning and scheduling. I could stress the importance of goal setting, invoke the ghost of Stephen Covey, and generally prove that I’m smarter than he is.

Only I’m the one who stressed and he’s the one who got the work done so I’m not the smarter one. I’m just the guy who has been permanently exiled from Teenage Standard Time.

Which is probably why my version of curfew is so very different from my son’s. Eleven o’clock real-world is eight p.m. Teenage Standard Time. The night is still young and there’s a world to explore and just who is Dad to get in the way of that?

Teenage Standard Time can even be a problem when I’m working on a very short-term deadline. Say, getting the kitchen trash emptied in the next five minutes.

Thinking that, because we’re all in the same room we’re also all in the same time zone, I say something stupid like, “Please empty the trash.”

The trash sits for a while, actively not being emptied. Thinking I spoke too softly, I repeat myself, “Please empty the trash.”

Still no results. I run my instructions back in my mind and I realize that the lack of trash-emptiedness is, in fact, my fault. I I failed to specify a time frame.

“Please empty the trash now.”

No response. Frustrated, I move directly to raising my voice.

“EMPTY THE TRASH THIS INSTANT!”

This is greeted with a frustrated sigh and declaration of, “I was getting to it!”

Silly old me. I forgot about Teenage Standard Time and the fact that my request had to cross at least two time zones after it left “Old Fogey Standard Time”. If I’d just been patient and waited five or six days, my son would have done as I asked.

As annoying as Teenage Standard Time is, though, I secretly envy my children and wish I could move back. In my real world, I’m so busy worrying about time lines and deadlines and calendars and clocks the only thing I feel when I actually do relax is guilt. When I sit down, worry gnaws at the back of my brain like a starving squirrel. Isn’t there something I should be doing? If I lived in Teenage Standard Time, I could let the squirrel out of its cage once in a while and just kick back and enjoy life.

Blame it on the monks.

In primitive cultures, nobody had clocks.  They didn’t have any use for clocks.  One guy would ask, “What time is it?” and everyone else would hit him with sticks for asking such a stupid question.  Then the monks decided they needed to pray every few hours.  Somebody had to figure out the meaning of “hour” and how many “hours” made a “few.”

So they invented clocks.  Early clocks were just candles with different-colored stripes.  One stripe equaled one hour.  If you bought your candles from a candle-maker with a wide brush, an hour might last several “days.”  (“Days” had been discovered much earlier by cavemen who used them to separate one night from the next.)

Thinner brushes meant skinnier stripes which, in turn, meant shorter hours which meant less time to nap between prayers.  Skinny brushes weren’t especially popular.

Once they got the bugs worked out of the system, the monks had to find one monk to care for the candle. This monk — named Charles (“Chip” for short) — had to make sure the candle always ran properly.  (In modern times, his equivalents are the kids who join the A/V club in school and run the projector.)  At certain times of the day and night, Chip had to tell the other monks it was time to say one of their prayers.  Each prayer had a special name–matins, lauds, lorem, ipsum, dolor, sit, and grace.  (Grace came before meals and was easily the most popular.)

Clocks changed everybody’s lives.  Because of clocks you could say things like, “You have to get up now, it’s 6:00 a.m.”  You could also say, “You only have one hour to complete this test” and “You’ve been on the computer for six hours!” If you had said something like that before timekeeping was invented, people would have stared at you for a moment before hitting you with sticks.

Clocks had a tremendous impact on all areas of labor relations.  In the dark ages — before clocks — you slaved for a man who owned land.  You were expected to be productive from sunup to sundown and received barely enough to survive on.  This system was known as indentured servitude.  Today you work for a man who owns a company.  You are expected to be productive from sunup to sundown and get paid barely enough to get by.  This is known as employment.  Ain’t timekeeping grand?

Timekeeping led to time clocks which lead to time cards which lead to the coffee break.  Before time clocks the boss would say things like, “Okay you guys, work on the pyramid until sundown and I’ll give you some food.”  After time clocks, the boss said, “I expect you all to work twelve hours and take a fifteen minute lunch.  You’ll be docked for every minute you’re short.”

Which isn’t to say that your boss isn’t under some time pressure himself.  Clocks led to appointments and scheduling.  Odds are good that the pyramid building guy didn’t ever say to himself, “Let’s see if I move my ten o’clock with the apex maker to eleven and my lunch with the zoning commissioner to dinner, I’ll have time to meet with the security guys about the new counter-weights in the sarcophagus chamber.”

All he had to do was stand in one place and occasionally hit people with sticks.  In contrast, the modern manager keeps in shape by sprinting from one appointment to the next, always chasing the clock and keeping score of his success by the number and variety of appointments in his Crackberry. 

With a little foresight, our ancestors could have nipped this clock thing in the bud.  When the monks got clocks, the general public could have said, “That’s fine for you, but none for us thanks.  We like living without time concepts.”

But, did they?  No!  Our ancestors had the same blind faith in technology that senators have in the apathy of the average voter.  Every last one of our ancestors said, “Clocks?  A chance to have our lives run by machines which aren’t any more intelligent or caring than the average rutabaga?  Love ‘em!   In fact, let’s invent watches so we can have little clocks with us wherever we go!”

Once everybody started measuring time, they noticed that they didn’t have enough of it.  People started to say things like, “Gee, I’d love to help you pump floodwater out of your basement, but I just don’t have the time.” Suddenly time was a precious resource that had to be managed and saved.

“Time management” seems like a pretty stupid phrase to me.  Nothing I’ve ever done has “managed” time.  I’ve never made time go faster or slower.  (Although, I once spent two days driving across the plains states and aged by at least a month.)  And I’ve never found a wad of time stuffed in the back of a drawer where I put it for safekeeping.

That doesn’t stop businesses from making a killing selling time management tools.  Just last week I got a letter from a company which promised to turn my life around for just $59.95 a year.  With their patented, copyrighted, trademarked, entirely secret time management system, I’ll be more productive in no time.  I don’t get it.  I’ve already got too much to do.  Now I’m supposed to improve the situation by spending an hour a day writing myself notes about how well I’m managing my time.  (I guess it’s one of those things you can’t understand until you’re on the inside–kind of like the U.S. Congress.)

The scary thing is that each generation gets more and more time conscious.  I worry that one day I’ll have grandchildren who keep little crayon-smeared schedule books.  I don’t think I can deal with a written plan showing how often a one-year-old is going to soil his diapers, cry, and throw fits.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my nap.

I first noticed this with the digital clock in my mini-van.  Some of the little LED segments don’t light up anymore.  Instead of showing a proper time like 3:26, it reads 3cL.  How am I supposed to interpret that?  Am I going to be late for my three-thirty appointment?  Or early?

The worst clock in the house is the one on the microwave.  Like its cousin in the car, its display has missing segments; only these render it unreadable.  Instead of nuking my popcorn for 2:35 seconds, I end up with something that looks like Klingon.  When I hit the buttons, I’m no longer certain if I’m setting the power to reheat or the phasers to stun.

The clock in my wife’s car works fine, but she can’t figure out how to change it over to daylight savings time.  For six months of the year she knows exactly what time it is.  For the other six she has to add an hour to the clock.  Or is it subtract an hour?  When she gets frustrated with that, she tries to reset the clock.  This process involves simultaneously pushing three different buttons and turning a knob either clockwise or counterclockwise.  In terms of intuitiveness, this procedure ranks right up there with advanced neurosurgery or setting the time on your VCR.  When she’s done, the clock has a new (but still wrong) time and all of her radio stations are messed up.

The recent Congressional decree that Daylight Savings Time should be moved by three weeks has thrown many of the clocks in my life into a serious tizzy.  Some had to be goaded ahead and then turned back, leaving them frightened and confused.  Two of the most sophisticated devices I own — my office computer and my Blackberry — were completely flummoxed by the change.

For about two weeks before the change my cell phone company sent me frighteningly reassuring messages telling me that they knew that Congress had moved Daylight Savings Time and that I’d be okay if I just followed their simple seventy-eight step instructions to update my device.  I obeyed and updated, but I didn’t feel any better.  I felt like an accident victim hearing an EMT say that I’d be just fine and, by the way, modern prosthetics are so good you can hardly tell they’re fake.

When Daylight Savings Time rolled around, I was surprised to find that my Blackberry actually kept the correct time.  What a fool I’d been.  There was no need to worry…unless I wanted to know when my appointments were.

When my assistant enters an appointment on my calendar, it shows up on my office computer and on my Blackberry automatically.  Only, after the time change if she schedules an eight o’clock meeting using her computer, it shows up as nine on my desktop and ten on my Blackberry.  Now I don’t know if my next appointment is at noon, a week ago last Tuesday or midnight on St. Swithins Day.

Lately I’ve getting frighteningly reassuring messages from my cell company telling me that things will be fine in a few weeks.  I just need to be patient.  Frankly, I think I’d have better luck trying to regrow a missing leg.

Even when my clocks work, they betray me.  Take my watch for example.  It’s too stupid to know about Daylight Savings.  All it does is keep track of time and occasionally beep at the wrong moment (during meetings, funerals, church services, movies, IRS audits, etc.)  I can live with the beeping as a small price to pay for reliability.  What I can’t tolerate is the fact that the watch runs at different speeds depending on what I’m doing.

Really.

The other day I was on my way to the airport and the particular airline I was flying with is especially fussy about whether or not I’m there on time.  If I’m catching a nine a.m. flight they expect me to be in the terminal ready to board in case the plane leaves on schedule.

Sitting on the freeway — stuck in traffic the way hamburger grease gets stuck in a drainpipe — I glanced at my watch to see that I still had an hour or so before I’d be officially late and I’d have to consider alternative transportation like walking to my destination.  The radio guy gave me the (now useless) traffic report and told me there’d be another in ten minutes.  Two commercials later — at least that’s how it felt — was the next traffic report.  My watch confirmed that ten minutes had passed even though I never felt it.

Ten more minutes whizzed past and I realized that my watch was running about ten times normal speed; like it wanted me to miss my flight.  Eventually someone applied Drano or something to the traffic and I made it to the airport with a good eight or nine seconds to spare.  Then my watch decided to make up for all of the time it had used on the drive.  While I waited to board, minutes dragged themselves past me so slowly I could see actual particles of time.  My watch kept things at that pace until some universal constant balanced and then I was allowed on my flight.

I don’t trust my watch now.  Next time I’m having fun, I know my it will squeeze those minutes down to molecule size and save the extra time to drag out some meeting at work.  I’m thinking of switching to a sundial.