Time dilates at work. It attenuates exponentially: a minute at the start of the day is a minute; a minute at the end of the day is an hour. This work-time is not the same as game-time, or sex-time. It certainly isn't the same kind of time as the few dream minutes between hitting the alarm and its blaring, idiot return. The dilation of work-time doesn't make us more productive. One can't pack more useful activity into a work minute than a normal minute. Rather, the opposite occurs because our brains are tricked into inactivity. They go into idle mode like an unattended computer. Why should they bestir themselves for this banal fare? My salival glands don't activate in anticipation when I smell plain tofu or unadorned crackers. No, and why should they? Our brains are smart enough to know when something is worth doing. The effort-reward ratio for most jobs is, while logically tangible, not immediately tangible in the same way the taste of bacon or the rush of winning a game.
So I have rituals to break up the monotony. Tea at 10am, noticing the acceleration of time as I wait for the kettle. I am standing, not sitting, and not in front of screen. The kettle is a real thing, a hot thing, blasting out sound and warmth. It rumbles as the bubbles burst and rage against its metal interior. Steam flares out as speedy particles to be reformed as condensation against the tiles of the kitchen, a coating too thin to drip down. Then the click of the switch on the kettle returning to off. I pour the water in my cup. It contains a bag of cheap green tea—good teas would be wasted on the tepid, dead water of the office building—that I barely submerge. A quick swirl of the bag in its little pool of water, then I pin it to the bottom of the cup and toss the water into the sink. This is a method of decaffeinating the tea and heating the cup in one action. The cup is then refilled to the brim. I walk slowly back to my desk, watching the ripples in the pale green-yellow—like the colour of an overwatered plant—liquid created by my movement.
Biscuits throughout the day. I eat them slowly. I think of cows and their endless chewing. If time dilates for me, then how do the terminally unoccupied, unstimulated cows perceive time? Perhaps they are fine with it. Perhaps evolution has given the right brains for standing still, or at least wonderfully sensitive tastebuds, so that they might find something new to enjoy with every digestion and redigestion of vegetation. No wonder my hutch-bound guinea pigs squeaked and shrieked so wildly at me when I approached with their bland food: at least it was something to do.
Lunchtime is faster time. It's so fast because it's sandwiched between two heavy lumps of worktime. The seconds are squeezed out quickly, like bullets under the hammer of a machine gun, and it's over in a flash.
There's a lurch as time slows again.
