“Who knows where the time goes?”
We’ve all had regrets for time that has gone. We may have lost it, wasted it, or even killed it, but it will never come back. Or perhaps, as Austin Dobson says, it stayed in the past and we moved beyond it, but either way it is gone.
For me, Sandy Denny’s song captures the feeling of time that is lost and the things that are lost with it, such as our fickle friends. It seems to me to be an older person’s song, which is odd because she was twenty when she wrote it and died at the age of thirty-one. But that’s how time works, I suppose — a short lifetime can be as full or as empty as a long one.
Time is, of course, my subject this morning. We don’t know where the time goes, and we don’t really know how the time goes either. We each experience its flow in our own way, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. We mark time as it passes with our sophisticated clocks. We sell our time to our employers, and make good or bad use of that time, and of the time we have to ourselves. And in the end it goes, or stays as we go, and we can contemplate what, if anything, is left with us.
The second hand unwinds as Cindy Lauper lies in her bed, thinking of her absent lover. Time goes more slowly when you are waiting for something — everyone knows this. “A watched pot never boils,” my mother told me on those special occasions when we had lobsters. “Time flies when you’re having fun”, which implies that it plods when you are not. You know that eventually your lover will return, or the lecture or the job shift will end, and you may even know when that is scheduled to happen, but you have to get through the intervening time. The second hand unwinds.
Kimmy Schmidt is a television character who endured over a decade of captivity in a bunker at the hands of a preacher who told her that the world above had been destroyed, then emerged to her new and relentlessly cheerful life in New York City. At one point she explains, “I learned long ago that you can stand anything for ten seconds. Then you start on a new ten seconds. One, two, three…”
That about sums up my attitude toward the current presidential administration. Being good at mental arithmetic, I’ve been pretty constantly aware since the inauguration exactly what fraction of the current term has expired. As of this morning, it’s 11.65 percent, and in three and a half hours, it will be 11.66 percent. Marking the time doesn’t make it go any faster, rather the reverse I suppose, and it doesn’t help us mitigate any of the evils that we are suffering through, but I find myself doing it anyway.
I decided to do a summer service this year when Nanci Griffith’s version of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” came up on my car stereo, and my first thought was of days at work when I find that after several hours I’ve accomplished nothing useful at all. Who knows, indeed, where that time went? I can tell you what I did — surfed the web, solved sudoku or Kenken puzzles, caught up on email, surfed the web some more — but not really why I did that instead of doing my real work.
And what is my real work? I’m a professor of computer science at UMass. I teach several courses a year, and I’m the Director of Academic Programs for my college. Despite my having tenure, I have measurable goals and I’m evaluated against them constantly. My lectures have to be ready, my grading has to be done, instructors and teaching assistants have to be assigned, letters have to be written, meetings have to be prepared for. Back when I was doing research, I had to make original contributions to human knowledge, write papers about them, and apply for funding for myself and my students. And I did all that, and I still do the teaching and administration that’s the center of my job now, and I do it pretty well.
Still, the time I waste! The extra work I could get done if, like Ben Franklin, perhaps, I focused on my job every minute of my work day. If I were an hourly employee, selling my eight hours a day to my employer, then my employer might look at what I was doing on the job and say that I wasn’t delivering the time I had sold to them. I could get reprimanded or fired, because as an hourly employee, you have to do what you’re told, within reason.
But I’m a professional. What I sell is not my time but my commitment to do my job, accepting the privilege and responsibility to decide how I do it, to balance and prioritize the various tasks to be done. And I am judged on whether the job is done well overall, not minute by minute.
When I was growing up, I learned that my computer programmer dad was a professional rather than an hourly employee. He had regular hours when he had to be at work, but he also worked at home sometimes when he needed to. I remember him telling me that when he agreed to do a job, it was his obligation to give it his full effort — his identity as a professional depended on that.
As I started college, I spent one summer as an hourly employee at the same company where my dad worked. They made the sort of big banks of machines you see around refineries or power plants — process controls. I spent a few weeks assembling these machines, then the rest of the summer in a metal fabrication plant, cutting or grinding the pieces of sheet metal out of which these machines were made.
The job was, I suppose, somewhat like Adam Smith’s pin factory. We did small tasks which were assigned to us, and by some plan beyond our comprehension these small tasks resulted in the machines being built to specification. We worked pretty steadily from the time we punched in to the time we punched out, with well-defined breaks, and when we went home we left the job behind.
Soon after that I took a course at Amherst College on “Work and Play in America”, where we read among other things Ben Franklin’s autobiography. Industrialization, we learned, fundamentally changed the nature of work. A typical American farmer or craftsman was a sole proprietor, deciding how to balance and prioritize his various tasks and being judged on the overall output — whether there was enough food grown to eat or to sell, or whether the customer’s work was done when promised and done well enough to satisfy them. There were employees, ranging from trusted colleagues through hired help to outright slaves, but in the pre-industrial world even the employees were usually balancing and prioritizing tasks like their employer. There were traditions like frequent holidays and the many beer breaks that were so important to Franklin’s colleague.
But as Adam Smith describes, division of labor can get a lot more done. If you own capital equipment, you can make the most money from it by having an organized, efficient work force. You want more Ben Franklins and fewer workers like his colleague. You may hire an efficiency expert like Frederick Winslow Taylor or Frank Gilbreth to figure out exactly the best way for each small task to be done, to maximize the total output. (This eventually led to the discovery of repetitive stress injury, among other things.) You find that your workers may be able to organize, despite your best efforts to stop them, and insist on higher wages and/or better working conditions, but that’s a reasonable price to pay for the time of dedicated, skilled workers.
One result of this change is that work becomes less interesting and less fun. Taylor and Gilbreth treat workers like parts of a machine, doing exactly what the master plan says they should do. If you aren’t promoted off to the floor to be an engineer or a manager, you don’t get much variety or opportunity to think during the time that you’ve sold. On the other hand, you get paid pretty well, and you get to enjoy the products of a capitalist economy. Furthermore, the time that you don’t sell to your employer remains your own, in which you can find whatever fulfillment you can. The men I worked with in that factory appeared to find that fulfillment mostly by working on their cars, using exactly the kind of skills and creativity that had been stripped from their paid jobs.
Of course now, thanks in part to the creative work of some of my own computer science colleagues, if a mechanical job can be exactly specified, it needn’t be done by a human at all. Robots can do exactly what they are told to do over and over, more precisely than a human can do, without repetitive stress injury or a demand for beer breaks, and as a result they now do most of the work in our large factories. There are some self-driving cars out on the road, with the prospect of many more, perhaps taking the jobs of human truck drivers.
With fewer factory jobs comes fewer, smaller, and weaker labor unions. As an employer, you benefit greatly by your workers being independent contractors rather than employees. You just buy the time for the work, and each worker gets the freedom to arrange their own health insurance and adapt to your work schedule. With no political power acting on workers’ behalf, you don’t have to worry about workplace safety and fair contracts, just play individual workers off against one another to buy their time cheaply.
Certainly there are ways to push back and give the worker’s time the value it deserves. The Living Wage movement argues that any worker’s time is worth enough to give that worker a minimum existence, and pressures employers to meet that hourly wage level. The workers at River Valley Market just won the right to be paid for the time they spend on a company shuttle going to and from work. That time, they argued, was no longer theirs and they should be compensated for giving it up. And thanks to their union, they now are.
Thanks to my own union, and the general high demand for computer science professors, I have something of the best of both worlds. I have the security of a regular paycheck, and the freedom to arrange my job creatively to meet its goals. No one checks up on the time I waste, if I do my job well. Does my freedom lead in the long run to my doing more and better work? I’d like to think so, but who knows. It’s very easy, when you have a privilege, to argue that you deserve it.
This summer, I’ve been devoting most of my non-working time to an unpaid acting gig, portraying Polonius in two different plays for Hampshire Shakespeare Company. It’s given me yet another perspective on time and work. As actors, we have our exits and our entrances, strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I have some wonderful hours on the stage, in a role I’ve often dreamed of playing. In Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, my hours on the stage are measured in seconds, because Polonius’ purpose there is to set the context for the story of the title characters, not his own.
That title comes from a line at the very end of Hamlet, when (spoiler warning) most of the major characters are dead on the stage and a messenger comes in to say that the two plucky comic relief guys we haven’t seen in a while are dead as well, victims of a cruel joke on Hamlet’s part. As Stoppard tells their story, time acts very strangely for them. They don’t seem to remember anything before they were summoned to the Danish court, and they eventually recognize that their entire existence will end with their role in Hamlet’s story. As characters, they are much like actors, killing time (in their case, by flipping coins and arguing philosophy) until their brief hour arrives to strut and fret.
It’s natural, of course, to think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s existence as a metaphor for the general human condition. After all, all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players. We have some finite amount of time on stage, to make our mark if we can. It is up to us to extract meaning from that time, however long or short. Certainly the short life of a Sandy Denny or an Otis Redding has meaning, and what I get from Stoppard is that the even shorter life of two fictional comic relief characters has meaning as well.
We regret the time we have lost because time is a finite resource. So should we take care not to waste it? W.E.B. Dubois says “It is today that our best work should be done and not some future day or future year.” Tock the watchdog is horribly offended at the idea of killing time. But to waste time means to not use it well, and what does it mean to use time well? Our employers might say that the best use of our time is to work on their behalf, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
I count my time well spent when I am productive at work. I also count it well spent when I’m working at theater, putting my effort together with others to create something meaningful. Some of my time surfing the web is well spent, some perhaps not. Sudoku, Kenken, recreational bicycling, all these things have their value. But for the best use of my time, the most important, I’m going to go back to Sandy Denny. And Cyndi Lauper. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Bear with me.
When your fickle friends are leaving, I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving. I am not along while my love is near me — I know it will be so until it’s time to go. I have no fear of time. If you’re lost you can look and you will find me, time after time.
Relationships build with time. Your confidence in them builds with time. The time you spend with someone you love is time well spent, however long it is. Though they display it mainly by bickering, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern love one another, and even their brief lives gain meaning through that relationship. Relationships end, of course — even the longest ones end with death. But we must make time for love while we can.
Last modified 25 July 2017