Smile-breaks
Swap You Three Monday Hours for a Friday Night Hour
Got time on your hands? I’ll buy it!
The government lets corporations buy and sell pollution credits. I’m thinking, why can’t they enact the same kind of laws for buying and selling time?
Some people I’ve met seem to have all the time in the world. I think they just have good administrative assistants. Me? I always need more time. And not just at work.
From the time I get home ’til time to go to bed, I’m deleting junk e-mails, throwing clothes in the washing machine, taking them out, writing that letter I should have written three weeks ago, getting my healthy walk in… When I finally sit down to watch “Criminal Intent,” it’s over.
The other day I calculated how many hours there are in a week - to see where I was missing out. Well, there are 168. And as far as time goes, we’re all created equal - 168 hours. That’s all you get. No matter how rich ’n famous you are. Or aren’t.
So where do all those hours go? I listed everything a normal human does: sleep, eat, work, run errands, answer the phone, get dressed. Not in that order. I estimated how much time each of those things takes, added up the hours and subtracted the total from 168.
That leaves exactly 19 hours to get everything I forgot to list done. Nineteen hours. Heck! You could spend 19 hours sitting in traffic or waiting in line at the grocery store. I also made a few assumptions that weren’t too smart – no one gets up at six-thirty on the weekends. Do they? Do you?
And I totally neglected television watching – which is a humongous lie. I don’t know about you, but I watch “Law & Order,” “Commander in Chief,” the eleven o’clock news and lots of football and baseball – no poker. Mostly I spend hours at the TV Guide channel, waiting for it to scroll back around to Channels 7, 8 and 10.
Obviously, we all need more time. There’s only one problem. Who’s going to sell all this time?
Maybe retired people - they have time, don’t they? Between cruises, flights to the Far East and visiting the grandkids in Omaha, they must have an hour or two to spare.
This is kind’a far out, but how about dogs? I never met a dog who didn’t have plenty of time to lie around and sleep. Instead of selling, they’d prob’ly trade you a few dog hours for a tasty bone. Dog hours, by the way, are a real bargain: worth seven hours each.
I’ll bet Greenspan would agree that a market in time would be great for the economy, boost productivity ’n all that. We’d have three markets to watch: The Dow Jones, NASDAQ and TIMEX – oh, that’s taken. Make that The Dow Jones, NASDAQ and TIMESUP.
With the new market in time, all those wasted hours that football players spend standing on the sidelines, commuters spend sitting on on-ramps, could be sold so you and I could work more hours.
Wait a minute! That’s not what I meant!
What I meant was, we need lots more time for relaxing and having fun. We already work hard enough – don’t you?
I’m waiting for some young – or old, I don’t really care - techie to come up with a way to buy and sell hours on cell phones or download them to iPods or hey! How about e-Bay? No taxes on e-Bay. No one wants to pay taxes on time.
Until that techie comes along and does his magic, we’ll all have to settle for 168 hours and mine have just run out. See you next time!