Posts Tagged ‘time’

Of all the commodities you have, time is the most valuable. Every second of it is another chunk of your life you'll never get back, a second lost to you forever. Mortal man must grab this time, use it, and live it to the fullest if he is to say he lived wisely, and nowhere is this more evident than when he is waiting outside a ladies dressing room in the mall.

There will always be times when you will be forced to wait, unproductively, for someone or something else. Watching someone else shop is an obvious example, especially this time of year, but there are also huge wedges of your life spent waiting for appointments, traffic, service, or (shudder) the DMV.

This is why I always travel prepared, ready to use that time to my own advantage.

Playing cards are an ideal way to idle along while waiting on fast-food orders. Sure, I could simply play Solitaire on my PDA, but it seems to speed up your service when the shift manager sees you actually laying out a few hands on the counter, especially if you get some of the other frustrated customers involved in a fast-paced game of Texas Hold 'Em.

Got waved out of the drive-thru to park and wait? No problem! Get the Frisbee and Nerf football out of the trunk and the time just flies by. Extra points if you catch ricochets off the speaker box.

Hacky Sacks and Superballs fit nicely in your pocket or purse and can help you pass a few moments improving your foot-eye coordination while waiting in doctor's offices or bank lobbies. Those are also ideal places for practicing other personal skills, such as juggling.

Nothing livens up a boring bus ride or plane flight like a kazoo.

My wife keeps a small pack of crayons in her purse because you never know when the need for personal expression will strike. Many are the place mats and Styrofoam cups she has transformed into breathtaking works of art to enlarge and embolden the spirit and not incidentally poke fun at our lethargic waitperson.

I'm not fond of GameBoys or cell phones as ways to pass time in public, although I admit to carrying a library's worth of books on my PDA in case of long traffic lights. I prefer doing something out in the open for the benefit of other bored individuals who can now keep themselves occupied by watching, joining, or reporting me.

To return to our dressing room example, have you found yourself fidgeting in those uncomfortable chairs waiting for your friend, relative, or lover to emerge and receive your shrug of approval? Stop wasting that time and do something! Get up and wander around. Find other things you'd like to see her try on. Practice your musical scales (the kazoo comes in handy here as well).

Offer loud, helpful suggestions to other shoppers, taking into account their coloring and estimated body-fat index.

Tile floors lend themselves well to hopscotch.

Catch up on your personal grooming.

Pace off measurements so you'll know how to navigate in the store in case of sudden power outage or explosive terrorist attack (hint: the average adult stride is 2.5 feet).

Gradually, a piece at a time, move all the really ugly clothing to one side of the shop.

Pick a stranger at random and silently contemplate how to prove that he or she is a spy, where their weapons are likely concealed, and how you could go about hiding the body before your presence is required back at the dressing room.

And hey, you're there to help your lady. She wants you there for your reaction and your guidance, or at least your resigned scowl. Don't just sit there avoiding the eyes of the other guys as you mope together. Instead why not band together and form a judging panel. Imagine your lady's surprise when she comes out to an appreciative audience! She'll love the attention, especially if she was trying on lingerie or corrective garments.

There's never any reason to be bored, no matter where you are or what you're doing. Remember: kazoo.

My biggest hassle after spending a week without power — thanks to our recent hurricane funfest — was not cleaning out the exciting new growths in the refrigerator or washing a cubic ton of laundry, although those were fascinating challenges that will probably come out in therapy one day.

My biggest hassle was getting my clocks right again.

I'm sure that most people, when confronted with clocks in several rooms, would simply set them to the same time and consider it a job well done. Ha, ha! What those poor, misguided people don't realize is that time is relative, as Famous Smart Guy Albert Einstein proved, and I don't get along with all of my relatives. Such consistency would completely ruin my schedule and make me horribly late for work. Or, worse, horribly early.

The timepieces in my life are meticulously calibrated. They're wrong, but they're meticulously wrong.

First we have my alarm clock, which runs about 17 minutes fast. This is necessary to trick my slumbering mind into thinking I'm already late, thus providing the vital burst of adrenaline-soaked panic I need to stop hitting the snooze button and become, somehow, vertical. The number of minutes is important because it can't be a figure my dream-encrusted mind can easily cipher, which is just about any figure.

Next we have the time on my computer I see when I check my e-mail, which I do compulsively whenever I get within a city block of my computer. This is fairly close to Real TimeTM and lets me know more or less how I'm doing, which allows me to relax and read comfortably until I need to move on.

When I get up I glance at the dining room clock, which runs fast and tells me I've somehow lost ten minutes since I turned around, so I scream and start running up the stairs. This is my cardio workout for the day.

Now, the important thing to remember is that even though I know, intellectually, that this clock is fast and I'm not really late, I still react as if I was. This is because the parts of my brain that handle the Getting to Work tasks are just above the Need Food arrays and right behind the Trees Are Pretty node. Millions of years ago primitive men got to work on time the exact same way, holding their sundials cockeyed and setting their crops forward.

Once I emerge from the shower my eyes are immediately drawn to the bathroom clock which is only a few minutes fast so I can calm down again and shave safely.

I scream again when I see my alarm clock (17 minutes ahead, remember?) and choose my clothes for the day based solely on their proximity to the door. I then hurl myself downstairs, throwing on my clothes in mid-air, certain that today is the day I'll be fired for tardiness and forced to work someplace that uses (shudder) a timeclock. By closing my eyes and running with my arms in front of me I can ignore the dining room clock, which isn't as fast as my alarm clock but faster than Real TimeTM and would, at this point, only cause confusion. Instead I sprint, after several painful attempts, into the kitchen where the times on the microwave and oven are hours apart and may even be in different years.

After a leisurely breakfast the dining room clock informs me I'm suddenly hideously late, again, and I dash out to the car where I have never set the clock on my radio and can therefore slump in blissful chronological ignorance while I drive.

There are various large digital clocks on the way to work, at banks and car dealerships and such, but none of them seem to be remotely close to any time I've ever heard of and can therefore be appreciated as art.

It's not until I get near work that I start obsessing on how late I am by pulling out my cell phone over and over and trying to remember how the Time According to Sprint relates to the time at work. Will I be a few minutes late, which is unremarkable and easily laughed away, or will I be late enough to need a saved-a-handicapped-baby-from-a-boat-fire excuse again? This is harder than it sounds since I have to dodge all the other drivers on the road who are also looking at their watches and concocting wild stories about international spies and spontaneous human combustion. And thus begins my day.

I don't wear a watch. Too stressful.