With a new year one often receives new responsibilities. Our office decided to institute a forty-hour week. We used to work 2 1/2 hours fewer, not counting times when lunch was cut short or the managers asked for overtime; then it was easy to do 40 hours a week or more if desired.
Once the change was approved, the question became how to add the extra time on to everybody’s already packed schedule without affecting the other two thirds of their lives. It’s amazing to look over the new schedules and see how adding 30 minutes a day to the work week can change people’s lifestyle dynamics. For one thing, bad weather can affect travel time, so parents of school-age children had to consider whether it would be prudent to move around their mornings or evenings.
Ultimately some folks asked for an earlier start, while others chose the “caboose.” Somebody (I was one such somebody) had to read a sheet which contained the original proposed schedules and the changes made to meet the needs of the staff involved. It took awhile to translate it, calculate it and enter it. In the end, however, nobody seems to have complained about the new protocol, only that the new hours now meant less overtime.
Some of us, unfortunately, had lunches reduced from 45 to 30 minutes. With only 30 minutes, it’s a challenge to eat lunch, especially when the cafeteria needs time to prepare your food. Add the actual consumption of the food, bathroom time and fielding cellphone calls which had to go unanswered on company time, and those 30 minutes disappear faster than a panicked cat.
Some stomachs were growling the first week, but not loudly.
The great thing about work is, when you work, you get paid. The more time you work, the more you get paid. The money goes into that cafeteria lunch, and if you don’t eat it all, you can take it home a half hour later than usual.
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