We are all allocated a certain amount of time on this earth. It may be long or short, but it ticks away at the same speed for everybody. The older you get, the more you want to make the most of those remaining days, hours and minutes. But the theft of time has become almost as much an epidemic as the theft of smartphones. I can live without a smartphone, but I do have a small and diminishing amount of time, which I would rather not lose, and the world seems full of time-wasters who want to snatch it away.
Any government office where you have to make an inquiry or an application, no matter how trivial, will swallow up hours of your time without explanation or apology. The DMV is perhaps the worst, but tax and Social Security offices are extraordinarily good at making your precious time disappear into their bureaucratic black hole. Annie Lowrey's new book is called "The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It." We need that book, even if it sounds suspiciously like what Dr. Johnson called the triumph of hope over experience.
It’s not just government. How much of your life have you wasted waiting for contractors who don't keep their appointments on time, or ever? The medical profession is notorious. Their appointment times are merely fanciful, like stock market predictions,
The wasting of our time is now fully automated. Hours can be snatched away from us without any human intervention at all. I wonder what gifted humorist invented terms like “customer service number” or “helpline.” When we need information from a bank, a credit card company or a computer manufacturer, we can be sure of losing a whole morning or afternoon listening to unctuous robotic voices lying about how much they value our call, reassuring us that we are number 2,346 in line and pretending that a dedicated
It is tempting to abandon the phone and turn to the computer, but then you are at the mercy of the greatest time-wasting device ever invented. Everything that used to be quick and easy has become slow and difficult, verging on impossible. In the computer age, booking a flight or placing an order, once a five-minute job, can easily swallow up a frustrating hour once you enter the hostile world of the internet with its Kafkaesque maze of security questions, codes and passwords.
My time and yours is definitely worth something, obviously not as much as the time of a notorious politician or an ephemeral media celebrity, but it’s worth something – let’s say $17 an hour, the minimum wage. After an hour of waiting in the accountant’s office, or any other office, we should have the right, and indeed the duty, to bill him or her for $17 and expect payment. Two hours on hold with a software company, listening to vile music, should be worth $34, and so on. The thieves of time will eventually get the message: if you waste our time, it’s payback time.
