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A Brief History of Timewasting
What did human beings do before computers
were invented?
by Dominic Hilton
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
What did human beings do before computers
were invented?
by Dominic Hilton
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
| CONTACT THE LIZARD |
The other day I was strolling past an open-plan office, watching
hundreds of sullen-looking workers forwarding each other viral emails, and
I started to wonder: what on earth did people do before computers were
invented?
I don’t mean, how did anyone get anything done? I mean, how did
anyone not get anything done?
These days, thanks to the internet, there are zillions of ways to look like
you are a grown-up professional busy working for a respected company
when in fact you are:
a) recovering from a hangover
b) telling everyone you know how hungover you are
c) planning your next hangover
Not to rub it in, but the basic truth about the new service economy is
that there’s not really enough work in the world to go round, and simply
no useful role for someone like you. This is why 99% of us have jobs in
which we spend the entire day huddled behind a monitor either:
a) IMing our friends about what a cretin our boss is
b) surfing the web for images of Jessica Simpson
c) sniggering at hilarious pictures of horses dressed as scuba divers
We do this because we know all too well that the best way to lose our
job, and therefore our house, car, dog and surgically-enhanced spouse,
is to actually try and do something with our job. That would be a huge
mistake and almost always leads to somebody getting fired, usually you.
The only way to hold down your job (not to mention your surgically-
enhanced spouse) is to spend every working hour sending your friends
pictures of Jessica Simpson, even though they probably sent you the
same pictures yesterday. And so what I’m wondering is: how did anybody
ever hold down a job in the days before forwarding pictures of Jessica
Simpson became the central function of all Western economies?
Here are just some of the things I found in the course of my investigation:
Back in the Pleistocene, Pliocene and Miocene eras (i.e. yonks ago),
when office workers spent a good deal of their time up in trees,
timewasting was still rather primitive. Early man (or Middlemanagerthals)
used to pretend to be on the lookout for mastodons and woolly
mammoths, when in fact they were busy thinking about pictures of
Jessica Simpson.
This prehistoric form of timewasting had catastrophic consequences and
would often result in office-workers getting eaten or squashed.
By the time the Ice or Bronze or Stone Age came around, man had
become considerably more adept at pretending to be busy. Men, in
particular, would invent tools that they’d tell their wives took years of
great craftsmanship to build and perfect, when in fact they were just
small lumps of heavy stuff with a point on the end. If any of the women
got suspicious and, say, followed the men to ‘work’ only to catch them
huddling around a warm campfire playing cards with their buddies and
laughing at how their wives thought they were busy progressing and
stuff, the men would just plant their sharp objects into the women’s
skulls.
This practice lasted for many hundreds or thousands or millions of years
(depending on whether you actually did any research), after which came
the beginnings of civilisation, in which rich layabouts quit even pretending
to look busy and just layabout looking rich. But don’t think their slaves
were working that hard either! All the slaves ever really did was feed
grapes to reclining fat men in togas or pour asses milk into the baths of
sexy queens. A doddle, really. The slaves would make themselves look
busy by chaining themselves together and playing tug-o-war. In their
spare time, they built temples and pyramids.
Then came the era of serfs, in which men and women would crouch down
in fields, amongst the crops, and pretend to be tilling or hoeing or
somethingorothering the harvest. But actually, instead of working, serfs
were just lying around in the sun, getting an even tan, and thinking
about pictures of Jessica Simpson. Their owners weren’t doing anything
either. But then owners never do. I mean, how hard can owning be?
After serfdom died out, along with all the serfs, industrial revolutions
swept across the entire known world (people had still not heard of
Andorra, and many of us still haven’t). Factories sprung out of nowhere,
when no one had built them. Giant chimneys poked up into the sky like
giant chimneys poking up into the skies. Dark satanic mills peppered the
landscape bellowing out soot and sometimes probably even that green
toxic looking gas that always appears in superhero cartoons, though
maybe not (my chemistry is shaky).
We hear a lot of stories about factory children who got eaten by these
giant knitting machines, or women who lost their hand trying to save
their children, and still put in overtime! But all of these stories are lies,
made up by bored historians and sensitive playwrights. Think about it:
how would having loads of machines around to do all the work for you
actually increase your workload? As if! All those old photographs you see
of downtrodden workers drinking stout with grimy faces hide the truth,
which is that in those days wearing lots of foundation was de rigueur.
Those pictures are actually of the aristocracy!
Things then started to get tricky with the invention of offices, in which
men (especially) were expected to turn up each day and work hard by
sitting still behind a desk. Back then, of course, there wasn’t much on
those desks, except ink wells, ink blots, carbon ribbon copytape and
money bills the size of unfolded road atlases, so it was pretty difficult to
hide behind anything except money and pretend to be busy.
Things reached a crisis point after the First World War when office
workers were forced against their will to abandon the trenches and sit
quietly on hard chairs, looking productive. The Twenties were a
particularly hard time, not least because there were so many great
parties and so many hangovers, but you weren’t allowed to talk about
them with friends on IM.
Then, finally, a man called the Milton Bradley Company came to the
rescue of Western Civilisation by inventing the game Battleships. It’s hard
to know how many millions of hours would not have been wasted in the
decades that followed had Battleships not existed. Especially seeing as
how Jessica Simpson was not born yet.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2007
Also by Dominic Hilton:
hundreds of sullen-looking workers forwarding each other viral emails, and
I started to wonder: what on earth did people do before computers were
invented?
I don’t mean, how did anyone get anything done? I mean, how did
anyone not get anything done?
These days, thanks to the internet, there are zillions of ways to look like
you are a grown-up professional busy working for a respected company
when in fact you are:
a) recovering from a hangover
b) telling everyone you know how hungover you are
c) planning your next hangover
Not to rub it in, but the basic truth about the new service economy is
that there’s not really enough work in the world to go round, and simply
no useful role for someone like you. This is why 99% of us have jobs in
which we spend the entire day huddled behind a monitor either:
a) IMing our friends about what a cretin our boss is
b) surfing the web for images of Jessica Simpson
c) sniggering at hilarious pictures of horses dressed as scuba divers
We do this because we know all too well that the best way to lose our
job, and therefore our house, car, dog and surgically-enhanced spouse,
is to actually try and do something with our job. That would be a huge
mistake and almost always leads to somebody getting fired, usually you.
The only way to hold down your job (not to mention your surgically-
enhanced spouse) is to spend every working hour sending your friends
pictures of Jessica Simpson, even though they probably sent you the
same pictures yesterday. And so what I’m wondering is: how did anybody
ever hold down a job in the days before forwarding pictures of Jessica
Simpson became the central function of all Western economies?
Here are just some of the things I found in the course of my investigation:
Back in the Pleistocene, Pliocene and Miocene eras (i.e. yonks ago),
when office workers spent a good deal of their time up in trees,
timewasting was still rather primitive. Early man (or Middlemanagerthals)
used to pretend to be on the lookout for mastodons and woolly
mammoths, when in fact they were busy thinking about pictures of
Jessica Simpson.
This prehistoric form of timewasting had catastrophic consequences and
would often result in office-workers getting eaten or squashed.
By the time the Ice or Bronze or Stone Age came around, man had
become considerably more adept at pretending to be busy. Men, in
particular, would invent tools that they’d tell their wives took years of
great craftsmanship to build and perfect, when in fact they were just
small lumps of heavy stuff with a point on the end. If any of the women
got suspicious and, say, followed the men to ‘work’ only to catch them
huddling around a warm campfire playing cards with their buddies and
laughing at how their wives thought they were busy progressing and
stuff, the men would just plant their sharp objects into the women’s
skulls.
This practice lasted for many hundreds or thousands or millions of years
(depending on whether you actually did any research), after which came
the beginnings of civilisation, in which rich layabouts quit even pretending
to look busy and just layabout looking rich. But don’t think their slaves
were working that hard either! All the slaves ever really did was feed
grapes to reclining fat men in togas or pour asses milk into the baths of
sexy queens. A doddle, really. The slaves would make themselves look
busy by chaining themselves together and playing tug-o-war. In their
spare time, they built temples and pyramids.
Then came the era of serfs, in which men and women would crouch down
in fields, amongst the crops, and pretend to be tilling or hoeing or
somethingorothering the harvest. But actually, instead of working, serfs
were just lying around in the sun, getting an even tan, and thinking
about pictures of Jessica Simpson. Their owners weren’t doing anything
either. But then owners never do. I mean, how hard can owning be?
After serfdom died out, along with all the serfs, industrial revolutions
swept across the entire known world (people had still not heard of
Andorra, and many of us still haven’t). Factories sprung out of nowhere,
when no one had built them. Giant chimneys poked up into the sky like
giant chimneys poking up into the skies. Dark satanic mills peppered the
landscape bellowing out soot and sometimes probably even that green
toxic looking gas that always appears in superhero cartoons, though
maybe not (my chemistry is shaky).
We hear a lot of stories about factory children who got eaten by these
giant knitting machines, or women who lost their hand trying to save
their children, and still put in overtime! But all of these stories are lies,
made up by bored historians and sensitive playwrights. Think about it:
how would having loads of machines around to do all the work for you
actually increase your workload? As if! All those old photographs you see
of downtrodden workers drinking stout with grimy faces hide the truth,
which is that in those days wearing lots of foundation was de rigueur.
Those pictures are actually of the aristocracy!
Things then started to get tricky with the invention of offices, in which
men (especially) were expected to turn up each day and work hard by
sitting still behind a desk. Back then, of course, there wasn’t much on
those desks, except ink wells, ink blots, carbon ribbon copytape and
money bills the size of unfolded road atlases, so it was pretty difficult to
hide behind anything except money and pretend to be busy.
Things reached a crisis point after the First World War when office
workers were forced against their will to abandon the trenches and sit
quietly on hard chairs, looking productive. The Twenties were a
particularly hard time, not least because there were so many great
parties and so many hangovers, but you weren’t allowed to talk about
them with friends on IM.
Then, finally, a man called the Milton Bradley Company came to the
rescue of Western Civilisation by inventing the game Battleships. It’s hard
to know how many millions of hours would not have been wasted in the
decades that followed had Battleships not existed. Especially seeing as
how Jessica Simpson was not born yet.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2007
Also by Dominic Hilton:
- How to speak Footballese
- The importance of not being Earnest
- The Truth About Britney Spears and Me
- Lions and Tigers and Great Bears, Oh My!
- Why is English football so *!?@#!% *!@#?
- It's winter, but don't be SAD
- This computer hates you
- Norman Mailer has ruined my career
- My predictions for future British sporting success
- Thank Gord there's not an election
| Updated at least 26½ times a day |
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