The four o'clock hour
By the time four o'clock strikes during the average work day, the marvelous muscle called the brain has reached fatigue.
Unfortunately, it is not proper etiquette to spend the last hour of the day staring at the clock on the computer nor rearranging the books on your desk according to size and then color and back again.
As a matter of fact, the general expectation is that you will continue working right up until 5.
So at 3:30 you begin looking at the mountain of work and deciding whether it would be wise to start this project or that project or whether this might actually be an appropriate time to change the labels on the recycled folders in your file system so they give helpful information like "Letters", "Reference Articles", and "International Records" instead of "California", "Ataxia", and "November 19-26".
And beginning in on the pile most likely to fit into the remaining time, you keep one eye on the clock, and hope no one requires anything more of you.
But of course, that doesn't happen. No, because there are those who, for some reason, think that the best time of the day to call and talk for half an hour or forty-five minutes is 4:25. And it gets to the point that you hear the phone ring at the reception desk on the floor below you and all senses go on alert, hoping that some other person will be the lucky winner. But no. Your phone rings and the receptionist says "It's 4:25. Guess who wants to talk to you?"
I'm sure that at some other point in the day you might have the mental dexterity to manage cutting a phone call down to a reasonable fifteen minutes instead of 45, but during the four o'clock hour, there is no hope for such a thing.
And so you sit in the middle of a pile of papers, the phone pinned to your ear, watching the minutes tick by on the clock and hope desperately that your brainless verbal grunting has not been interpreted as approval.
Unfortunately, it is not proper etiquette to spend the last hour of the day staring at the clock on the computer nor rearranging the books on your desk according to size and then color and back again.
As a matter of fact, the general expectation is that you will continue working right up until 5.
So at 3:30 you begin looking at the mountain of work and deciding whether it would be wise to start this project or that project or whether this might actually be an appropriate time to change the labels on the recycled folders in your file system so they give helpful information like "Letters", "Reference Articles", and "International Records" instead of "California", "Ataxia", and "November 19-26".
And beginning in on the pile most likely to fit into the remaining time, you keep one eye on the clock, and hope no one requires anything more of you.
But of course, that doesn't happen. No, because there are those who, for some reason, think that the best time of the day to call and talk for half an hour or forty-five minutes is 4:25. And it gets to the point that you hear the phone ring at the reception desk on the floor below you and all senses go on alert, hoping that some other person will be the lucky winner. But no. Your phone rings and the receptionist says "It's 4:25. Guess who wants to talk to you?"
I'm sure that at some other point in the day you might have the mental dexterity to manage cutting a phone call down to a reasonable fifteen minutes instead of 45, but during the four o'clock hour, there is no hope for such a thing.
And so you sit in the middle of a pile of papers, the phone pinned to your ear, watching the minutes tick by on the clock and hope desperately that your brainless verbal grunting has not been interpreted as approval.
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