9 to 5

I know that I'm not the only one out there, but I really am not a fan of the 9-5 work schedule. If I had my way there would be no such thing in the world of offices. The concept of everyone working basically the same hours doesn't work for anyone. That means if you need a doctors appointment, or need to have some work done at your house that you need to be around for you options consist of either taking time off of work to accomplish your tasks or trying to cramp it all into the weekends when few medical offices are open and the stores are crammed with people. The 9-5 slog also makes for worse traffic for everyone. Especially in a city with little transit, having 80% of the population on the roads at the same time makes little sense.

When you add into the mix families with children, you have an even bigger challenge of either having kids home alone while the parent's are still at work (since no K-12 school is in session beyond 5pm), having to pay for child care, or forced to only work part time at most in order to make sure that an adult is available for when the kids are out of school. There is no winning solution, other than perhaps changing the normal business hours. For me, my preferred schedule would to work only four days a week, but work 10 hour days - two on, one off, two on, two off, etc. I'm not one who likes routine, I hate being interrupted from my work flow for a meaningless mandatory 15 minute break, and I find I get the most done when there are not necessarily other people around. That schedule won't work too well in the future with kids, but if I shaved it down to 30-35 hours still only four days a week that would work.

Everyone on the roads at the same time means that everyone takes longer to get to their final destination, everyone wastes more fuel getting there, and everyone is crankier - which in turn makes you question why bother going through the routine at all. Some days there is nothing you can do to keep up, no matter what sort of job it is, while others you feel like you are just wasting your time (or the company's money) just waiting for the clock to say you can go. Sales, customer services, sanitation, health care, construction, gardening, you name it and the routine will not always serve you well. Mostly it just serves the almighty dollar.

I  remember hearing once the difference between East Coast and West Coast US work mentalities. East Coast: live to work. West Coast: work to live. I'd like to think that the West Coast mentality at least gives the option of escaping to a life where you don't need to work the standard schedule. These days of supposed economic leaness makes it even harder to escape. Employees who are underemployed can't look for something else because they are told that they should feel lucky that they even have a job. Employers are told they had better not hire more people or else they risk their profits. It's a no win cycle keeping both halves under-performing. What motivation is there to work hard and advance if companies are too timid to take risks with their profit margins, and what motivation is there to hire new talent if that talent is unwilling to risk moving up? Sometimes if feels as if the career path is more of a corn maze than a road map: you think you know where you are going until you get stuck in a dead end or in an endless loop. There is little help to get out of the maze if you don't know the right people, make the right connections. That's partly why the mentality in this country towards the poor is so horrid. We expect everyone to be  able to work hard and advance and if you fail at that its because you didn't try hard enough. Only we forget about how much networking is involved, how you need to know someone inside to even get an interview these days, and how the last hired is most often the first fired. There are many factors working against us and it takes more than your own bootstraps to keep afloat these days.

I suppose if we all just lived to work it wouldn't matter that we were caught in a maze of corporate bureaucracy. Maybe if we all were working at jobs that made us not mind the junk that comes with it - office politics, gossips, deadlines and surprise projects, we might then find that bridge in the middle that gives a vantage point, a place to regain your sense of direction.  All jobs are just another four letter word... the goal is to find something that elevates the experience above the mundane. I can't say that I've found that yet, but I'm relatively young still. I've got time to ride out this supposed recession. Lets just hope that is doesn't stunt my growth.