Anybody See Where June Went?

It's hard to believe, but tomorrow is the last day of June. Today, of course, is the penultimate day. Heh.

Seriously though, the older I get, the faster time seems to go by. Well, time in terms of months seems to go by rather quickly. Time on a normal workday goes by with amazing slowness. I'm thinking that each day still consists of 24 hours, it's just that time isn't really linear. You'd think that one hour would be pretty much the same as any other hour wouldn't you?

But picture yourself in a meeting, or a conference. A really boring meeting. Like one of these -

Each minute spent in one of these feels like days, no years. When I've been in these meetings I imagine that if I could watch the outdoors, I would see time go by like in one of those time lapse sequences. For instance, here's how time moves for the rest of the world while we're stuck in some boring meeting.

(That is a pretty cool video, neh?)

But if you want time to speed up, well that's easy. Just go on vacation. Where one day feels like 5 minutes. You take two weeks off and before you know it, it's Monday morning, you're driving in to your place of work and moments later, everyone is wondering why you're standing in the parking lot screaming "No!". Over and over and over and over.

Now there are days at work when time goes by very quickly. Particularly when the high ups want something done in a most expeditious manner. Say you have five hours until the deadline. You check the time, it's 8 in the morning. So you start to work on whatever it is the bosses want.

Then the next time you look up, 4 and a half hours have gone by. What the heck? But I'm not done yet. Where did the time go?

On the other hand, here's how Mondays at work usually go:

1. Arrive at work, boot up computer - 10 minutes elapsed
2. Go get coffee - another 10 minutes elapsed
3. Start reading the specifications for the new project you've just started, time is 0800
4. What seems like hours pass, you've gone through dozens of pages of schematics and requirements, you check the time - it's 0815. Fifteen minutes have elapsed.

And so goes the entire day. Time does seem to speed up as Wednesday approaches, but not to worry. It will slow right down again until Friday finally arrives, with glacial slowness.

So my theory is that each minute spent at work is approximately one-one hundredth of a second outside of work. That's why being 8 hours at work feels really long and why sleeping for 8 hours feels really fast. And where does that other 8 hours in a day get spent? Why can I seldom fully account for that other 8 hours.

Oh yeah, time spent getting ready for work or getting ready for bed. Time spent eating and attending to various and sundry other things which Nature demands. Then of course, there's reading, blogging, television, radio, listening to music and whatever else one does to entertain one's mind.

Anyhow, my fuel low level light is flashing, time to hit the tanker.

Bis morgen!