Dogbert’s Whip

For almost a year now, I’ve tried so hard to beat out the call time of my company—an inhuman and ungodly hour of 7:00 in the morning. I have succeeded on a number of occasions, but have obviously failed miserably for the most part.

To justify my habitual tardiness, I once argued that it takes so much time to travel from my boarding house in UP Diliman to my workplace at the Citibank Towers in Makati City. The problem is, this excuse is so flimsy that a number of arguments could easily quash it. These arguments could be lumped into three main bullets:

1. The company’s early call time is meant to avoid the early morning rush that clogs Manila’s thoroughfares by mid-morning. And since the Metropolitan Railway Transport (MRT) takes less than 20 minutes to travel from the Quezon Ave. Station to the Buendia Station, there’s no reason for me to be late if I leave home an hour before seven.

2. A good number of my workmates live in places considerably farther than Quezon City but still manage to get in the office on time. For instance, my boss hails from a far-flung town somewhere in Rizal province and yet, he’s consistently the first person to report for work everyday (gasp!).

3. This is a personal favorite of mine: My contract requires me to report for work from 7AM-4PM on weekdays, and I’m supposed to follow this unconditionally or risk increasing the unemployment rate of this country. In other words, it’s comply or “We’ll kick your butt out of here.” It doesn’t get simpler than that.

As far as I can remember, I was never the prompt kind. Back in grade school, teachers would often tell us that “The early bird gets the worm.” Somehow, being the cynical and rebellious person that I am, I never really cared if I won’t get the worm. Even at a young age, I found it rather disgusting that adults had to lie about birds feasting exclusively on wriggly annelids. I guess the Combantrin commercials aired on television made a huge impact on my formative years.

I must admit that that I could’ve done or achieved more, whether these are higher grades or better job performance reviews, if not for my recurring tardiness. But the inner procrastinator in me rationalize the misdeed by concurring that although I raise eyebrows when I dash to the office all sweaty and rumpled, at least I kick ass with my performance (or so I think). And certainly, there’s nothing more satisfying than getting the most out of my nightly dates with the Sandman.

Any normal human being who slaves through work or school would agree that one entry that should merit space in any self-help book is this: “Weekdays are meant to be excruciatingly boring and slow.”

It’s quite baffling why time seems to pass slower on days starting with letters other than ‘S.’ On some particularly boring days in the office, I’m tempted to think that Einstein erred when he formulated his Theory of Relativity. One needs not to travel at the speed of light (that’s a ‘measly’ 300 million miles per second) to make the transit of time appear slower to a stationary observer. Motivating one’s self to accomplishing artificial deadlines on weekdays would have similar effects on time. And you won’t need a keen proficiency in differential calculus to know why.

Unless your folks have ventured to highly-profitable businesses using capital gained from organized crime or politics, skipping workdays is never an option. For one, people in the workforce are aware that companies compensate their employees for about eight hours they spend working. Not counting inevitable overtime work, this ‘work time’ usually translates to ONLY about an hour or two of deceptive tapping of the computer keyboard. The rest of the time is spent on meals, sipping hot cups of caffeinated drinks, staring at dead air, logging on to Friendster and countless other web sites, and gossiping about the latest twists and turns of those cheesy ‘Koreanovelas’ that everybody seems to fancy these days.

Along with dysfunctional personal relationships, corrupt government officials, and society’s other ills, weekdays are probably one of the proverbial crosses that people have to contend with everyday. While some ambitious overachievers in school and a couple of nosy suck-ups in the workplace relish those dog gone weekdays, most of us do not. But through it all, if whatever we do on weekdays support or will eventually lead us to the life we’ve always dreamed of, then it’s probably healthy if we just stop whining and get our hineys back to work. But if it doesn’t, then tough luck. We’d just take what most Catholic priests preach in their sermons:

“A barefoot Jesus carried a gigantic cross all the way to a hill in Golgotha on a blistering day. He was jeered, whipped, and hit with stones. He was barbarically crucified afterwards to absolve mankind’s sins…”

So there you go — weekdays or mankind’s sins. Which cross would you rather carry? Yeah, right. Whatever. But elsewhere around the globe, the avid believers of Buddha or Mohammed or Brahma or ‘Deity Whoever’ have their own tales to share.