Disillusioned Discordian

Yea it’s a Friday… which means office workers across the country are slacking off. Look at me I’m writing a blog when I should be doing paperwork. Brilliant! This is what it is all about. We work more hours then the rest of Europe and have less holiday so this is just us stealing back some of our time. Of course there are some whiney business types who see all this Friday fun as a threat to their precious profits. I mean honestly how dull is this. Apparently our Friday slacking costs someone £50 Million a year which sounds a lot but when you break it down to and individual worker it can only be a couple of quid a year. Money well wasted in my opinion. This reminds me of a story I read a couple of weeks ago in the Metro. I actually despise the Metro for it’s drip feeding of propaganda to commuters across the country. Anyway this was a story where some loser had actually calculated how much money business lost from workers making coffee on a Monday morning!

Coffee is of course the drug of industry as it makes people more alert and combats our inherent laziness. You would have thought therefore that companies would be happy with their workers imbuing the drug to combat the lack of sleep they suffer. Apparently however the time spent drinking the drug to make you work harder is costing industry money.Anyway to solve the problem some quite spark has created a computer program that tracks the time people have off to detect any ‘slacker patterns’. Of course installing this computer software will cost more then they lose in employers taking time off but that’s not the point. The point is to constantly over work your staff and ensure that they feel like they are being tracked and monitored by big brother throughout their day. We can then as a society achieve Zen Efficiency. Just think, business will flourish, we will have full employment, we will all work without taking breaks, we will never go out drinking on weeknights, Gordon Brown might even smile.. Isn’t it sounding like fun already boys and girls! In fact I’m going to stop blogging right this instance, reform my ways and go and do some filing. After all it is a Friday.

The ethos of being Idle is one that is very close to my heart and for a sustained period I have been involved in some kind of physic struggle against my inherent laziness. I felt I was doing fairly reasonable, despite a few online work avoidance strategies mainly focused around blogging and posting on forums. Now however I have stumbled across How to be Idle by Tom Hodgkins.  Tom’s book may not be as high brow as the thinkers such as Weber, Aristotle, Wordsworth from which the main premise is spun but it re-casts their ideas into the expressive catch-all term of the ‘Idler’. I like thinking of things in this dichotomy of Idler Vs Worker.   

 Reading this book was quite a cathartic experience as I realized that I shouldn’t try and shun and repress my intrinsically idle ways.  Instead I need to develop an effective escape route out of the wage slavery that I have ended up trapped within. A distancing from consumer capitalism and the reification of society is I feel in order. Already I feel more pleased, knowing that my energies are focused on reducing the amount of work I have to partake in. Put simply the reason I’m Disillusioned is that I have made to live in a silly society that encourages working lots and buying things in order to relive the misery induced by working.