Time

When does anybody have the time?

I’m applying for permanent teaching jobs. Most of them are lengthy essay style questions. It takes me from one to three hours to complete an application.

What do people do when they need to apply for jobs whilst currently working full time?

And I don’t mean the old style full time where you worked 9-5 with a generous lunch break in an office somewhere; twiddling your thumbs, sending the odd email and generally pratting around in front of your boss in a sheer blouse. The old style of full time where you could do all of this for a liveable wage; enough for a mortgage and a pension payment. Where you could walk out the door Friday and not think about your job again until Monday morning.

No sirreee, I mean the modern full time.

The full time that has you pulling 45 hours a week at work, another 10 doing homework and a generous commute thanks to ‘umbrella companies’ building ‘flexible location’ working into their contracts. The full time that has you walking away to pick up your kids from nurseries and childminders knowing you’re 10 minutes after last pick up and you still have to check those [insert appropriate task]. The full time that has you thinking about work when you’re in the pub. Minding your P’s & Q’s. Watching what gets said or whose pictures you might end up in. You don’t get a personal life anymore. Social media and the threat of job security, has removed many rights of free speech. I wonder if anyone more clever than me has thought this and maybe looked into it.

There isn’t any time.

We outsource our home admin. Or ignore it altogether. We have to. We work full time, we don’t have time to keep a house as well. When a bill needs dealing with, or an accident happens, or a racoon gets stuck in the toilet… these things take time to resolve. Time to clean up after as well. Most couples start off optimistically leaving these things to one weekend a month. But then routine gets upset by racoons or children or family members being unwell and other responsibilities that put demands on your time. Before you know it you’re asking friends to pick up the kids, paying a company to sort your accounts, missing the good switchover deal on your leccy, getting rid of the lawn in favour of something with easier upkeep…

Ordinary people. Normal people. People who pay their bills. People who pay their taxes. These are the people falling into paperwork traps. Falling victim to penalties we didn’t know existed. But ‘oooh it says right there in the contract we update every 6 months! Didn’t you read it?’ say the legal squadrons sent out to deal with the aftermath. Of course they didn’t read it. They don’t have the time. They trusted the companies they had been using, to treat them fairly. But they didn’t and they don’t.

We beg our bosses and our government to give us liveable wages and decent working conditions. They say yes then find other ways to make us pay for them, they make it ours to implement or create a policy on it or use it as a stick to beat us with when we make human mistakes. Because we’re human. And we’re surprised they don’t care when we walk away to find something new? Why should they? If you stay too long, you get extra benefits like extra sick pay, sabbaticals, career breaks, heftier pension contributions, better PAY. Why on earth would any company want you to stay with them? Everything changes all the time anyway, and we’re breeding generations of thinkers and innovators who have spent their childhoods learning how to LEARN. Happy to learn, for a fraction of the wage of some 50 year old with tenure who, quite frankly, would rather be at home in his slippers.

Instead we live with the threat of someone taking our job away. Our security. We don’t hold the power anymore. If anyone walks out, theres a hundred willing to take their place. There’s jobs I never thought I’d accept back when I had a cushty permanent position. I was safe. They couldn’t get rid of me unless they made my work unbearable. Oh wait…

Desperate people will do anything. Scared people will be aware of this yet unable to help themselves, caught in a perpetual state of bunny in headlights, not effective or confident. Confident people will change nothing until it’s too late and they become the desperate ones.

Then the government wonder why the sudden increase in anxiety and depression. When people are becoming increasingly aware of how restricted their lives are. How close to losing it all, we all are. We’re just one minor incident away from losing our job, our house, our life. That’s quite depressing and worrying for most humans. Most humans want and need a bit of security. Even Maslow understood that one.

The answer is time.

We need time.

Technology may have made old house keeping chores easier. But our society has created a whole new set of tasks and challenges that need a clear head and a quiet afternoon. Parents has different challenges. Yes it worked a couple of decades ago. School was relatively unregulated, children were happier, they didn’t have social media stress or exam stress. There was room for adjustment on the working hours of the back-to-work parent. Kids could grow up in houses where both parents worked, and they were FINE. They didn’t have to be watched or checked up on. Everyone would come to the table at dinner time and regale each other with their daily exploits, jobs left at the front door. The white goods in the kitchen will have completed the day’s chores. The childminder will have wizzed the hoover round. The standing order you created 6 years ago to pay your leccy bill was the same as anybody else’s. There’s no need to go hunting for a bit of paper you had in your hand this time last Tuesday, just give them your National Insurance Number, they’ll know it’s you. It just WORKED. All that was left was bedtime, and parents around the globe are aware how much of an ordeal that can be even on the best days.

Not anymore. Nobody would want to talk about their day anymore because most likely it’s awash with tasks that couldn’t be finished; deadlines that close at midnight; social issues surrounding a new pay deal. Kids don’t want to be reminded of the information overload they’ve experienced. And the day probably isn’t over. There will be homework that requires an adult. Or homework that involves items you just don’t keep in the house. There will be phone calls to make to stop the leccy going off, because an electronic payment has gone awry. The bank will call, but they won’t tell you what’s wrong until you give them the 3rd, 7th and last characters of a 13 character password you created 2 years ago and wrote on the back of a receipt somewhere. You’ve got three hundred and thirty emails in your personal email account from the past two days and you know if you don’t phone the doctor between 8.00 and 8.03 tomorrow morning, you won’t get an appointment for another month.

I don’t even have children. Or a full time job. And even I sometimes get to the end of a day that started at 6am, utterly exhausted and drained from all the things I had to do. Just to keep up the charade that is required of me to gain access to society. There just isn’t enough time.