So I'm trying to drive home from school at frickin' 3 pm today and run into traffic on the freeway. At 3 pm!!!! It's amazing we get any work done in this country. I think in reality we have like a 30-hour work-week instead of a 40-hour one. I mean think about it, there are always excuses about why work isn't being done. "It's Friday so I'm leaving a little early." SO what? Why can't you start the weekend after the week is supposed to end: at FIVE? "It's Monday so I'm coming in at 10." What, the 2 days off wasn't enough for you? And then after coming in at 10 on Monday, of course there is talk about how the weekend went and before you know it, it's lunch time. Then you go out to lunch, come back and maybe check email for a while. Cuz you know, you can't really work or concentrate cuz you just ate. And then after putzin' around for a few hours, it's time to go home again. Tuesday is when the real work starts. Then Thursday afternoon, people start talking about their weekends at the water cooler, shaving some more time off the afternoons there. So with Monday off, and some hours Thursday and Friday afternoons, that's only like 30 hours of work a week.
And don't get me started on holidays. For Thanksgiving people get Thursday off, so they take Friday off, which makes sense, otherwise you'd have to go to work for just that last Friday before the weekend. But now people take the Wednesday before off too. Pretty soon we'll be having a Thanksgiving week. And what's up with high school proms these days? It used to be you just went to the dance. Then it turned into dinner and dance. Then it turned into a day activity then dance. Now, people leave town on Thursday to go to Disneyland before the dance.
So yeah, it's not just work that suffers, but school too. And in grade school, Mondays are spent with show-and-tell. Then for math, half the time is spent in returning graded papers, so maybe 10 to 15 minutes get spent on a new lesson. And then of course because it's FRIDAY, they watch movies all day. And that's not the only way that education is put on the back-burner in this country. Don't get me started on how I can't park in a parking spot I paid for just because there's a football game at the university that afternoon, and people who want to watch a bunch of guys grunting and running each other down get to park in the lot.
If you want to watch the guys grunting and get beat up, that's fine, hey, I'm not here to tell you how to spend (or waste) your time. Just stop complaining that kids in other countries are smarter than us and take our jobs.
