I’ve been trying to piece together the thought process that led me to be at the office this morning at 8 o’clock. The actual process isn’t terrifically complicated — I woke up earlier; I caught an earlier train — but I’m still not entirely sure why I decided to do that, or what I thought I would accomplish by being half an hour earlier than I am on even my earliest mornings.
Heaven knows I went to sleep earlier again last night, and by the time I woke up in earnest, there wasn’t a lot of time left to do anything but catch a train into Manhattan. I had to be in to work this morning by 9, thanks to a meeting with our sales reps from Kentucky, and that meant I had to be in by 8:30, thanks to the way my local train schedule works. I think I had this idea that I wouldn’t necessarily go to the office straight away, that I would have time to grab a bite to eat for breakfast. But the train was a little late getting in to Penn Station, lurching its way through the tunnel, and by the time I walked uptown I figured, hey, I’m already here. I might as well have the satisfaction of being here before practically anybody else.
There’s not a lot of satisfaction in that, and that first half hour actually goes by pretty fast. The whole day went by really fast, in fact, even though in the end I stayed until 4:30 (instead of leaving half an hour early at 4), and even though I didn’t leave the office for lunch (since that was provided, as part of the meeting). It wasn’t a particularly exciting day, but for an unusually long one, it felt unusually short.
It’s wrong of me to imagine that the sales rep from Kentucky looked and spoke like Foghorn Leghorn, isn’t it?
I’m often at the office about twenty or thirty minutes before the day starts…not really by choice, though, as I’m at the whim of the transit system here. Still, it’s nice to sit and read for a little bit, or even write.
I dunno…is it wrong for me to imagine every sentence in Canada punctuated with an eh or ya hoser? 😉 In reality, I don’t think either of our two reps even have Southern accents. They may not be from Kentucky originally.
We have flexible hours here, so, in theory, I could arrive any time between 7 and 9, and then leave any time between 3 and 5. Most people work a 9 to 5 (or 8:30 to 4:30) day, however. Because of the way my train works, I’m either in at 8:30 or 9:15. I’ve done the 9:15 thing sometimes — I am weak and prone to sleepiness — and then made up for it with a shorter lunch, or working past 5. But the meeting started at 9 sharp yesterday, so that wasn’t an option.
I probably should have done some reading or writing with that extra half hour, but all I ended up doing was scanning some figures for one of our production managers in the UK.
That there, the fact that we’re a global company with half our group in England, throws a whole other wrinkle in the mix.
To be fair, I say ‘eh’ all the time. But not ‘ya hoser.’ We don’t have flexible hours, so I have the option of being in early or squeaking in at 8:29. And though I sometimes end up with the latter because of traffic, I almost always choose the former. Much easier to just sit quietly in my cubicle for twenty minutes or so than to dash in from the bus stop.