The intended definition of time is that it is part of a measuring system used to organize events into a sequence, create a sense of order and specify duration between events, and enable comparisons between durations and intervals.
Somewhere along the way, duration of time became the basis of assigning and judging value. People traded based on how long a duration of valuable services were given and received. The concept came with both rewards and abuses. Tales of doctors who take up your valuable time by making you wait excessively to see them and lawyers who bill for seemingly impossible numbers of hours for services are commonplace enough to make your ears glaze over with each telling.
Then came the Age of Information. Time and duration intervals previously known only to exist in the scientific crowd suddenly entered everyone’s daily language – milliseconds, nanoseconds, megaherz, megamillions powerball, and more.
Durations are now shorter and shorter and people get involved in more and more things to fill each interval. A family’s schedule is full and overlapping, an endless and on-going attempt to orchestrate impossibility. Any successfully completed event is met with smug self-acknowledgement of how well we can multitask.
People understand a negligible amount of what lays behind technology and science, but they sure do love the vocabulary. Multitasking! Women do it better than men! Men can’t do it at all! Only men can do this job because it requires multitasking!! I can do it and you can do it, too, if you you read my blog, buy my book, watch my infomercial!
As with most things, if folks truly understood what it meant, the word would never be used again in common conversation.
Instead, the concept has been assimilated and redefined for mass consumption, and with it appears that the very nature of time itself is changed.
Nowhere is this any more apparent as it is in the world of Major Technology Consulting Sevices. We have not only organically leveraged our synergies and extended our core competencies with value-driven values derived from our best shore approaches to continuously improve upon customer satisfaction experience through extension of the wait periods of the dreaded doctor’s visit and hours billed at numbers that lawyers do not (yet) know the names for, we have changed the very perception of time itself.
Terms like second, minute, hour no longer are part of a system of measurement, created to bring order between events. They are now physical objects in space that have all the attendant properties such as mass, shape, velocity, and so on, unrelated to one another. The only carry-over from the out-dated way of viewing time is its limitlessness.
I didn’t go very far in math and went too far for my ability in physics. My ability to understand marketing is nil and that is what causes me the most difficulty understanding these new concepts. What I have gleaned from it all so far is that these newly acquired physical properties can be defined thusly: a minute is a polygon with n-sides, where n is my current task load in a specified interval, which is made up of a whole lot of little intervals that are just like it, combining into bigger intervals with even more stuff just like all the others. n-1 is the maximum real number of tasks I can accomplish during any one of those interval thingies, but is of no consequence. Furthermore, the value of n increases exponentially over time.
The most obvious flaw with that concept is that if I should ever reach a state of having nothing to do in any interval, it would then become an object with a negative number of sides and many new books, blogs, social sciences, and hyperventilating consultancies would have to brought in to quickly explain The New Multitasking.
The folks I work with would never let that stop them, though. We’d just have to modify the billing system. Won’t take long at all.
Every now and then in the last few weeks, I have managed to assign one of those n-1’s to hawking and slipped out. Nothing big happening, but leaves are gone and it’s looking better out there.
The hawks are doing well, even though Charlie clearly is not our President-elect. He did finish a close second to the Republican guy in our middle school’s 6th grade. He probably would have won if we started campaigning sooner.
Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we could really put any effort into it.