hours

i typically get to my office at 9 am and stay until 6 pm. i probably eat lunch, on average, for 45 minutes; never in front of my computer.  with vacation and other time off that means 8 hours in the office every day, 5 days a week, let's say 230 days a year for a total of about 1,800 hours. a year is 8,760 hours minus sleep (2,352 hours) so i have 6,408 waking hours left minus 1,800 that is 4,608 for everything other than work and sleep including taking showers, eating, going to the bathroom, etc. this is considered pretty good. science shows that regularly working over 40 hours a week is really bad for you. unlike the people i am surrounded by, i don't do that. still, i spend proportionally way more time in an office than any other place except for bed. and when you can't quite love the one that you have, you wonder...what else could those 1,800 hours (108,000 minutes) be better used for?

today at about 6:30 pm, i was contemplating this question, feeling bad for myself on account of some idiocy at work, when an unusually chatty Mexican delivery guy asked me in the elevator if i was coming home from work. then he told me he regularly works 12 hours a day, until midnight, almost every day of the year. it's pretty safe to assume he gets no benefits.