Eating into my rest time...

Earlier this week I was put through an induction process in order to be given a site badge for a global customer of ours. Nothing unusual about that, you might say... just another wretched photo ID badge to leave behind at home on the wrong day. The ritual brainwashing was, this time, a little different. This particular company has a more refreshingly honest approach to the European Working Time directive.

For example:

(3) Time-off - Daily Rest. A worker has a right to 11 hours uninterrupted rest a day, between shifts/work patterns

(4) Time-off - Weekly rest. A worker has the right to one day off in every week, but can be averaged over two weeks - e.g. 2 days a fortnight

Now working includes "working lunches, travel as part of their work, job related training, on call when required to be at the place of work', but does not include include travel between home and work, or rest breaks (a concept I'm not sure I understand anyway!) The working lunch is a well known curse, and the clogging up of laptop keyboards with baguette crumbs is a well known hazard of the workplace these days.

Once I take my 4 hours of commute (non working time) from my rightful 11 hours of rest, I'm left with 7 hours to myself. It's merciful that I get by on six hours of sleep a day, or I'd never have time for a shower and a shave.

This leaves me thinking that the Working Time Directive enables me put in 78 hours a week, while commuting for a further 20 hours, enjoying a day to myself on a Sunday before getting another 42 hours rest the following week.

At least they're honest! The small print about the 48 hour 'maximum is just that, small print.

It's an interesting fact that when I first joined the industry, 32 years ago, we worked a strict 37 hours week, had no laptops so couldn't take our work home, no mobile phones or Blackberries, and yet it really does seem that we were at least three times as productive as we are today... What's going on here?!

Rip Van Treescaper stirs...

... did I drop off just now? So it's 2008 eh?

It's been an 'interesting' couple of months or so re-living a game from my youth. Long ago and far away, in the days before the X-Box, the Wii, the Playstation or the bicycle helmet, my mates and I used to hurtle around the town hanging onto the backs of buses and trucks to supplement peddle power - clearly the forerunner of the modern hybrids and dual fuel vehicles. While we were ahead of our time in some respects, we were also frequently to be found deeply immersed in that age old role playing strategy game, 'Cowboys and Indians'. This memory has haunted me recently, though with undeniably incorrect political overtones. My first visit to the Great Sub-continent - the subject of the previous post - was followed by my first visit to the Bible Belt of Oklahoma. Since then, my working day has split between contacts five and a half hours to the east and six hours to the west - culture shock in both directions.

Call it escapism if you like, but there's something about Tulsa that fascinates me. Much of what was there in the twenties has been razed to the ground and turned into parking lots, but there are still a few real art deco gems in the buildings that remain.

Having played with this blog for a week or two last year, I've decided that it would be a useful distraction from the daily frustrations of corporate information technology and the equally incomprehensible challenges which appear to be associated with my private life! I am increasingly finding escape from both by walking and taking photographs. The former requires no technology other than a stout pair of boots - my refusal to indulge in GPS toys will be as sincere as my resolve to go to my grave never having seen the Sound of Music. Photography, on the other hand, has become a complete overdose of technology in this digital age. In its defence, the Nikon D200 that I've been using for the past two years is still a beautiful piece of kit which never fails to impress me. I've not felt so much at one with a camera since I bought an Olympus OM1 - the ultimate manual mechanical SLR camera - a few short weeks before my daughter was born in 1981.

But I'm rambling! While out walking and taking photographs, I find myself reflecting on a wide variety of subjects and putting them to rights. Where printable, some of these ramblings I'll commit to his page, interspersed with a few pictures. Sometimes, a picture just 'works' for me, and some of these I'm going to put up in future posts.

This one is not the best side of one of Tulsa's downtown buildings, but it got me thinking of the good ole 'Red White and Blue' - colours that we share with the US, and in a way also with India. To misquote George Bernard Shaw, "Three countries separated by a common language."

'Cowboys and Indians' is the new player in the game of IT outsourcing.... with the UK stuck in the middle, wondering where the hell colonial power ended up...!