Whose time is it anyway?

I get battle-ready on the first day of every month....
To join pensioners and sundry other unfortunates at the queue at our friendly neighborhood Post Office..
The pensioners come armed with their tiffin boxes ..wife in tow with thermos in hand...for back-up support...ready for the Long Wait ahead...
I arm myself with patience, steel myself to boorish behavior and sharpen my tongue in readiness for repartee....

Truly, there can be no greater leveler than the Post Office queue.. other than Death of course...
I watch as Prince and pauper are treated alike, with equal contempt..
"Pass-book update? Look at the queue behind you...no time now..come at 3.30," the counter clerk tells the old gent ahead of me after he has waited a whole hour in line..it is only 11.30 am now...he walks away...to fight is useless he knows....
"Next"...
My turn now..I approach the Bench..
In trepidation...
Anxious..
Prepared to answer all questions.....
With my flawless convent English accent...that should throw her..
And I will be firm... Verrry FIRM.....
She searches through three ledgers until she finds the moth-eaten page with my accounts.. makes an entry, signs it..passes it on to the Post master...who by some strange miracle is not in the middle of his tea break..he initials it...enters it in his little red book and then it is all over...the deed is done.....

Phew!!!!
50 minutes to withdraw Rs 5000/- of MY OWN MONEY!!!!
I have the math done in my head.. that's a wait of 1 minute for every Rs 100 withdrawn...
And this does not include the 35 minutes I waited until the clerk bustled in...late as usual...or maybe this is her usual time..

Hey, I am a GOVERNMENT employee, not your personal servant...I help run this country...it's a tiring job......I cannot always be on time........you want your job done??...then wait for it...I'll show you who's boss here...take up my time will you? I'll have my revenge by squandering yours....the counter clerk's body language seems to say..

It is the last thought that irks me the most...my time..I have to waste large swathes of it every time I come in contact with officialdom..

The time-work correlation as well as attitudes to time have changed and will keep changing as a brief history of time will tell...

Family saga has it that in the early 1900s, my Paternal Grandfather, stayed at his own wedding just long enough to tie the thali around his young bride's neck.... the groom quickly shed his garland, adjusted his turban, wore his overcoat and made it to First Line Beach to be at his desk at Ye Olde Bank of Madras when the counters opened for business that day....he gave his Time and his commitment to the Bank...willingly...it was his life...nay his very soul..

Fast forward to the fifties, my father worked for a bank too..he was always at THE BANK...interesting things happened at THE BANK....interesting people came to visit him at THE BANK..like a Geiger counter he detected the frauds, tricksters and cheats and threw them out of THE BANK ..every day brought a new challenge and he came home to regale us in the evening with his exploits at THE BANK that day...
It was his life and by extension, ours too...

So much so that as a child I thought that boys grew up, studied and then went to work at THE BANK...
And girls grew up, studied and married someone who worked at THE BANK....
Needless to say, it was quite a shock to me at age four, when I heard that there were career options other than the bank...some of my nursery pals had fathers who were doctors, teachers, lawyers, police officers, landlords...but of course THE BANK was the best of all...Amen.

And now me!!!
I was a true child of the Seventies, in spirit, if nothing else...
The Beatles sang of Revolution..
At the convent school that I attended, I along with a group of other 15 year olds rued the fact that we were not born in that great land, the US of A..
Then we would been at Woodstock.....definitely...
Then we would have hung out with other groovy people at Greenwich Village...
Then we would have hitch-hiked to Haight-Ashbury...this from girls who were not allowed to even ride a rickshaw alone!!!!...
Smoked pot...when the only kind we dared have access to was definitely of the clay variety!!!!..
Hooked Paul McCartney....at a time when good girls from good families were not encouraged to laugh out loud!!!
Or at least had his babies..
Out of wedlock???!!! Of course!! This from babes who just did not get it until told by their peers in rather crude terms: the v-g--a is the middle of the three holes we girls have down there STUPID!!!
Dressed like hippies..nay become hippies and toured the world in a hippie style caravan...
Freedom..Freedom...sang Richie Havens and we sang along
Time was all ours..
We could do with it as we pleased...

Strangely, Indira Nooyi, now CEO of Pepsico also attended school in Madras at about the same time...she came away without imbibing similar woolly-headed notions of life...needless to add, she was not a student of OUR convent...

I took this work for the love of it to my work place.
Work was everything.. it had to be perfect...creative...reflecting the superiority of my mind....an end in itself...
Time???...you took as much time as the work needed....besides I loved the work...

At my first job, which I joined on the the 25th of the month..I couldn't believe it when they paid me for those five days...
Keep the change..I almost told them....now giddy, in addition to being woolly headed!!!!!

Articles in magazines extolled this idea of working for the love of work alone and pay be damned...
It took me a while to figure out that these articles were actually put out by the Skinflint Employers Association and their minions, whose numbers were surely legion...I then tried my hand at hard bargaining...time was money...and my time was certainly a lot of money...or at least should be!!!

In Chennai today, in BPOs and sundry other outsourcing establishments, employees are not only aware of US time, UK time...but also of Company time and how it is so different from Personal time..

At the Sweatshop,
Employees are subjected to weekly and monthly lectures on such fine differences.....nine to five fifteen at least is certainly company time....every micro-second of it....
So we frown on personal phone calls received on personal mobile phones in company time...even if your house is on fire...
We frown on lingering over lunch...
We frown on extra long pee-breaks...
And we watch your body language..
And we hear your thoughts..
Quantity is everything..
Creative juices?? You can just go and can those...if you can find some tins!!!

And so we come back to the old question..Whose time is it anyway???
I think:
Time belongs to whoever takes charge of it...
QED....

Gotta go take charge of it...Just be there and do that...yeah!!!