From some Spanish chick SOTI about her country’s lifestyle:
‘Everything slows down in the afternoon heat. Between 2pm and 5pm, shops close, streets empty, and we like to rest up.
‘Embrace our slower afternoons and you’ll have more energy to enjoy dinner the Spanish way; late, leisurely, and alfresco at 10pm.’
I have to say that when I went to Chile — where they have the same outlook — I grew to love that way of doing things. Granted, it’s not the best business practice, and you can mock it all you want, but it sure as hell is more restful. I loved that when we Americanos went out for dinner at 7pm, we found most restaurants still closed or at best staffed only with people cleaning the place. Two hours later and there’d be a queue of hungry Chileans with their families waiting for a table. Then after the meal — which would end at about 10.30pm — the streets were filled with people strolling about the streets, or going home. Bedtime, I would guess, was no earlier than 11pm, maybe later.
Small wonder that their workday only begins after 9am.
One of the worst aspects of our Murkin work ethic is that nonsense about eating lunch at your desk. Apart from being a filthy habit — sauces and crumbs scattered all over the place — it denies the necessity of taking a break from work. When I was working for Big Corporations, I never had a lunch break of less than an hour, unless there was a deadline looming in which case I just didn’t eat at all and worked through lunchtime. But those situations were few and far between, because I planned my workload efficiently to account for a long lunch. I might have worked late — sometimes past midnight — but only during crunch times.
Over Here? Don’t ask. Work, work work, even for a shitty wage, and annual vacations that are totally inadequate for allowing people to take a proper break from the grind. Ten working days / two weeks? What a load of crock. Whenever I hear about some asshole saying proudly that he hasn’t taken a break from work for ten years, I want to kick his ass.
And we wonder why some people burn out.
I don’t want to hear that our relentless work ethic is what makes our economy the powerhouse that it is. What causes that is not the number of hours we work, but how efficiently we work. (Europeans and Latin Americans are the worst: they work less time and only at about 60% of our efficiency, so it’s small wonder their economies lag behind ours.) There must be a happy medium somewhere between Euro sloth and American drive, and we should try to find it.
To quote the best summary ever: Nobody ever lay on his deathbed wishing he’d spent more time at the office.
