Boredworkers.com

Straight off the bat, let me just say that by nature, I am a workaholic. Having said that, I’ve had this question spinning around at the back of my mind for a long time now. “What is an acceptable working hour?” In other words, if required to work overtime, how far would you take it? What is the cut off point, when you say to yourself, “Ok, that’s it. I’m calling it a day and going home”? Do you draw the line at 2200, midnight, or perhaps 0200?

When I first became a peon, I was all gungho about getting to work early and putting in the extra efforts and hours. I would arrive at the office half an hour earlier and maybe put in 4 or 5 hours on top of my official 9 to 5 (well, actually 8.30 - 5.30, but who’s counting). So that means that instead of working the required 8-9 hours, I might put in something like 13-14 hours a day. But that’s all in the past. The years have gone by, and slowly, I have become jaded and perhaps a little cynical in my outlook on the professional working life. I place the blame partially on not pacing myself better (causing burnout), and partially on the employer for not looking out for my welfare.

When we’re young, we uaually have something to prove. We want to carve a name for ourself. To do that, we put in the extra effort thinking that we can influence the final outcome. But after a while, we come to realise that the corporation is a giant network. The people, its employees, are like little nodes within the network that perform a certain task. However, important that task is, there will always be someone next to you who can perform the same task equally well. So people come and go, when one node leaves, another takes over its operation and when another node becomes active, the corporation assimilates it into the network. Like it or not, we soon realise that without us, it is still business as usual.

Granted that this is not always the case. There are situations when a corporation becomes too dependant on an individual to perform its daily operations, or vice versa an employee becomes dependant on the corporation for their livelyhood. However those are exceptions rather than norms. The corporation can live without us, and similarly, we can survive without the corporation. We’re all independant units. It just so happens that we’ve struck a mutually profitable bargain where we barter our time and services for the corporation’s resources and money. To us, it is making a living. To them, its a business venture.

And so, we come full circle. Where do we draw the line (and mind you, its a very fine line indeed)? When does mutual benefit become exploitation? The corporation has its own measuring stick for determining a person’s worth (and will usually try to bargain down on it). But do we as individuals have a means for determining our own value? I believe that we should have such a measure to keep things in check. A benchmark of sorts so that we do not wind up holding the shorter end of the stick. Think about it and let me know your thoughts.