Monday, November 29, 2021

I'm pretty much habituated to working on Saturdays. . .

as I'm busy, but I took Thanksgiving weekend off for a variety of reasons. Also, for a variety of reasons, it's the first time I've had four days off in a row for several years.

I avoided checking my email, which I'm better at doing than other people that I know.  I don't have my email set up to give me automatic alerts, for example.

Cell phones. The worst thing to happen to humankind since. .. well ever.  These are our old cell phones.  I found them in a drawer when I was looking for something the other day.  They're expensive, so you save them, which you probably don't need to do.

So in checking my email this morning, and my calendar, I see that I have emails from lawyers for every day of the four-day weekend, save for maybe Thanksgiving itself.

There's no doubt about it.  Cell phones and computers have become the enemy of sanity.  

I know that some of those folks were simply working on Friday, which isn't a holiday weekend for everyone.  I had intended to but decided not to.  But Saturday and Sunday?

There's a point at which stuff like this has to stop.  I'm glad to see that for the first time, pretty much ever, Walmart and some other big box stores closed on Thanksgiving itself and will close on Christmas.  Some restaurants were open, however. Grocery stores were as well.  Friday, of course, was "Black Friday", which I've worked many times myself, and Saturday was "Small Business Saturday".

We're reading, of course, about inflation ramping up, which the administration seems to have no handle on whatsoever.  The weekend shows had Democrats on explaining how the "Build Back Better" bill won't contribute to it, which is baloney.  If anything starts to depress it, it'll be the arrival of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, which isn't good.

Really building back better would take a fundamental look at which what we've built, which is a 24 hour a day, seven day a week, cubicle economy, and dismantling big chunks of it.  Right now workers are voting for that with their feet.  

Maybe some pondering on that is in order.

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