o you end up captive at your desk doing the action items from your morning meetings and preparing for your afternoon meetings. And you don’t even have 15 minutes to gripe to a coworker, phone your spouse to say “I love you” or call the plumber to fix the kitchen sink. Oh, right. We’re supposed to do that over lunch.

Geez. I don’t even have a job right now but I’m getting woozy just thinking about it. I better go eat lunch now while I still can.

Anyway, it’s 1:00 now so you head off to three

A girlfriend and I were feigning lament over being unemployed one afternoon. One of us (I’m not confessing who) mentioned wanting a kick-back job that paid well. The kind of job where you work no more than eight hours and had some free time to catch up with coworkers. The kind of job where you knew you could leave at 4:00 every day so you can catch the last half of The Ellen Show.

Don’t get me wrong. We are both hard working people. We aren’t saying that we don’t want to put much effort into our jobs. When we are at work, we work hard and we work smart. We just want to have a life outside of work. We want to be treated like human beings, not machines.

I don’t think it’s natural for human beings to operate like clockwork (i.e., arrive at 8:00 on the dot every day, take only a 60 minute lunch). Life happens. Sometimes we have a rough night sleeping and need an extra 30 minutes in bed. Sometimes you hit traffic and sometimes your cat throws up on the bed as you are about to walk out the door.

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect people to not socialize or interact much while working. I understand that we are there to conduct business. However, we are interacting with other human beings, who unfortunately, tend to intrigue us. When we are doing business with someone, we want to know who we are working with, right? We want to know how they spend their weekends, whether they are married and have kids, where they bought those cute shoes. Meetings should have a 30 minute buffer where people just chat and get to know each other.

Instead, we have a lunch hour. We’re supposed to cram all of our “catching up” and socializing in a 60 minute period. But, the lunch hour is an illusion. There are lunch meetings where you actually discuss business. Somehow, people manage to schedule meetings (no lunch included) to run right over your expected arrival time at Baja Fresh. If they don’t manage to schedule them over your usual lunch time, they book you up all morning and all afternoon so you end up captive at your desk doing the action items from your morning meetings and preparing for your afternoon meetings. And you don’t even have 15 minutes to gripe to a coworker, phone your spouse to say “I love you” or call the plumber to fix the kitchen sink. Oh, right. We’re supposed to do that over lunch.

Geez. I don’t even have a job right now but I’m getting woozy just thinking about it. I better go eat lunch now while I still can.

Anyway, it’s 1:00 now so you head off to three

jobs. When we are at work, we work hard and we work smart. We just want to have a life outside of work. We want to be treated like human beings, not machines.

I don’t think it’s natural for human beings to operate like clockwork (i.e., arrive at 8:00 on the dot every day, take only a 60 minute lunch). Life happens. Sometimes we have a rough night sleeping and need an extra 30 minutes in bed. Sometimes you hit traffic and sometimes your cat throws up on the bed as you are about to walk out the door.

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect people to not socialize or interact much while working. I understand that we are there to conduct business. However, we are interacting with other human beings, who unfortunately, tend to intrigue us. When we are doing business with someone, we want to know who we are working with, right? We want to know how they spend their weekends, whether they are married and have kids, where they bought those cute shoes. Meetings should have a 30 minute buffer where people just chat and get to know each other.

Instead, we have a lunch hour. We’re supposed to cram all of our “catching up” and socializing in a 60 minute period. But, the lunch hour is an illusion. There are lunch meetings where you actually discuss business. Somehow, people manage to schedule meetings (no lunch included) to run right over your expected arrival time at Baja Fresh. If they don’t manage to schedule them over your usual lunch time, they book you up all morning and all afternoon so you end up captive at your desk doing the action items from your morning meetings and preparing for your afternoon meetings. And you don’t even have 15 minutes to gripe to a coworker, phone your spouse to say “I love you” or call the plumber to fix the kitchen sink. Oh, right. We’re supposed to do that over lunch.

Geez. I don’t even have a job right now but I’m getting woozy just thinking about it. I better go eat lunch now while I still can.

Anyway, it’s 1:00 now so you head off to three

r.

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect people to not socialize or interact much while working. I understand that we are there to conduct business. However, we are interacting with other human beings, who unfortunately, tend to intrigue us. When we are doing business with someone, we want to know who we are working with, right? We want to know how they spend their weekends, whether they are married and have kids, where they bought those cute shoes. Meetings should have a 30 minute buffer where people just chat and get to know each other.

Instead, we have a lunch hour. We’re supposed to cram all of our “catching up” and socializing in a 60 minute period. But, the lunch hour is an illusion. There are lunch meetings where you actually discuss business. Somehow, people manage to schedule meetings (no lunch included) to run right over your expected arrival time at Baja Fresh. If they don’t manage to schedule them over your usual lunch time, they book you up all morning and all afternoon so you end up captive at your desk doing the action items from your morning meetings and preparing for your afternoon meetings. And you don’t even have 15 minutes to gripe to a coworker, phone your spouse to say “I love you” or call the plumber to fix the kitchen sink. Oh, right. We’re supposed to do that over lunch.

Geez. I don’t even have a job right now but I’m getting woozy just thinking about it. I better go eat lunch now while I still can.

Anyway, it’s 1:00 now so you head off to three

e people just chat and get to know each other.

Instead, we have a lunch hour. We’re supposed to cram all of our “catching up” and socializing in a 60 minute period. But, the lunch hour is an illusion. There are lunch meetings where you actually discuss business. Somehow, people manage to schedule meetings (no lunch included) to run right over your expected arrival time at Baja Fresh. If they don’t manage to schedule them over your usual lunch time, they book you up all morning and all afternoon so you end up captive at your desk doing the action items from your morning meetings and preparing for your afternoon meetings. And you don’t even have 15 minutes to gripe to a coworker, phone your spouse to say “I love you” or call the plumber to fix the kitchen sink. Oh, right. We’re supposed to do that over lunch.

Geez. I don’t even have a job right now but I’m getting woozy just thinking about it. I better go eat lunch now while I still can.

Anyway, it’s 1:00 now so you head off to three

o you end up captive at your desk doing the action items from your morning meetings and preparing for your afternoon meetings. And you don’t even have 15 minutes to gripe to a coworker, phone your spouse to say “I love you” or call the plumber to fix the kitchen sink. Oh, right. We’re supposed to do that over lunch.

Geez. I don’t even have a job right now but I’m getting woozy just thinking about it. I better go eat lunch now while I still can.

Anyway, it’s 1:00 now so you head off to three hours of poisoning by PowerPoint in the Gas Chamber Boardroom. By the time you stagger out of the conference room, it’s 4:00 and everyone who is smart enough to take public transportation is shuffling out of the office in a hurry. They can’t miss the bus/train/donkey – otherwise how on earth will they get home? You look around the office. It’s you and a bitter 20 year old receptionist who is bound to her desk until 4:59 (she cheats and leaves early).

You envy the receptionist. She makes $12.50 an hour but she gets to leave by 5:00. You have reports to send out, emails and voicemails to respond to (thanks to that 24 hour response “service level agreement” your manager loves) and action items up the yin yang. You could let it wait until tomorrow, but your manager promised on your behalf that you could have five things done for first thing tomorrow morning. So you scowl, pout and swear a little before putting on your iPod to start the second half of your workday, called Overtime.

Your manager bounces happily out of her last meeting sometime around 8:00 and is happy to see you there; now she has company for the next few hours. You consider using the staple remover to stab holes in your wrists so you can bleed to death.

I figured out what the problem is. There is always going to be someone (usually under 30) who is willing to work like this. There are simply far too many people out there who don’t have spouses, kids, significant others, families, friends, hobbies, evening plans, a bus/train/donkey to catch, or any biological need for seeing daylight. Those people are making everyone else look bad. We can’t compete with these people. They have all the time in the world, and they are just fine spending it all in one place - work.

I remember interviewing candidates for two positions our team had open. One was an entry level job, the other was a senior level associate. The entry level candidates did the eager head nodding the whole time, said “yes!” to everything we asked, and