Member-only story
Time Allocation
Too Much Of Nothing
Earlier this year the days had been rolling along rather smoothly. Predictably. The office owned his 9 to 5, the commute was time for Candy Crush on the smartphone, and the weekends were for chores—or some advanced variation of doing nothing. The fact that Lionel didn’t have an imagination was noticed by few. His work didn’t demand it, his friends were similarly handicapped, and his calendar never made any demands that he fill in the little boxes with plans. So he didn’t. He had bought himself a large flat screen TV, and would sit in front of it for hours. But he never turned it on. Everything was in its place, each hour designated, no pulls from the past or future.
And then, unpredictably, the job fell through. They didn’t fire him, they were sorry but they had to let him go. Quite gentle. Not like dying, more like passing on. There was a whole thesaurus that came along for the final interview—the economy, budgets, cutbacks, layoffs—all wrapped in professional decorum and tied with a ribbon of we wish you the best.
No acknowledgement of the fact that they were pulling the rug up from under his feet, his life, was forthcoming. But he certainly got a sense of the instability of the earth beneath his feet when they gave him an empty box and some Time—to collect his personal belongings from the office. They had unplugged his computer so he couldn’t access his…
