In Those Days

In those days we moved with fewer restrictions. In those days the country was a vast, quiet expanse condensed to masked hours in the air and layovers in cities we didn’t care to visit but had to pass through all the same on the way to where we were headed. I’m not saying it was right but the Virus was an afterthought. We were young, healthy, and invincible. We would drop everything to jet from Chicago to Seattle or Columbus to Colorado Springs for a long weekend of debauchery and outdoor recreation, parallel pursuits matching in intensity and ambition despite requiring different skills, different costumes. It wasn’t at all outrageous to ask one of us to get a last minute flight from Midwest to West Coast—long shots were standard and air fare was cheap. It was always worth asking, even just for the absurdity in it all; it was funny that these last minute dares to click purchase, to pack up and go, weren’t out of the question. Temptations of escapism and fear of missing out fueled so many last minute “fuck it”s.

In those days work was a sham, a grimy traveling circus whose tent poles we strained against with uniformed shoulders, maintaining that promised path to professional success and security but, in those days, we scrambled and swindled behind the scenes to keep up appearances, buy time, and ride paychecks we didn’t deserve through the expenses of niche hobbies and a short term outlook which might at any time be filled with trips, outings, expeditions, or excursions that could not be missed. It was in those days that the five minute work week was patented, where the weight and form of an external battery pack rendered it the perfect candidate for a calculated sand-for-gold swap on the spacebars of our company issued laptops—à la Raiders of the Lost Ark—in effect, doing more to earn our salaries in those degenerate days than we could be bothered to lift a finger or lazy-lidded eye for.

In those days, spurred on by collective social and economic uncertainty, we abused unprecedented remote work policies. We trampled over uncharted territory and took full advantage of the lenient accommodation for decreased efficiency that seemed to soak into all aspects of society. The world became temporarily numb to slipping deadlines and scrapped projects. While the corporate machine was crippled, shunting resources and attention to those essential activities keeping the lights on, we executed our heist. We were marauders of time. It was Grand Theft Timecard and the loot was the freedom to do not only as we pleased but as we couldn’t before. We stole back control of our lives in spite of a world reeling from the rhetoric of one demagogue to the next and we did it one minute at a time through back doors and past taped over webcams. In some ways they kept us in technological bondage, bound ball-and-chain by a tangle of laptop chargers and dongles to the ticking time bomb of an unexpected Teams message or last minute meeting. The searchlights could be on us at any moment and we couldn’t always stray far but we were sneaking through a poster-covered hole in the back wall, sliding under fences to do as we pleased and creeping back in before they even noticed we were gone. In those days we made out big and our reward was, in addition to time, a sense of autonomy, clawed back from the expectations and routines of corporate work which had before then been systemized, codified under the watch of preceding generations.