March 2, 2016 Article

The Old Coot isn’t a 24/7 guy.

By Merlin Lessler

I’ve had it with the term “24/7.” I’m sick of it. It’s lame. It’s been in use for more than two decades, but it’s older than that. It was first uttered in 1983 by LSU basketball star, Jerry Reynolds. He said it in a Sport’s Illustrated article describing his jump shot, “It’s good, 24/7.” It’s now a term in common use. Common OVERUSE! I look at it as an assault on the language, replacing words with numbers. Gone are the old phrases that served us well: every hour, every day – constantly – all the time. That’s bad enough in itself, but even worse, 24/7 is usually an overstatement, if not an outright lie. No one does anything 24/7 except to maintain a pulse.

We didn’t brag that we were on the job 24/7 in my working days. We bragged about our forty-hour workweek; we didn’t refer to it as “8/5. It was a big deal back then, the 40-hour workweek. It was a new standard. For the first half of the 20^th century, people worked 6 days a week, 8, 10 or 12 hours a day. But, even my “8/5” (forty hour work week) was a misnomer if you subtract the time I spent daydreaming, on coffee breaks and at the water cooler swapping gossip. It was more like 6/5.

It’s tougher in today’s work world. The 40-hour workweek has morphed into a 50 or 60-hour week, spanning six or even seven days, back to the early twentieth century standard, because corporations have workers by the short hairs, now that job security and job opportunity have become so fleeting. People are gently, and not so gently, forced to put in more and more time. Modern technology, E-mail and text messaging, make it harder to disengage from the workplace. To get away from the boss. 

Many of today’s workers are connected to the office with this electronic umbilical cord, yet their claim that they are on the job 24/7 is still an overstatement. Even if the time spent sleeping and eating is ignored there is still a lot of work time spent “occupying” a desk, not working. Especially when you deduct the time spent sending and receiving personal e-mails and text messages, playing Candy Crush and surfing the Web. 24/7 is in truth, a lot like the 8/5 or 6/5 of my employment era. In fact, us old coots probably put in more productive “work” hours than employees today. We were lucky; we weren’t interrupted by a Type A personality above us on the corporate ladder, constantly barraging us with texts and e-mails, asking for a progress report. We had the freedom to do our job. Today it’s a highly prized rarity.  

Back to my gripe, the overuse of 24/7. It’s at the top of my list of hip terms that should be retired. The old coot world I live in doesn’t fit an, hours/days, concept anyhow. Some weeks we’re productive 2/3. Even that’s a lie, because one of those three days is simply a repeat of what we did the previous day, and forgot. Like mowing our lawns two days in a row. The only thing we truly do 24/7 is to moan about the good old days, give updates on our physical condition and ask, “What was that guy’s name?”