Work on the go

We’re in 2023. At least I am. Not sure you are. Not sure if the world is.

In the age of ultra-, mega-, super-connectivity, I’m sitting in a local train trying to latch on to a cloud-hosted work document to finish something that I couldn’t finish at work. Yeah, unlike so many other days, I had a tight workday.

A tight workday basically means working through your shift with high levels of concentration. Also means giving yourself and your personal life not much importance during the workday. I suppose the corporate world would want more people to have more tight workdays, but I’m pretty darned sure that few people would want themselves to work tighter than they already are, which, in my opinion, is too tight.

Tangent: just realized that the word used for defining when you work seems to suggest that there would be variability, but in reality, it implies that there shouldn’t be variability. Ah, the irony of borrowed words for other purposes.

So I couldn’t find time to finish what I thought I should finish. Which is something that I feel perennially. And to make myself feel a little bit better, I try to extend my workdays at either end by making myself do more personal things during the work days. That is, a looser work day. Yeah, that does make me a loser because I’m someone who not only knows that what I’m doing is unhealthy, hell I even teach people at work to not do such stuff.

So, here I am, the loser, at the end of the tight workday, trying to make things looser by working beyond my shift. Because I feel better when I do this. A trait of losers, evidently.

The point that I’m trying to make, however, is that I’m on the go. Since the time I frustratingly stopped refreshing my browser, trying in vain load my cloud work document, and started typing this, I must have traveled about 15 kilometers. North to South on the Mumbai Suburban rail network. Flew (figuratively) from around the airport to the north of the original island. From the ‘burb to the ‘bay.

My reverse-faucet for accessing the internet is my phone, and Airtel, which promises a bunch of stuff including unparalleled connectivity across the nation, failed at a very basic 2023 task. Connectivity to the internet. That’s basic even in 2003 I would argue.

So the question is—are we really in 2023? Or is 2023 different for different people. Is my 2023 not the 2023 that was allocated to the place that I find myself in? And how is that fair? How is anything fair?

Tangent: Why the hell is fair, a racist word at best, used for implying that things are non biased toward anyone?