I’ll introduce you to a man I know.
Mr Egri heads a listed manufacturing company. I find myself in his large, windowy office the day after it’s announced that South Africa will be getting a few extra public holidays.
Public holidays cost the company — and the South African economy, Mr Egri reminds me — zillions and zillions in lost productivity. That’s a few zillions too many. So yesterday Mr Egri called in the director of each division.
The meetings all had impressive names. One was ”The Productivity Hub’s Productivity Surge Strategy”.
Each meeting required a PowerPoint presentation at the beginning and an action plan at the end. Once Mr Egri signed off each bullet point, the directors met with their managers to discuss implementation. After meeting and signing things off all day, Mr Egri and his people had developed a plan to squeeze 15% to 17% more value out of the workdays that remained.
”Impressive,” I say.
”Let’s get some lunch,” he says.
Lunch is three hours long and Mr Egri gives himself the rest of the day off.
Interesting thing about the people at the top of big companies: they spend a lot of time avoiding work.
So do I. I’ve been doing it since my parents first told me I’d have to go to school.
I’d watched my sister — older by a year and a bit — go through the first years, corralled and cooped all day. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me and I put my parents through hell to avoid school.
Fake crying worked well: ”You hate me! I hate you!” and so on.
Then there was the trick I picked up from a movie: lick your palms to make them clammy, throw in some groaning and you’re set.
Thinking back, my parents and I watched that movie together and, at age five, I was a ham actor. (When telling a lie, I unintentionally broke into a silly English accent.) I don’t doubt they saw through the con. They were letting me get away with it.
How could they not understand when they were slackers too?
My mum quit work years earlier, saying it was so she could raise us right. Personally, I think she was just being lazy.
My dad took paternity leave before it became cool. A man ahead of his time? No, just lazy.
It was six months before the authorities busted up our racket. There they were at the door like the Nazis to my Anne Frank. They threatened my parents with consequences if they didn’t give me up to The Man.
They did. But they didn’t leave me hanging.
Once in the system, about the time they started calling us ”learners”, my dad would write me a wad of sick notes, signed, but with no date. I’d fill one in whenever I needed to break free.
I remember one reading: ”With apologies, Lev has the plague …”
I’d like to claim I spent my time at home reading Chaucer. Mostly I watched the Back to the Future movies over and over. Still, it’s not like there was nothing to learn from that.
Apart from my intimate knowledge of the laws of time travel, my parents gave me the irreplaceable gift of not taking this work thing too seriously.
And I love the idea of a whole country taking work a little less seriously and giving itself a few days off.
I wish they’d close the malls too. Stop the trains running. For each one of us to share that moment when we open our eyes and raise our heads off our pillows a little, thinking we’ve woken to a more serious day, then realising we haven’t, let our heads back down again.
It would seem, though, that only the rich are allowed the pleasure of idleness. And they enjoy it even when they’re working. How many meetings can you call, how many committees and task teams and hubs can you form before you roll up your sleeves and actually do something?
There’s a difference between an action plan and … action. There’s a difference between spending your days making PowerPoint presentations and spending it breaking rocks with the sharp end of a pick. Microsoft products might be hell, but one job isn’t just different to the other. It’s easier.
So when grumpy captains of industry appear on Summit TV, grumbling about how we can’t afford to have the country take a week off, what they’re really saying is they can’t afford to have the working poor take a day off.
The rich are already out to lunch.