clockwatching

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pages: 376 words: 93,160

More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds

clockwatching, friendly fire, hive mind, illegal immigration, place-making, power law, Stanford prison experiment

Chapter 7 - Chickenpox Chapter 8 - Rough Chapter 9 - The Black Dog Has Been Taken Outside and Shot Chapter 10 - Complaint Chapter 11 - Snapshots Chapter 12 - Repeat Offender Chapter 13 - Algesia Chapter 14 - Back on the Car… Chapter 15 - Wee-Wee Chapter 16 - Swagger Chapter 17 - Scent Chapter 18 - Betting Shops Chapter 19 - It Says ‘London’ on the Side Chapter 20 - Good Job/Bad Job Chapter 21 - Valentine’s Day Chapter 22 - Tagged Chapter 23 - Lost Words Chapter 24 - Bleurgh Chapter 25 - Free-Market Oxygen Chapter 26 - Uniform Chapter 27 - Abuse Your Ambulance Crew Chapter 28 - Slow Suicide Chapter 29 - I Wouldn’t Trust Them with My Dog Chapter 30 - Laughing Policeman Chapter 31 - Structural Collapse Chapter 32 - Shorn Chapter 33 - 12th November 2046 Chapter 34 - On the Power of Blankets Chapter 35 - Friday Night’s All Right for Fighting Chapter 36 - Gassed and Splinted Chapter 37 - More Crap GP Work Chapter 38 - Wasting the Time of a GP Chapter 39 - Small Observation Chapter 40 - (Another) Nan Down Chapter 41 - More Madness in East London Chapter 42 - Ethnic Relations Chapter 43 - Lying to Patients Chapter 44 - Patientside Chapter 45 - Hit and Run Chapter 46 - Happiness Is Chapter 47 - Offering the Chance Chapter 48 - Shaken Baby Chapter 49 - On the Strange Thoughts that Assai I You at Five in the Morning Chapter 50 - Taxi Driving Chapter 51 - An Upsetting Job Chapter 52 - Being Lied to Chapter 53 - Clockwatching Chapter 54 - Thank You Taxpayers Chapter 55 - Helpful Demons Chapter 56 - Absurd Council ‘Thinking’ Chapter 57 - Last Night’s ‘Off Job’ Chapter 58 - Wild Geese Chapter 59 - Why You Should Pull Over and Let Us Pass (Or Hahahahahaha …) Chapter 60 - Arranged Chapter 61 - Sugar Chapter 62 - F-off Chapter 63 - The Standard Weekend Night Chapter 64 - Moped Madness Chapter 65 - Sucking Lungs Chapter 66 - Persuasion Chapter 67 - The Jobs We Do… Chapter 68 - On Dealing with a Brain Surgeon Chapter 69 - Forgetting Your History Chapter 70 - A Warning Chapter 71 - Bloody CPR Chapter 72 - Stabbings and Sex Politics Chapter 73 - New Terms Chapter 74 - Rioting and Waiting Chapter 75 - Not with Your Ten-Foot Barge Pole Chapter 76 - Not All Bad Chapter 77 - Minimalist Blogging #1 Chapter 78 - Minimalist Blogging #2 Chapter 79 - Minimalist Blogging #3 Chapter 80 - Minimalist Blogging #4 Chapter 81 - Minimalist Blogging #5 Chapter 82 - Community Care Chapter 83 - Things that Make Me Want to Go Stabby Chapter 84 - Why I Keep Telling My Mother that I Would Rather Wear Glasses to Work than Contact Lenses—Namely Their Protective Quality Chapter 85 - The Usual Suspects Chapter 86 - Maybe Chapter 87 - Heatwave Chapter 88 - Blue, Blue, Blue and Blue Chapter 89 - Armed Siege Chapter 90 - Working for Your Pay Chapter 91 - Boating Chapter 92 - Intermediate Tier Chapter 93 - Double Fall Chapter 94 - Fall-Not As Given Chapter 95 - Faux Pas Chapter 96 - ‘Cheating’ to Get Care Chapter 97 - Oh FFS!

I particularly hate abusive drunk drivers who could have killed someone and who have been flagged as being violent towards anyone in a uniform. When he told us to ‘fuck off’, I was more than happy to open the door to the ambulance and have the police remove him. For some reason I find it difficult to care about his painful hand. Clockwatching It’s 3 a.m. in the lonely hours of the morning and I’m nervous. We are in the bedroom of a six-year-old boy. His mother found him having trouble in breathing half an hour ago. His airways are so tight that every breath that he takes turns his chest inside out. He is trying to breathe so hard that I’m waiting for his breastbone to snap under the strain.

Chapter 7 - Chickenpox Chapter 8 - Rough Chapter 9 - The Black Dog Has Been Taken Outside and Shot Chapter 10 - Complaint Chapter 11 - Snapshots Chapter 12 - Repeat Offender Chapter 13 - Algesia Chapter 14 - Back on the Car… Chapter 15 - Wee-Wee Chapter 16 - Swagger Chapter 17 - Scent Chapter 18 - Betting Shops Chapter 19 - It Says ‘London’ on the Side Chapter 20 - Good Job/Bad Job Chapter 21 - Valentine’s Day Chapter 22 - Tagged Chapter 23 - Lost Words Chapter 24 - Bleurgh Chapter 25 - Free-Market Oxygen Chapter 26 - Uniform Chapter 27 - Abuse Your Ambulance Crew Chapter 28 - Slow Suicide Chapter 29 - I Wouldn’t Trust Them with My Dog Chapter 30 - Laughing Policeman Chapter 31 - Structural Collapse Chapter 32 - Shorn Chapter 33 - 12th November 2046 Chapter 34 - On the Power of Blankets Chapter 35 - Friday Night’s All Right for Fighting Chapter 36 - Gassed and Splinted Chapter 37 - More Crap GP Work Chapter 38 - Wasting the Time of a GP Chapter 39 - Small Observation Chapter 40 - (Another) Nan Down Chapter 41 - More Madness in East London Chapter 42 - Ethnic Relations Chapter 43 - Lying to Patients Chapter 44 - Patientside Chapter 45 - Hit and Run Chapter 46 - Happiness Is Chapter 47 - Offering the Chance Chapter 48 - Shaken Baby Chapter 49 - On the Strange Thoughts that Assai I You at Five in the Morning Chapter 50 - Taxi Driving Chapter 51 - An Upsetting Job Chapter 52 - Being Lied to Chapter 53 - Clockwatching Chapter 54 - Thank You Taxpayers Chapter 55 - Helpful Demons Chapter 56 - Absurd Council ‘Thinking’ Chapter 57 - Last Night’s ‘Off Job’ Chapter 58 - Wild Geese Chapter 59 - Why You Should Pull Over and Let Us Pass (Or Hahahahahaha …) Chapter 60 - Arranged Chapter 61 - Sugar Chapter 62 - F-off Chapter 63 - The Standard Weekend Night Chapter 64 - Moped Madness Chapter 65 - Sucking Lungs Chapter 66 - Persuasion Chapter 67 - The Jobs We Do… Chapter 68 - On Dealing with a Brain Surgeon Chapter 69 - Forgetting Your History Chapter 70 - A Warning Chapter 71 - Bloody CPR Chapter 72 - Stabbings and Sex Politics Chapter 73 - New Terms Chapter 74 - Rioting and Waiting Chapter 75 - Not with Your Ten-Foot Barge Pole Chapter 76 - Not All Bad Chapter 77 - Minimalist Blogging #1 Chapter 78 - Minimalist Blogging #2 Chapter 79 - Minimalist Blogging #3 Chapter 80 - Minimalist Blogging #4 Chapter 81 - Minimalist Blogging #5 Chapter 82 - Community Care Chapter 83 - Things that Make Me Want to Go Stabby Chapter 84 - Why I Keep Telling My Mother that I Would Rather Wear Glasses to Work than Contact Lenses—Namely Their Protective Quality Chapter 85 - The Usual Suspects Chapter 86 - Maybe Chapter 87 - Heatwave Chapter 88 - Blue, Blue, Blue and Blue Chapter 89 - Armed Siege Chapter 90 - Working for Your Pay Chapter 91 - Boating Chapter 92 - Intermediate Tier Chapter 93 - Double Fall Chapter 94 - Fall-Not As Given Chapter 95 - Faux Pas Chapter 96 - ‘Cheating’ to Get Care Chapter 97 - Oh FFS!


pages: 260 words: 76,223

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In the second part of the book (“Reboot: You”), we’re going to get personal and talk about you. The fact is that not only will we need to understand these five major movements, but we’ll also have to reboot who we are and how we work. I have uncovered seven triggers that will help you (and the people you work with) transition from being a “jobber” (someone working nine-to-five, clock-watching, and waiting on your pension plan) to someone who is doing the work that you were meant to accomplish. That’s the real big idea here: The future of business isn’t about what’s written in a contract, it’s about what we do with every waking moment to make it count. These triggers apply to entrepreneurs or being an entrepreneur within an existing organization.

The lucky ones are concerned about how they’re going to reach the next plateau or get their full bonus at the end of the year, but there’s a huge swath of people who are mostly just trying to get by. These people are punching the clock and trying to make ends meet. They’re less concerned about where they’re going and much more concerned about not being let go from their jobs tomorrow. Beyond that, there are many people who are unemployed and would welcome the kind of misery that those clock-watchers are enduring. If you look at the global job market, things are not pretty. That was the crux of Thomas L. Friedman’s column on July 12, 2011, in the New York Times titled “The Start-Up of You.” His premise? The job market is not going to get any better, because the jobs of yesterday are gone and the companies with big valuations (he names Facebook, Twitter, etc.) aren’t looking for the types of workers that companies used to hire decades ago.


pages: 255 words: 80,190

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke

clockwatching, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, imposter syndrome, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, post-truth, profit motive, sensible shoes, Snapchat, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Dave and I swiftly discovered that the net financial benefit to our family of my working was less than zero. By becoming an NHS doctor, I was losing my family around £5,000 a year since our childcare costs outstripped my income. One weekend on call could last thirty-five hours and cost close to £500 in childcare. Antisocial hours were only a part of it. To avoid being a clock-watching doctor, someone who raced out of the ward on the dot of five to reach the nursery before it closed, we paid for childcare that ran on into the evenings, since the workload invariably did the same, regardless of what were, on paper, our official hours. There was no other way to avoid becoming the kind of doctor who dumped on her colleagues or abandoned her patients if they took a turn for the worse at the end of the day.

Nonetheless, it is perfectly clear that, as resources are squeezed ever tighter, compassion, kindness and attention to patients as individuals are being rationed as surely as the cataract surgeries, hip operations and the latest expensive cancer drugs. Staff may continue to remove themselves from brutalising conditions of work – as I did temporarily – or, with their compassion and commitment to the NHS fatally worn down, they may morph into burned-out clock-watchers. Either way, the health service is compromised, moving a step away from what it should – and still could – be. Like the other great schisms in British politics in 2016 and 2017 – over Brexit, Nigel Farage, the price of Marmite, the shape of a Toblerone – the National Health Service is one of the great polarising forces of national life.


pages: 109 words: 29,486

Marx: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer

clockwatching, means of production, Paul Samuelson, source of truth, technological determinism

It is a statement which contrasts oddly with what Marx says about communism in his comments on the Gotha Program – also a late work – which are as optimistic as any of the early statements. There Marx foresees the end of the ‘enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour’ and a time when labour will become ‘not only a means of life, but life’s prime want’ (GP 569). The idea of labour as ‘life’s prime want’ is very different from the clock-watching attitude that takes the shortening of the working day as the prerequisite of freedom. It is, incidentally, in these comments on the Gotha Program that Marx proposes the celebrated principle of distribution for a communist society: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.


Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

In 2007, Sainsbury’s caused some controversy when the company praised the ‘superior’ work ethic of migrant workers from Eastern Europe, and expressed the hope that it would rub off on ‘domestic colleagues’. 11 Similarly, garden centre boss Richard Haddock complained that the school leavers allocated to him by the JobCentre were ‘unsuited for the world of work’. Last year, Indian steel tycoon Ratan Tata complained in a similar way that clock-watching UK managers were unwilling ‘to go the extra mile’, and seemed never to be found in the office past 3.30pm on a Friday.12 So much for Britain’s legendary Protestant work ethic. But how far can we generalise from anecdotal experience? Work Ethic 65 Idlers of the World? Historically, continental Europeans led the way when it came to hard work.


pages: 173 words: 52,725

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

Don’t fob voters off with another talking head or let an attention-seeking backbencher take five minutes of flak, in return for a pat on the back from Central Office and a knighthood 20 years down the line. And, when a minister does put his head above the parapet, don’t let him answer a question you haven’t asked. Don’t let him insult us all by going off on a clock-watching tangent and then complain that he isn’t being allowed to speak when you interrupt him. Interrupt him again. And again. And keep interrupting him until he either answers the question he’s been asked or admits that he can’t. If that seems too uncomfortable a challenge, stop socialising with these people.


Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

If you work within a traditional structure, talk to your manager about your workload – the more awareness they have, the more they can speak up for you, and even say no for you when needed or when more senior people throw their weight around. You may not feel like you can – it does depend on your relationship to a degree – but part of their job is to look after your workload. Once again, communication is key! Tasks vs time. Work by task rather than time where possible. Clock-watching is boring as hell and a waste of your time, as well as everyone else’s. Understand how much capacity you have and work on tasks accordingly. Finding it hard to concentrate? Set yourself a few easier tasks to complete and promise yourself a break. Make sure this is a set amount though – don’t fall into the Admin Demon’s trap!


pages: 256 words: 79,075

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

According to Unison, three-quarters of English councils commissioned visits of fifteen minutes in 2014, up from 69 per cent the previous year.19 Half a million (593,000) care visits between 2010 and 2013 lasted five minutes or less.20 When the five-minute figure made national headlines in 2013, the care minister at the time, Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb, lamented the findings as ‘totally inappropriate and unacceptable’. Yet so-called ‘clock-watch care’ was arguably the logical conclusion of both the privatisation of social care and the swingeing cuts to council budgets which the 2010–15 coalition government (of which Norman Lamb was an integral part) implemented with gusto. Prior to the 2015 General Election, Labour leader Ed Miliband promised to ban care visits lasting a quarter of an hour if he became Prime Minister.


pages: 267 words: 78,857

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff by Dinah Sanders

A. Roger Ekirch, Atul Gawande, big-box store, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, clockwatching, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, credit crunch, do what you love, endowment effect, Firefox, game design, Inbox Zero, income per capita, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Kevin Kelly, late fees, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Merlin Mann, Open Library, post-work, side project, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand

Symptom #39: Killing Time Solution #39: Living in the Present I know you all have ideas sitting in the back of your head; go out and start it. I mean, there's no reason not to. Don't be afraid. —Will Smidlein, teen entrepreneur Don’t live the life of having to make the time pass Don’t spend your time hanging on for tomorrow, clockwatching, and merely enduring. Do what you love whenever you can. Laugh long and hard at anyone who says you’re done living and that it’s time to buckle down to “real life,” by which they mean horrible dullness. There is absolutely no excuse for failing to notice repeatedly that existence is bloody brilliant!


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

Whilst it would be absolutely blinkered to deny that the escape to a slower pace of life is a practical impossibility for many people, who would not be able to survive economically, it is equally reckless to accept the idea that high-consumption lifestyles are the fixed norm to which everybody should aspire. SEVEN * * * Half a person Idler, drone, lazybones, lie-abed, loafer, lounger, flâneur, sloucher, sluggard, slacker, skiver, clock-watcher, Weary Willie, moper, sleepyhead, dawdler, slowcoach, hobo, bum, tramp, wanderer, mendicant, beggar, spiv, parasite, cadger, sponger, scrounger, moocher, freeloader, layabout, good-for-nothing, ne’er do well, wastrel, slubberdegullion, floater, drifter, free-wheeler, opium-eater, waiter on Providence, fatalist, nonworker … Roget’s Thesaurus As part of their art project ‘Learning to Love You More’ (July and Fletcher, 2007), the artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher asked members of the public to complete the following assignment: ask your family to describe what you do.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

The more you use the ingredients of the Slow Fix – admitting mistakes, pausing to think, joining the dots, sweating the small stuff, taking the long view – the better you come to understand whatever it is you do and the more likely you are to develop the intuition needed to deal with problems swiftly in the future. “When you have years and years of practice and knowledge behind you, nothing escapes your notice,” says Hodgman. “Whatever the time constraints, you will spot the problem and find a way to fix it.” That is true beyond the clock-watching world of motor racing. Gary Klein has spent nearly 30 years studying how people tackle problems under duress. Along the way he has become a leading proponent of the power of intuition. In his book Sources of Power he shows how expertise built on practice, training and experience is the most reliable recipe for a good fix when time is tight.


pages: 320 words: 86,372

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

Professions, Immaterial Labor and the Future of Work’. In S.H. Bolton (ed.). Searching for the Human in Human Resource Management: Theory, Practice and Workplace Contexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp.263–280. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hart, A. (2014). ‘Why Everyone’s Started Clockwatching’. Stylist, 30 April. Harvey, D. (2001). Spaces of Hope: Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. New York: Profile. Hasek, J. (1973). The Good Soldier Svejk. London: Penguin Books. Hayek, F. (1960).


Dear Fatty by Dawn French

affirmative action, British Empire, carbon footprint, clockwatching, Desert Island Discs, upwardly mobile

Tiny but effective measures were taken, e.g. the yanking up of bra straps to force teen bosoms into a more upright position, the rolling over of the waistband of the school kilt incrementally raising the hemline of the skirt, loosening of a button or two on the blouse, the careful arranging of a special magician’s-secret-type knot in the school tie which could be hoiked off in an instant without wasting the precious extra three seconds it would otherwise take to get it off at the end of the day. A tiny imperceptible amount of orangey Avon spot-cover and foundation and perhaps the merest hint of pale lipstick. The afternoon lessons were pointless on those days. We could not possibly concentrate. All we could think of was the imminence of boy time. We clock-watched and fidgeted our way through French and bloody vile double maths until, like New Year’s Eve, but silently, internally, we counted down the seconds to the end-of-the-day bell. Then, and only then, could we race to the loo, hastily slap on the full orange grouting and many, many, many layers of thick gloopy mascara, eyeshadow, blusher, roll-on deodorant, breath freshener, brush teeth, brush hair and let hang loose, roll up skirt even further, put on jewellery, spray Aquamanda perfume behind ears, on wrists, on crotch, whisk off tie – hey presto!


K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs, David Roberts

British Empire, clockwatching, it's over 9,000, summit fever, trade route

I always sleep with my boots in my sleeping bag, though not on my feet. Lots of climbers don’t. So in the morning they have to put on cold boots, which will instantly suck precious warmth from their feet, whose blood circulation is sorely taxed to begin with. That contributes to a bad start. On my expeditions, I’ve always been the clock-watcher. I always have a plan. I want to be in control of the time. In a way, that’s just part of my nature—I tend to be punctual. The night before, I’ll remind my partners, “We need to be out the door by one or one-thirty A.M.” Other climbers seem to have the attitude of “Oh, I’ll leave when I’m ready.”


pages: 399 words: 118,576

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Easter island, epigenetics, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, lone genius, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, precautionary principle, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell, TED Talk, zero-sum game

DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2017.03.006 ageless.link/cvj3ba The 8,000 samples [Horvath] used in his first paper … Steve Horvath, ‘DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types’, Genome Biology 14, R115 (2013). DOI: 10.1186/gb-2013-14-10-r115 ageless.link/gkjacc … he later told a reporter that he had trouble believing … This is an accessible account of Horvath’s work. W. Wayt Gibbs, ‘Biomarkers and ageing: The clock-watcher’, Nature 508, 168–70 (2014). DOI: 10.1038/508168a ageless.link/eginsd … people … die sooner See, for example, Brian H. Chen et al., ‘DNA methylation-based measures of biological age: Meta-analysis predicting time to death’, Aging 8, 1844–65 (2016). DOI: 10.18632/aging.101020 ageless.link/gpji9v 5.


pages: 367 words: 122,140

A Very Strange Way to Go to War: The Canberra in the Falklands by Andrew Vine

Boeing 747, clockwatching, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

She would sail the next night and go in for the landings on 21 May. CHAPTER ELEVEN Take Cover, Take Cover STEAK WAS served at breakfast, lunch and dinner on May 20, and if that had about it the air of a condemned man being offered a special meal before going to the gallows, then it chimed with the tension and clock-watching. Temporarily returning to cruise-ship fare for men about to go into action seemed entirely appropriate to Canberra’s officers; heaven alone knew what lay ashore, so the best they could do was give them the finest food on board, and as much of it as the soldiers wanted. Rudderham’s stock of fillet steak took a battering as the men of 42 Commando, for whom it had been an occasional treat, devoured it in the morning, afternoon and evening, all the more gleefully for knowing that the best 40 Commando and 3 Para could expect in the horribly cramped conditions of Fearless and Intrepid was stew.


pages: 442 words: 127,300

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, autism spectrum disorder, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, impulse control, lifelogging, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, systems thinking, the scientific method, time dilation

In addition, patients must (1) establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends, (2) go to bed only when sleepy and avoid sleeping on the couch early/mid-evenings, (3) never lie awake in bed for a significant time period; rather, get out of bed and do something quiet and relaxing until the urge to sleep returns, (4) avoid daytime napping if you are having difficulty sleeping at night, (5) reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts and worries by learning to mentally decelerate before bed, and (6) remove visible clockfaces from view in the bedroom, preventing clock-watching anxiety at night. One of the more paradoxical CBT-I methods used to help insomniacs sleep is to restrict their time spent in bed, perhaps even to just six hours of sleep or less to begin with. By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure—a greater abundance of adenosine.


pages: 469 words: 124,784

Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Apollo Moon Landings by Jay Barbree, Howard Benedict, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton, Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, clockwatching, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making

This was a time of cliff-hanging suspense, a time to count the minutes and seconds that must pass before Apollo 8 emerged from the lunar back side to where it could send the desperately hoped-for signal of success. Jerry Carr kept up a persistent call of “Apollo 8 . . . Apollo 8 . . . Apollo 8 . . . ” After what seemed an eternity of intense clock-watching, headsets and speakers crackled. Smooth and calm as always came the voice of Jim Lovell: “Go ahead, Houston.” Those three words—coming just at the instant they should have— sent Mission Control into a bedlam of cheering, whistling, shouting, and applause. Electronic signals flashed their message on the big viewing board.


iPad: The Missing Manual, Fifth Edition by J.D. Biersdorfer

clockwatching, cloud computing, Downton Abbey, Firefox, Google Chrome, incognito mode, Internet Archive, lock screen, Skype, stealth mode startup

To use it: Tap Home→Clock, and then tap the Stopwatch tab at the bottom of the screen. Tap the Start button to start the clock. Tap the Lap button when you complete a lap but want the overall Stopwatch to keep counting. Tap Stop when you’re done, or Reset to wipe all the displayed times. Timer The Clock’s Timer function is handy for cooks and other clock-watchers. To set it: Tap Home→Clock, and then tap the Timer tab at the bottom of the screen. Spin the wheels in the middle of the screen to dial up the amount of time for your task. Tap the Sounds button in the top-left corner to pick the alert noise that plays when time’s up. Tap Start.


pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

CEO Jan de Smet insisted the project be based in Belgium, and Course assembled a team of seven developers who worked fourteen-hour days that often ended in a late dinner at the Oude Market in Leuven, where they lived. There was a cultural divide among the hardworking but jovial Australians and the clock-watching Belgians, who fought over car-spot allocations. But the fate of Intellect depended on the TAFMO project. This was no time for petty office politics. The technology developed by TAFMO had powerful applications. The Australian payments system was old, clunky and prohibitive for new players to access.


pages: 517 words: 139,824

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

card file, Charles Babbage, clockwatching, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, spinning jenny, the scientific method

The place was full of bettering-blokes, really: shopkeepers and store-clerks and druggists, with their tidy wives and broods. In her father's day, such people, Whitechapel people, had been angry and lean and shabby, with sticks in their hands, and dirks in their belts. But times had changed under the Rads, and now even Whitechapel had its tight-laced scrubfaced women and its cakey clock-watching men, who read the 'Dictionary of Useful Knowledge' and the 'Journal of Moral Improvement', and looked to get ahead. Then the gas-lights guttered in their copper rings, and the orchestra swung into a flat rendition of "Come to the Bower." With a huff, the limelight flared, the curtain drew back before the kinotrope screen, the music covering the clicking of kino-bits spinning themselves into place.


pages: 687 words: 165,457

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health by Daniel Lieberman

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, death from overwork, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Santayana, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social distancing, Steven Pinker, twin studies, two and twenty, working poor

G. (2013), The role of mitochondria in aging, Journal of Clinical Investigation 123:951–57. 31 All your cells have the same genome, so you need epigenetic modifications to enable a skin cell to function differently from a neuron or a muscle cell. Some epigenetic modifications appear to be passed on from one generation to the next, making this a nongenetic form of inheritance. 32 Horvath, S. (2013), DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types, Genome Biology 14:R115; Gibbs, W. W. (2014), Biomarkers and ageing: The clock-watcher, Nature 508:168–70. 33 Marioni, R. E., et al. (2015), DNA methylation age of blood predicts all-cause mortality in later life, Genome Biology 16:25; Perna, L., et al. (2016), Epigenetic age acceleration predicts cancer, cardiovascular, and all-cause mortality in a German case cohort, Clinical Epigenetics 8:64; Christiansen, L., et al. (2016), DNA methylation age is associated with mortality in a longitudinal Danish twin study, Aging Cell 15:149–54. 34 He, C., et al. (2012), Exercise-induced BCL2-regulated autophagy is required for muscle glucose homeostasis, Nature 481:511–15. 35 This mechanism is especially fascinating because of the molecule mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin), a protein that senses amino acids and promotes growth.


pages: 563 words: 179,626

A Life in Secrets by Sarah Helm

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, clockwatching, haute couture, large denomination, old-boy network

Perhaps her indebtedness to him for his protection during her difficult times was such that she instinctively protected him in return when he came under attack for F Section's failings. There were occasionally small chinks in that loyalty—signs, almost, of rivalry. Asked once about the long hours Buckmaster worked at F Section, Vera scoffed, saying he was “the worst clock-watcher of all.” And she also allowed a difference of opinion to open up with her former boss over Déricourt. She had told me she never trusted Déricourt, and I soon discovered that in older age she had made a point of telling many people the same thing, even giving interviews for TV documentaries on the subject.


She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

Geserick, Gunther, and Ingo Wirth. 2012. “Genetic Kinship Investigation from Blood Groups to DNA Markers.” Transfusion Medicine and Hemotherapy 39:163–75. Gibbons, Ann. 2006. The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. New York: Doubleday. Gibbs, W. Wayt. 2014. “Biomarkers and Ageing: The Clock-Watcher.” Nature 508:168. Giese, Lucretia Hoover. 2001. “A Rare Crossing: Frida Kahlo and Luther Burbank.” American Art 15:52–73. Gilbert, Scott F. 2014. “A Holobiont Birth Narrative: The Epigenetic Transmission of the Human Microbiome.” Frontiers in Genetics 5:282. Gill, Peter, Pavel L. Ivanov, Colin Kimpton, Romelle Piercy, Nicola Benson, Gillian Tully, Ian Evett, Erika Hagelberg, and Kevin Sullivan. 1994.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Standard Thai dishes, like đôm yam and gaang kĕe·o wăhn, are transformed into vegetarian versions, while festival specific Hokkien-style yellow noodles are stir-fried with meaty mushrooms and big chunks of vegetables. Don’t cut those long noodles as they represent good luck. * * * SIAM SQUARE Food vendors on Soi Kasem San 1 do a brisk business of feeding hungry clockwatchers and lounging faràng (foreigners) ; they are masters at communicating with hand gestures. MBK Food Court THAI $ (6th fl, MBK, cnr Th Phra Ram I & Th Phayathai; dishes 40-60B; lunch & dinner; BTS National Stadium) The best introduction to street food a roving stomach could find. This mall food court has helpful English menus, cool air-con and all the standard dishes you’ll need to know in order to conquer the menu-less street stalls.