Too Many Mornings

Americans love working more than almost anybody else on the planet.

Americans work more hours than almost anybody else on the planet, ranking 7^th behind ball-busting countries like Korea, Mexico and Japan.

Why we work so hard, I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because we’d rather spend our time staring unhappily at the corporate clock than interacting with family and friends, who can be a bother. Or maybe it’s because almost nothing’s more important to us than the latest iGadgets and living in palatial homes, even if we have very little time to enjoy them because we’re so busy working and shopping for more stuff.

Admittedly, it’s fun to collect stuff, and there’s an awful lot of stuff (some of it shiny) to collect at places like Costco—if you’ve got the money for it and you don’t mind having a lifetime supply of mayonnaise sitting on your kitchen counter or 40 pairs of socks stuffed in your dresser drawer. I don’t, and one of these days I may even buy one of those clear-plastic barrels of golf-ball sized bright-orange cheese puffs they sell, not because I’ve got the worst case of the munchies in the history of the munchies, but because I think it’d be interesting to put it on a pedestal in my living room and illuminate it with a spotlight, like a Ming vase or a Rodin statue. When guests come over, I could point at it proudly and say, “I own the world’s largest collection of giant orange cheese puffs,” or, “Yes, that is an original Andy Warhol sculpture. I traded a hundred cans of tomato soup for it.”

Sure, some people would probably dismiss me as an idiot, as some people already do. But many people would be deeply impressed with my orange cheese-puff stuff, because nothing excites the American imagination like stuff, especially if you have a lot of it displayed in one place, and it’s colorful and jumbo-sized.

Americans like stuff so much, in fact, that we build huge temples to revere it.

The size of the average Wal-Mart Supercenter is about 102,000 square feet, and the largest one is about 224,000 square feet. But the biggest church in the nation is the Washington National Cathedral, which is about 82,981 square feet. The cathedral’s largest service ever took place in 2003, attracting about 2,100 people. Nearly 29,000 people shop at each one of Wal-Mart’s 3,500 stores every week, more if they’re having a good sale on sweatpants. No wonder I’m never able to find a parking spot near the front door.

And so our love of stuff propels us to work.

Americans log long hours at work so they can go to Sam's Club and buy barrels filled with giant orange cheeseballs.

That and the Puritan work ethic.

The Puritans were a bunch of serious-minded Protestants who got kicked out of England and sent to America because they believed Catholics and Episcopalians were lazy ne’er-do-wells who wanted too many vacation days. They argued that it’s good to work—that the harder you work, the closer you draw to God. I don’t know where they got this idea because I’ve been doing some research and according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, God cursed us with work.

I’m just paraphrasing here, but God told Adam, “Hey, I distinctly remember telling you guys not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Yes, the tree with the apples. You’re not fooling me, kiddo! You know well and good which tree I was talking about, and don’t try to pretend otherwise or I’ll snatch you bald-headed, buddy boy! You’re sorry? I’ll bet you’re sorry. Sorry that you got caught. But guess what, Mr. Smarty Pants? Actions have consequences, and here’s yours: From now on, if you want to eat, you’re going to have to be a farmer. That’s right, genius, from now on you’ll be getting up at the butt-crack of dawn and working your ass off until dark to milk the cows and till the fields and grind the wheat into bread. That’ll teach you to ignore me!”

And so we’re forced to go to work, usually Mondays through Fridays. Those tend to be dreary days on the American calendar, and we dutifully mark them off like zombies, living instead for the weekends, a handful of national holidays and an average of 13 days of paid vacation a year.

The non-Puritans who run the world’s other countries think we’re crazy to work so hard, of course.

The French enjoy an average of 37 vacation days, the Germans 35. Canadians get about 26 vacation days off plus extra days whenever they win a hockey championship, which they always do because they’re Canadians and they invented the sport. Even the Koreans and Japanese take 25 vacation days, plus they get huge discounts on flat-screen TVs and stereos . But all of us work like indentured servants compared to the Italians, who get an average of 42 paid vacation days a year and don’t even have to spend money to go somewhere nice for their vacations because they already live in Italy.

To make matters worse, most of us don’t have glamorous, high-paying jobs. We leave for work in the morning and come home at night without doing much in between that’s significant, unless you count doodling as significant. Pablo Picasso liked to doodle, and supposedly paid some of his lunch bills with quick sketches on napkins. I tried to do that once at a diner, but the waitress just laughed at my cubist drawing of a cube steak and insisted that I give her something less square and more rectangular, like a $10 bill, check or credit card.

Is it me or the clock battery that's dead? I can't tell.

Anyway, I could probably say a lot more about work, but I can’t right now.

Why?

Because after three long months of financially troubled, soul-crushing unemployment, I finally have some good news and some bad news to report on the job front.

The good news is that I got a job.

The bad news is that I got a job, and have a lot of work to do.

I can’t wait until the weekend.

I haven’t been to Costco in months.

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