The Modern Cubicle Jockey’s Guide To Getting to the Office Almost Sort of On-Time and Pretty Much Mostly Ready To Work.
By: Mike Gries

Today at work, I started poking around on Google looking for poll results that suggest that people nowadays are more frequently late to work when compared to employees of the past. I’m almost positive that if I could have spent a little more time looking for that proof I would have found it. Unfortunately, I got distracted and ended up on imdb.com looking up information on the movie The Exorcist III which I finished watching at 1 a.m. the night before on the ironically-named American Movie Classics channel. (Interestingly enough, under the “trivia” section, imdb doesn’t list the fact that it was Jeffery Dahmer’s favorite movie. When I get around to it, I’m going to submit that info to them.)

So I have no proof that people are more frequently late to work now than in the past, which forces me to do my own poll:

You’ve got a problem getting to work on time, don’t you? Honestly, yes, right? Ok, so let’s just move on. (If you answered, “no” well you can stop reading now you little nerdlinger.)

As for me – even though I stay up well past the witching hour watching George C. Scott waste his talents in surprisingly-not-too-terrible horror movies – I am still completely awesome at, if not getting to work almost on time, then like, totally almost sort of on time. And because of that fact, I’ve decided to write up a guide that will help you get to your 9 to 5er at the crack of 9:07 totally almost not quite ready to work.

Step One: Getting up.

I think we can assume that if you need this guide that each time you get up in the morning you generally convince yourself that you’ve never been more exhausted, and that forcing yourself out of bed will be one of the hardest god-damned things you will ever have to do in your life. Mentally it should be as taxing as gearing up to break up with a girlfriend. I like to call this condition Hatred Fibrosis because you can actually feel your individual muscle fibers hating you for trying to get them to do anything at all. If you don’t feel like that in the morning, well for chrissakes, just get up 20 minutes earlier and you can skip the rest of this guide. But if on the other hand, despite years of getting up in the morning to drag your ass to work, your body still reacts by asking, “Wha, What? . . . no! NO! . . . What the fucking fuck is going ON here?” each day you try and rip it out of the sheets, then please read on.

The first step to getting up is setting 3 alarms. The first alarm isn’t so much an alarm, but a warning that the real alarm is coming. It primes the pump so to speak. A gentle “beep-beep, beep-beep” travel alarm should suffice for this. Set this alarm for 20 minutes before you want to get up (and 30 minutes before you actually will), put it by the bed where you can reach it without doing anything more than slumping forward like a rag doll, and when it goes off, hit the snooze.

The second alarm is your alarm. It should be a clock radio, and it should be positioned so that if you don’t have to get out of bed to reach it, you should at least have to crawl to the opposite edge of your bed to get your hands on it. Chose a clock radio that has 3 alarms to choose from: Beeping, Music, and Beeping/Music. To actually annoy you enough to consider getting out of bed, the alarm should be set to the “Beeping/Music” setting. What type of music station you chose is up to you. Generally the more jarring the better, but at that moment in time combined with the “beep-beep” of the alarm, pretty much anything is jarring. (For the hard core of you, dial the dial a smidge off the station to add a bit of static to the mix.)

Keep in mind there will be occasions when this setting will be a bit too effective. For me, I can still remember clear as day getting woken up by the line “I want to (beep) fuck you like (beep) an ANI(beep)MAL!” from Nine Inch Nail’s Closer and on another occasion getting roused out of bed with a “Beep beep beep” backed “WISH THEY ALL COULD BE CALIFORNIA GIIIIIRLS!” Actually, the second was worse because the “beep beep beep” was way too quick for the song. And Pet Sounds is highly over-rated. Perhaps this sentiment is a bit off target here, especially considering that “California Girls” isn’t even on that album, but really, it is. Also, even though Brian Wilson’s Smile had young and old rock critics alike pouring through thesauruses to do justice to how great it is, I refuse to believe the hype.

Talk radio/beep is also suitably horrible. Music/beep works because it’s a racket. But talk radio/beep works a bit differently. Muic/beep can make the song seem like either: a.) A bad polyrhythmic experimental remix of whatever song is on, or b.) One of those “electronica” songs written in 1999 by an aging traditional rocker who should have know well enough to leave that style of music to the knob-twisters who know how to build songs like that from the ground up, rather than putting a few beeps, blips and some vocal distortion over a standard pop song. But talk radio/beep just makes you aware that there should not be a “beep” going on over that talking. (And what the hell are they TALKING about this early in the morning? Football? Fucking FOOT-BALL?) The talking works to highlight the “beep”, and becomes white noise to magnify the “beep” more than if the “beep” just existed alone. It’s sort of interesting to think how our brains experiences sound, isn’t it? How a sound can be “louder” to us when altered only by a backdrop of white noise? You know – like that study that did with crayfish and fish. You know the one, right? Interesting, huh? No. No it isn’t. It might be later in the day, but as you sit heavy-lidded in bed, your Hatred Fibrosis will punch you in the eyeballs from the inside if you start thinking NPR-type thoughts like that.

The second alarm should be set for two snooze cycles before you have to get up. This way, the snooze on the first alarm will go off. Then, you’ll hear the snooze alarm from the second alarm. And then the first again. Finally the second alarm repeats, and this should be sufficiently annoying to actually get your ass up.

The third alarm is a safety alarm, and it should be just that – for safety only. It should be set across the room, and set for 10 minutes later than you absolutely have to be up by. Of course, because of the existence of this safety net, at least two out of every three days, this will be the only alarm of the three that has a chance of actually getting you up for the day.

Step 2: Getting Ready

As established, on days that you don’t get up until your safety alarm goes off, you’re already 10 minutes behind schedule. This gives you license to run around willy-nilly in an effort to make up the time. The benefit of NOT running around willy-nilly and staying true to a long established pattern would be that your automatic, unthinking motion would add and proficiency to your efforts to get to work. Unfortunately, you would still be late. You would see what still needed to be done before you got out the door. You would see what time you had to do it in, and you would know at each point along the line that you hadn’t an earthly chance of making it out the door on time. Repeat this day in and day out, and this will be cancerous to your self-esteem. You’ll get down on yourself for being so irresponsible, and that’s no good for anybody. The catch 22 is, even if you did save enough time you would just add that time in on the safety alarm, get up 5 minutes later, and would be late again. So don’t do it. Mix it up just a bit – sometimes jump straight into the shower, sometimes find your wallet and keys first and throw them in your bag. This way you can create the allusion that you’re feverishly attempting to make it out the door in time. You never will, but maybe tomorrow . . .

Shower
On the days you actually get up sort-of on time, mosey to the shower. Turn the water on. Get in, and then one of two things will happen.

The first possibility: You will immediately kill off a few of those 10 minutes that you’re not yet behind by. You’ll contemplate the grout; you’ll think of what you have to do for the day. Or perhaps you’ll use my favorite time killer: fantasizing. For instance, sometimes when I’m in the shower I imagine how cool it would be if I could break dance in front of your amazed co-workers. (Man, if only I had stronger core muscles – like tighter abs and stuff - I could so do the windmill. And like I could do it at that big Christmas party where they get a DJ . . .) Sometimes I come up with a witty rejoinder that would have totally ripped apart that douche bag who made me look like a moron at the bar. These might work for you too. If not, feel free to use my favorite, and my standby: I like fantasizing about being in a movie where I’m playing a sleepy guy in the shower:

(Mike takes his forehead off the shower tiles, and rubs his hands over his weary face - smelling the musty bed funk on his hands and face. He drops his hands, and stairs vacantly off into the middle distance as water cascades down his face.)

Get good at this and you can actually let the water just hit you for a two solid minutes without feeling the slightest inkling to pick up a bar of soap (or in my case the poof I use to lather up the lavender body gel I use. Powerfully gay. I know.) Get too good at this and you’ll zone out for too long and too deeply and ten minutes later you’ll be sniffing your arm because you not only forget if you shampooed your hair, but also if you lathered and rinsed yet. Remember, moderation is the key to immaturity. So snap out of it. Stop beating that guy up, being witty with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, or taking the girl who hands out the checks from behind. And since you forget if you used the soap yet, it’s probably just best to a quick once over on the groin, pits, and ass. If you already cleaned ‘em - oh well. If not – they’re really the only body parts that can’t easily go a day without a proper cleaning.

The second possibility: As soon as you step into the shower and get soaked all three alarms which you forgot to turn off will come off their snooze cycles in quick succession. This means that the serenity of your shower will be shattered a sound more grating than the more challenging patches of an Einstürzende Neubeuten record. This will actually cut your shower time in half. But life is way to short for crappy, tense showers. So remember to turn your alarms off before getting into the shower.

Primping and Preening and Getting Dressed

Once you’re out of the shower and have done your best to get fairly dry, you should immediately start doing whatever else you need to do to your filthy body to get it presentable to the outside world. Check the clock and decide what you have time for. If you’re only already sort of behind at this point, feel free to do a few of those things you have to do sometimes, but not everyday like q-tip you ears, pop some blackheads, cut your nails, or in my case, pluck the eight scary rouge hairs that pop up on my chest and nipples. If you’re late-late, rush out of the bathroom half soaked and start picking out clothes. Pick out a t-shirt and shirt. Just pick one. The blue one. That’ll do. Throw the shirt and undershirt on the bed. You should find the pants you wore the day before hanging over a chair mostly unwrinkled and only moderately stained with coffee and Doritos smooge. You will likely have a clean crisp pair of pants hanging in the closet, but these will not already have a belt looped in them. So forget them, and throw the ones you wore yesterday next to the shirts you plan on wearing for the day. (There - you just picked up the 20 seconds you were staring vacantly at your shirts trying to pick one out.) Next pick out a pair of socks. And yes, of course the sock you just picked clash with your shirt, but Jesus, don’t worry about it; you’re late.

At this point you will have air dried to a slight moist, and you’ll be feeling pretty good about not wasting that extra 40 seconds drying yourself completely when the air and time have done a serviceable job for you. Now finish the job of drying yourself by sitting down on your bed to put your socks on. By sitting on your bed, not only are positioning yourself to put your socks on, but you’re also allowing your sheets to soak up that hard to reach moisture from your crack, ‘taint and balls. (Or in the case of women . . . well your womanly bits.) This single motion will be the most productive thing you do all day.

Once your socks are on, make sure you immediately pop back out of bed to finish getting dressed. Why? Studies show that people who shoot heroin in the same room all the time OD less. People who study in the room they’re going to take a test in focus better and do better. These things happen because our bodies learn what happens in certain surroundings and respond accordingly – i.e – This is the room I shoot heroin; Get ready for the heroin; there’s the heroin; Now, don’t die. Plopping you moist tush onto the bed is good in that it dries your meat and two veg, but as soon as you get your second sock on, the loadstone that is you bed will try to suck you back in. And you’ve got time for a five minute nap right. Just five minutes? No, no you don’t. You’re already going to be late. Plus you couldn’t look more ridiculous than you do with your eyes half mast, your legs splayed, and your socks on. Put some undies on for chrissakes.

After you finish dressing, you’ll still have a number of things to get done, and you won’t have much time to do it in. It’s time for some serious time management. Consider what needs to be done, and what time you have to do it in. People who actually make it to things like work, weddings, and say funerals, on time, use a method of figuring out how long things will take by a method called adding. It works pretty well. But I suggest taking a more modern approach and using the selective/distortion non-aggregation method. The selective aspect of the method involves not factoring in things that “really don’t take much time.” So, where as the addition method counts the three minutes you brush your teeth as taking three minutes. The S/D/N-A method counts that as zero. The distortion aspect is similar, but instead of counting certain task as taking no time at all, you just round them up or down. How much? It doesn’t really matter. Just don’t have any scale. Make 7 minutes 5. 11 minutes 10. 4 minutes 3. Count a 20 minute ride to work as 20 minutes, but have a 10 minute ride count as “like a little over five.” The non-aggregation aspect of the plan means never adding these numbers together to get a sum total. Just have them swimming around in your head until, ‘oh, holy shit, is it really 8:50? Oh, man, I’m utterly screwed.’

The second important aspect when it comes to time management is multitasking. Brush your teeth and look for your shoes. Put on your shoes and scan the room for your keys. Button your shirt and kick the clothes on the floor to see if the keys are underneath them. Untuck your shirt so you can put on your underarm deodorant that you forgot to put on after your shower, and . . . WHERE THE FUCK ARE THOSE KE . . . oh, here they are. One word of wisdom here: pick a good hearty multigrain cereal that takes a bit of chewing to swallow if you want to create the illusion that you’re multitasking most proficiently. In my experience nothing feels more responsibly irresponsible than having a dribble of milk drip off my lips as I masticate about eight spoonfuls of cereal while I simultaneously tie my shoes.

The final aspect to time management is atonement. Before you go to bed at night, help yourself out for the next day by getting a few things ready. Don’t go crazy and pack your lunch or anything. But maybe put your keys where you can find them. Or untie your shoes, stretch out the area around which you put your foot in, and place them next to your front door so you can quickly run into them and then straight out the door to your car. And remember: don’t tie them. There’ll be time for that at the first light you hit. Or maybe in the elevator up to your desk.

Some Final Notes About Slinking To Your Desk.

If, day after day, you come in 7 to 15ish minutes late to work your boss will know about it. What should you do as a result? Really I don’t know. You could apologize, but that will draw attention to the fact that you’re always late, and what is an apology worth if you can not or will not make amends for your habitual transgression? Also, an apology is an admission of guilt, and despite the fact your boss knows you can’t make it in on time, he or she may appreciate your general effort and professionalism, and he or she may want to feign ignorance of your biggest nasty little habit. You don’t want to make that effort any harder for him or her. On the other hand, if every day you strut in like the cock of the walk, you’ll seem . . .no, you’ll be a real jerk about not making it to work on time. But still yet, if you slink in everyday, it’ll seem less like an act of contrition, and more like you’re trying to pull a fast one. So mix it up. Some days come in with a hearty “gooood morning!” Some days slide quietly into your seat. Some days just walk in as normally as you were on time. Just don’t blame traffic, or train delays, or any of that crap. And on days you make it in on time, don’t make a racket like Holy Armageddon dropping bags and plopping down on your seat so on, so that everyone knows you’re there. But then again . . . well, a hearty throat clearing might not be such a bad idea.