Concrete pencil

By John Hill on May 8, 2008 8:59 AM |

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Concrete Pencil - This week, Dan Bourke is angering the machines...

When you sit idle at your workstation, it’s best to at least try to fill your time productively.

By this of course I do not mean that you should find some work that no one has asked you to do and show initiative, or anything so ludicrously self-defeating as that.

No, far better that you try to get free stuff or win things on the internet.

Now for one reason or another I don’t get to do nothing nearly enough in my work any more. But I have been commuting my suited body to these towers for nine years exactly now, so I’ve had my share of downtime.

A fellow waster and I have tried to win holidays in the Caribbean, several generations of PlayStation, free Lottery tickets, DVDs, BMWs, digital cameras. You name it.

I haven’t actually won anything, of course, but the process was not without value.

There’s the rigmarole of applying: that usually killed about half an hour.

There was the planning stage, picturing ourselves driving about the Wharf in our new soft-top, driving to the flat we’ve just won and trying to work out how to install that hot tub.

And there’s the anticipation.

It doesn’t happen so much for me any more. Although the other day I got an email newsletter from Penguin, asking me if I’d like a free Classic.

Yes, I said, what do I have to do?

Review it, said the email.

So I filled in the form and about a month later I got a free book, selected at random from their 1,200 titles.
It was Pnin, by Vladimir Nabakov. I had instructions to read it, then write what I thought about it and join some messageboard and discuss it.

Now, I have very bad reading habits. I put the book by my bed and got through some of it.

Then leaving the house for the Tube one day I got distracted by a book about swimming. Then I took to reading only the paper.

But by the time I got back to it my interest was lacking oxygen, and eventually, sadly, it died.

So I can’t really write a review. “I read it for a bit and it kept me awake slightly longer than I would have been otherwise, but for no discernible reward.
“The author seems to mention squirrels a lot for no real reason I can fathom, and if you finish it after 56 pages it is not an altogether rewarding experience. Nabakov must do better.”

So I didn’t. But I now feel awful. I feel really guilty that I’ve taken this book on good faith and I haven’t taken part in the process.

This surely is a feeling peculiar to our times. These emails are set up by a computer program. The reminder I got was automated.

I am wasting emotional effort on the thought I might have offended an algorithm.

That somewhere in a server room some binary code is emoticonning disappointment in my slackness.
Maybe the computers will turn against me.

Maybe this column, when emailed, will have some degrading false confession inserted into it by vengeful Windows.

I am a bed-wetter, and I voted for Boris Johnson.