Is bottomless overtime right for you?

Is work-life balance dead, and will you even find time to attend the funeral?

During different phases of my five-decade working career, I have worked all three shifts, toiled every holiday, struggled with doubled production quotas, accepted 48 hours as a standard work week and missed countless family events.

Still, today's job applicants are facing unprecedented obstacles to squeezing in a little "me" time.

According to the Wall Street Journal, in the post-COVID business environment, remote work, clock-watching and water-cooler gabfests are history.

Employers are bluntly (gleefully?) warning applicants that attendance at after-hours events is non-negotiable, do-or-die projects may be dumped in their lap without warning and flinching at routine 70-hour workweeks brands employees as sissies/underachievers/traitors.

Yes, as the labor market loosens up, companies are back in the driver's seat. ("That's right. We're back behind the wheel! We may doze off, sideswipe a schoolbus and send it careening down a ravine — but we're back behind the wheel, baby!")

Job-seekers are encouraged to apply elsewhere if they don't lust after mandatory overtime. Some start-up companies are even stipulating retroactive mandatory overtime. ("Signing bonus? There's no signing bonus. In fact, we're docking you for all those times you shut down your front-yard lemonade stand in November.")

Entrepreneurs such as Mark Cuban snidely advise that workers better get on board with the New Normal, because unless they give 110 percent 24-7, that bogeyman The Competition is going to eat their lunch. ("Dude, I'd be glad if somebody actually found time to eat my meals! I can't. And trying to catch a red-eye flight while hooked up to an IV pole is not what my high school guidance counselor prepared me for!")

I know there's a lot of alpha-male (or maybe "The Devil Wears Prada") bravado exacerbating the "survival of the fittest" mentality; but it also looks desperate when you force your employees to upend their downtime for Zoom meetings with vendors/customers halfway around the world. Better to bluff your way through. ("Listen, you can make yourself available when it's convenient for MY people, or I'm buying your whole %$#@ time zone!")

These managers and HR directors remind me of Steve Martin as Navin Johnson in "The Jerk." You know the speech: "I don't need this stuff and I don't need you. I don't need anything except this. This ashtray. And this paddle game. The ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control…"

Except their message is more "This company can't survive without humbly indispensable me working 80 hours a week. Well, me and my dedicated hand-picked team. And their long-lost friends from summer camp. And, oh yeah, that litigious guy who hasn't been able to fall sleep since one of our delivery trucks hit him and…"

Ambitious college graduates find themselves having to reconfigure time-tested life goals. The mantra used to be "Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse." Now it's "Live fast, die young and leave a really good stock portfolio for…the blood relatives who forgot you were alive…um, the Significant Other you never asked for a date…uh, the faithful dog you never adopted…er, the museum whose doors you never darkened…"

Don't get too cocky, bosses. Pendulums swing both ways.

"No, you may NOT vacation on Mars… not until I've given you a raise and a footrub and let your darling rugrats rummage through my desk!"

–

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Controversial author Harlan Ellison once described the work of Mr. Tyree as "wonkily extrapolative" and said his mind "works like a demented cuckoo clock." Tyree generated a particular buzz on the Internet with his column spoofing real-life Christian nudist camps. A lifelong small-town southerner, he graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1982 with a bachelor's degree in Mass Communications.

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