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The Time-Sweepers
You may
not be familiar with the time-sweepers. The time-sweepers are the people who
sweep up all the time that is lost and wasted. You cannot see them, though if
you are in the railway station and think you see something out of the corner of
your eye, that will probably be a time-sweeper, cleaning up around the bench
you are sitting on. If you were to see them, you would find a small, bluish
person with an intent expression, clutching a broom and a mop. The men wear
overalls, the women old-fashioned tweed skirts and scarves on their head.
The time-sweepers are present wherever time is being lost or wasted. There are
always several in train stations, and at least one in every doctors surgery.
The man who has waited so long to propose to his girlfriend that her hair has
gone grey, probably has his own personal time-sweeper following him around. The
woman who has spent thirty-five loathed years in an estate agents, dreaming of
opening a florists, causes the neighbourhood time-sweeper to sigh, and fetch a
bigger dustpan.
You should not feel sorry for the time-sweepers, though their work is menial:
they are never sick, do not worry that they are in the wrong career, and have
excellent working conditions, though what they do for leisure is unknown. They
enjoy bank holidays off, which is why, on these days, there seems so much more
time than usual. At Christmas and new year, the time-sweepers have a week's
holiday. When they return to work in January, they face a vast backlog of time
which has been lost, wasted and thrown away over the holidays. It takes them
around three weeks to resume normal service, which is why January always seems
to last longer than other months.
The time-sweepers have been around forever, though modern life has created
wasted time in such large concentrations that in some places the time-sweepers
have been forced to industrialise their operations, buying a number of
specialised compressing lorries similar to those used by ordinary bin-men. They
use these for the largest collections, at prisons and shopping malls, two
venues where the tide of wasted time threatens to swamp even the most dedicated
operatives.
Were you to ask a time-sweeper, they would tell you one surprising thing: time
enjoyed is never time wasted. Cleaning up in a large office full of staggering
tedium, the time-sweeper will pass straight by the desk of the woman who is
reading a holiday catalogue under the desk, poring over photos of tropical
beaches. They will pass by the next desk, where a man is enjoyably wondering
what his mother-in-law looks like naked, and stop by the desk of the young man
who is counting every minute, and loathing the hours.
You may wonder what happens to the wasted time after it has all been cleaned
up. Never fear, the time-sweepers are ardent recyclers. It is collected, packed
into large containers, moved to Liverpool docks, loaded onto a ship, and taken
to India. There, in a dusty industrial estate somewhere near Bombay, it is cleaned,
sorted, and graded. The most toxic and poisoned time – the residues of failed
peace negotiations, wrongful imprisonments and truly poisonous marriages, is
skimmed off and buried in a tank underneath a disused army base. There, it will
take two or three centuries to decay, and become harmless again.
The rest of the time – made up of stuff such as dull meetings, missed
appointments, delayed buses and bad nights at the theatre, is cleaned and put
back onto a ship, where it is taken to the Guangzhou industrial export
processing zone. Here it is compressed and stored, awaiting redistribution.
Around twenty percent goes direct to the factories of the export processing
zone, which has the world's highest productivity rate. A quarter is bought in
hard dollars by the Chinese government. Ten percent of the most concentrated
stuff is sold to a cryogenics laboratory in California. Another twenty or so
percent is discreetly sold to a variety of rich private clients, mostly old,
rich men who have married beautiful young women.
However, the time-sweepers are not in it for profit. The money from these deals
pays for their operations, including dusters, bin-bags, overalls and shipping.
The rest is distributed to good causes. No-one who gets any extra time has to
fill in any forms, or ask for a grant. They are all quite unaware that they are
in receipt of assistance. One of these beneficiaries is a shabby and overtired
scientist in a crumbling public laboratory outside Novosibirsk, who will be the
man to find the vaccine for malaria. Another is a prostitute in a Nairobi slum
who has fostered seventeen children, and who, despite twenty years in the
business, never falls ill. A third is the Indian taxi-driver in a cramped flat
in Toronto, who, in between sending money home to a sick wife and children, is
writing what will later be acknowledged as the greatest novel of the century.
Not all the recipients of the
time-sweepers' largesse are people. About forty miles outside Timbuktu, a
medieval mosque, buried in sand, receives a delivery every decade or so.
Somewhere below the floor in the Aegean sea, a Trojan galley is miraculously
preserved in mud. Similarly, the time-sweepers gift a little extra time to a
temple in Mexico, and preserve a haul of dark-age treasure in a Galway bog.
A certain amount of charitable
time is kept back for emergency situations, both small and large. It is
parachuted in in times of desperation, and has facilitated peace deals, changed
battles, and allowed numerous fathers to make it to the delivery room in time.
The time-sweepers are, by their
very nature, a tidy and orderly sort of people. They wish that humans would
think more about throwing away this valuable commodity, but don't expect it'll
happen any time soon.
There isn't a moral to this story.
It's just that if you areplanning on throwing away your time,
please remember -somebody has to pick it up.
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