I\u2019ve had it with the term \u201c24\/7.\u201d I\u2019m sick of it. It\u2019s lame. It\u2019s been in use for more than two decades, but it\u2019s older than that. It was first uttered in 1983 by LSU basketball star, Jerry Reynolds. He said it in a Sport\u2019s Illustrated article describing his jump shot, \u201cIt\u2019s good, 24\/7.\u201d It\u2019s now a term in common use. Common OVERUSE! I look at it as an assault on the language, replacing words with numbers. Gone are the old phrases that served us well: every hour, every day \u2013 constantly \u2013 all the time<\/i>. That\u2019s bad enough in itself, but even worse, 24\/7 is usually an overstatement, if not an outright lie. No one does anything 24\/7 except to maintain a pulse.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t brag that we were on the job 24\/7 in my working days. We bragged about our forty-hour workweek; we didn\u2019t refer to it as \u201c8\/5. It was a big deal back then, the 40-hour workweek. It was a new standard. For the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century, people worked 6 days a week, 8, 10 or 12 hours a day. But, even my \u201c8\/5\u201d (forty hour work week) was a misnomer if you subtract the time I spent daydreaming, on coffee breaks and at the water cooler swapping gossip. It was more like 6\/5.<\/p>\n It\u2019s tougher in today\u2019s work world. The 40-hour workweek has morphed into a 50 or 60-hour week, spanning six or even seven days, back to the early twentieth century standard, because corporations have workers by the short hairs, now that job security and job opportunity have become so fleeting. People are gently, and not so gently, forced to put in more and more time. Modern technology, E-mail and text messaging, make it harder to disengage from the workplace. To get away from the boss.<\/p>\n Many of today\u2019s workers are connected to the office with this electronic umbilical cord, yet their claim that they are on the job 24\/7 is still an overstatement. Even if the time spent sleeping and eating is ignored there is still a lot of work time spent \u201coccupying\u201d a desk, not working. Especially when you deduct the time spent sending and receiving personal e-mails and text messages, playing Candy Crush and surfing the Web. 24\/7 is in truth, a lot like the 8\/5 or 6\/5 of my employment era. In fact, us old coots probably put in more productive \u201cwork\u201d hours than employees today. We were lucky; we weren\u2019t interrupted by a Type A personality above us on the corporate ladder, constantly barraging us with texts and e-mails, asking for a progress report. We had the freedom to do our job. Today it\u2019s a highly prized rarity.<\/p>\n Back to my gripe, the overuse of 24\/7. It\u2019s at the top of my list of hip terms that should be retired. The old coot world I live in doesn\u2019t fit an, hours\/days, concept anyhow. Some weeks we\u2019re productive 2\/3. Even that\u2019s a lie, because one of those three days is simply a repeat of what we did the previous day, and forgot. Like mowing our lawns two days in a row. The only thing we truly do 24\/7 is to moan about the good old days, give updates on our physical condition and ask, \u201cWhat was that guy\u2019s name?\u201d<\/p>\n Comments? Complaints? Send to \u2013 mlessler7@gmail.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve had it with the term \u201c24\/7.\u201d I\u2019m sick of it. It\u2019s lame. It\u2019s been in use for more than two decades, but it\u2019s older…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\n