Real time, wasted time and old times ...

Nineteen days had passed since Cone Man had worked his last day at the Great Hall of Wisdom. Five days had passed since the expiry of his Long Service Leave, which meant that he had ceased being paid for his time at 5pm the previous Friday. Admittedly, he was receiving final payment next week including unused Annual Leave plus his Redundancy, so Cone Man had reason to view this state of affairs with equanimity, but his mind turned again to the question of time. "Fugit inreparabile tempus" (it escapes, irretrievable time) growled the sage Virgil, and sadly, that harsh fact of time had not be changed by the mere passage of two thousand years.

How does a warrior extract financial value from hours for which no employer or customer will pay him money for? Reflecting on this mundane question (most of the questions in Cone Man's life were rather mundane) he remembered that cash payment for hours worked was an invention of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that time, the concept was ridiculous.

Virgil undoubtedly understood the value of money, but he lived in a world where 90 percent of the population lived in villages, grew their own food, and often bartered for other things. The word "salary" derived from the practice of the Roman paying soldiers with a ration of salt. Slavery and serfdom saw many work as long as was necessary without consideration of paying them anything. War, famine and the Black Death often rendered the value of money completely worthless, and your time on earth tended to be nasty, brutish and short anyway.

Value, nevertheless, could be extracted from unpaid time. Many a warrior survived a battle because of the time he spent in sword practice, and it was not for nothing that the French had a proverb: "The graveyards are full of middling swordsmen".

Less dramatically, Cone Man could clear, dig over and prepare his vegetable patch for the August planting. He could for that matter, finish painting another room in his house. Or take in a lodger (if the lodger could tolerate an old codger). Writing one page a day could conceivably produce a return one day (or so Cone Man fantasised). With this happy thought, he headed down to the local library to file another job application ...