Brad Heap

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. – Benjamin Franklin.

This morning I have been cleaning the house and among other rubbish that is being thrown out is a few old bus passes. For some reason I decided to look on the back of my bus pass where each of the trips taken are recorded and it is a little scary how routine my day is:

Trip 1 – On Bus at 8.20
Trip 2 – On Bus at 17.29

Trip 3 – On Bus at 8.28
Trip 4 – On Bus at 17.29

Trip 5 – On Bus at 8.29
Trip 6 – On Bus at 17.20

Trip 7 – On Bus at 8.31
Trip 8 – On Bus at 17.40

The scatter of morning trips is within 11 minutes and three of the four trips are within a 3 minute period on different days. Coming home from uni the spread is over a 20 minute period but two of the four trips are identical times on consecutive days.

The going to uni closeness in times makes a lot of sense I have my morning routine drilled down so well that I can be up at 7.30, showered, breakfast, and walk down to the bus stop within a 10 minute window of variance.

What surprises me more is the pattern in heading home. I try to maintain 9 – 5 hours at uni but the end time is often determined by who I am talking to or what I am working on, it is not the sort of thing you can just stop, I stop when I get to a point in my code I can halt on, or I finish whatever task I was doing, so to manage 4 consecutive days of finishing within a 20 minute window is well scary.

It is an almost scary idea that in 5 weeks time the first decade of the 21st century will be over. I can still remember the celebrations at the turn of the century ten years ago (at the time I was only 12 years old!).

In the herald this morning there is an article on the defining moment of the last decade.

The writer of the article makes an interesting choice for the defining moment:

The defining moment of the last 10 years wasn’t George W. Bush reading “The Pet Goat” to a bunch of kids on 9/11 while New York was burning, or the Hadron Collider finally producing its first bang this week. I fear the true essence of this decade was captured in four minutes of a flash mob video of 20,000 perfectly syncopated bouncing Oprah fans “spontaneously” erupting in a choreographed dance to a Black Eyed Peas performance in the middle of Chicago’s main thoroughfare.

However the article also makes a point that we have gone too far with the mass publicity of our private lives:

It took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million. Facebook got there in 24 months, according to Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s now infamous “Did You Know” series. To put this in perspective, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter didn’t exist at the start of this decade. I can be patient. We’re bound to outgrow this over-sized hyper-connectivity lust. I’ll be the really edgy, new advocate for two people just sitting in a room talking – because that’s all it needs to be sometimes.

Personally I have not given much thought to what the defining moment would be, there are a lot of things that could be considered. Maybe that is the topic for a future blog post?

Tag Archives: Time

The Daily Routine

The defining moment of the last decade.