I would love to tell you that there is some profound message to me having chosen these toy road signs from a children’s playground alongside the beach for my shot for today. The reality is that I just liked the shapes and colours set against the early morning sun over the ocean.

However if you insist (I know you didn’t, but I’ll pretend otherwise), I can find one.

My work has decided to insist that we all return to the office three days per week. In my case, that is a two-hour commute each way, each day. Four hours per day. Twelve hours per week.

I’m sure that some would say “If you want the job, then you have to turn up!”. The first group of people who would say this are managers who don’t know how to manage in the twenty-first century when there is no need for everybody to be gathered in the one place and micromanaged. The second group, and the ones most strident about it, are those who have investments in commercial real estate. They try to disguise this self-interest by claiming that their motives are high-minded and entirely about trying to preserve businesses in the central business district.

What does this have to do with the sign? I think too many of us (and I am as guilty as anyone else on this point) fail to periodically stop and question whether we are doing the things we do because they still have value to us, or whether we should be re-evaluating them. What we do for work, and how we do that work, is one such issue. We become addicted to the paycheque, but at what cost? In my case, working from home has allowed me to exercise at least an hour a day six or seven days per week. As a result, while I’m far from being an elite athlete, my health is the best it has been in years. When I was commuting five days a week in the days before the bug, I would have to get up in the early hours of the morning. Two hours would be wasted on a train. I would do my work. I would leave relatively early (because I had arrived early), and spend another two hours on a train. I would get home in time to tend to the animals, and start preparing dinner. By the time that was done, it would be too late to go out and do outdoor exercise. Also, it would be time to start getting ready for bed. That would still result in less than eight hours sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. This had unfortunate health side-effects eventually.

What bothers me more is that not only is it unnecessary (there is no part of my job that cannot be done from home), it is actively counter-productive. At the moment, some of the time that I would be spending on the train is instead spent working at my desk at home. That is time that the company will lose. I’m certainly not going to make up those twelve lost hours by working additional hours. Thus, I lose my ability to stay healthy, and the company loses productive hours every week, and for what? Essentially, to have me in the office as set decoration.

Often people just keep metaphorically sleepwalking in life because they have failed to do what the sign says; stop, and consider alternatives. (“Sleepwalking”; see, I told you I’d find a use for the pedestrian crossing sign in my allegory.)

Here endeth the lesson.

For people who are viewing this image somewhere other than PBase, anyway. For PBasers, I’ll add something else that I can see ending. That is, the Show and Tell competition in the Forum, which is also promoted on the PBase homepage. The rules are quite simple.
1/ The winner of the previous competition proposes a topic.
2/ PBasers submit their images which correspond with that topic. Or have something remotely to do with that topic. Or not, for some of the entries that I’ve seen.
3/ The competition is open for exactly one week.
4/ The person running the competition is supposed to choose the winner within “24 to 48 hours”.
5/ The new winner is supposed to nominate a new topic, again within 24 to 48 hours.

As at the time of posting, the most recent competition closed on Tuesday, 22 October. It is now Saturday, 26 October. The competition runner has not been heard from. This is the third time in about a month where either the person running the competition has failed to nominate a winner inside the prescribed period, or the winner has failed to create a new competition within the prescribed period.

The last time I entered one of those competitions was 2008. I could tell from stat counter that the competition runner didn’t even bother looking at my entries. (Afterwards, I also noticed that the winner was generally selected from a particular group of mutual admirers, so I didn’t bother trying a second time.) Of course, back then there were about seven pages worth of entries for each competition, so some shortcuts are understandable. Now, the competition is lucky to have seven entries.

(Looking back at that one competition that I entered, it is more disturbing than interesting to see how many of the entries now link to “no such user account”. Clearly, in the last sixteen years a significant number of PBase members embraced the concept of stopping and considering whether at least one thing in their lives still worked for them... and apparently decided that PBase didn’t. Which is a pity, because I recognise the names of some damn fine photographers in there.)

There have been a handful of (understandably) testy posts in the forum about participants having to wait days for winners to fulfil their obligations. One even called for people who do that to be banned from winning future competitions. However considering that the number of regular participants is probably about a dozen by now, the competitions are going to start running out of participants if people start being banned. Thus, that may eventually become another piece of PBase history that also comes face-to-face with a stop sign.