More on Time Theft

We live in a four-dimensional world. I work with binocular vision and one of the goals in much of the therapy we do involves establishing the ability to appreciate motion in three of those dimensions, and to sustain that in the fourth dimension. Each of those first three dimensions goes two ways. Horizontally, you can move left or right. Vertically you can move up or down. Looking straight ahead, you can move closer or farther away. The position of things near to you can be described by those three dimensions. When that third dimension works properly in vision, we often refer to the result as depth discrimination or depth perception.

The fourth dimension is different. That’s time. Setting science fiction aside for the moment, time only moves one direction. In a sense, time is a half-dimension. It only goes one way. And that’s a problem. 

A common observation in our world is “I’m never going to get that time back.” Albert Einstein taught us that as we approach the speed of light, time slows down. The longer I survive on the planet, the more stationary I become and therefore the less likely it is that I can move at or near the speed of light. So I can’t even slow time down, let alone reverse time.

You are never going to get back that time that was lost. So, when time is stolen from you, it is a non-redeemable, non-recoverable theft. No one gives you your time back. No one offers to replace your lost time. And most frustratingly, those organizations that thrive on theft of your time, and never give any consideration to the concept of theft of your time, constantly come up with new ways to steal your time.

The IRS, of course, might be called the model for all governmental agencies for wasting time and human energy. Get over any idea that you will in any way be compensated for time and effort spent on behalf of Internal Revenue. As if the direct attacks by the IRS, represented by quarterly and annual tax forms, weren’t enough, it’s somehow my problem to figure out my employees’ withholding for their taxes and then deposit those taxes. Why is this my problem? Shouldn’t they be adult enough to figure it out on their own and save their own money to pay the tax bill? And shouldn’t they waste their time rather than mine in figuring that out?

Two reasons for this employee-based open theft of my time come to mind. First, the Feds see me as an easier target for collections and fines than employees. But also, if employees had to be personally responsible for calculating and saving for their taxes, then they might understand how much they’re being charged, and a revolution would ensue. Would they also start to get the idea of how much of their time is being stolen? Maybe. Over time. When you’re young, as my employees are, time seems less precious.

I can easily argue that the State of Washington (where I live and where my business is) is certainly at a professional level in wasting my time. Recent irritating time-wasters have been surveyed. The first, wanting to know about business, came via Washington State University. In a weak moment, based on the novel route of coming from the University, I responded to the survey. It quickly turned into whether I was taking care of LGBTQ+++ people. When I got to the end, once again, they left a comment box. I responded, “This was a complete waste of my time. You people need to GO AWAY!” 

A word to those who create surveys: If you don’t want to know what I think, don’t leave a comment box.

The second came several weeks ago. Apparently more local, I got a survey on wastewater. I have an indoor office – in a small office building owned by someone else. The survey asked me if I had any solvents such as acetone and how I disposed of it. I answered that we have acetone to take marks off spectacle lenses and “IT EVAPORATES!” On the detergents question, I suggested they probably don’t mean whether I wash my hands or not. It’s a required survey every 5 years. Why??? It’s another theft of my time, with complete disregard to the cost to me. 

No problem. I’m just a nano-business who can’t do anything about it. As a business owner, by government definition, I have all the time and all the money in the world.

I recently dispensed with a third survey. The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program survey is from the US Bureau of Labor statistics, but is administered by the State of Washington. The email introducing the survey merely thanks me for participating. No mention of whether it is required. The first page of the online survey itself also has no mention of whether participation is required.

So I asked. They had an email address for questions. I sent two emails, actually. One asked if the survey was mandatory. The second asked where to send an invoice for my time.

The next day I did get an email telling me the survey was NOT mandatory. It went on to explain all the great things I could learn from my participation. 

I responded, “Thank you for your kind response. Since it is voluntary, I will not participate. My time is limited. If you really, really want my opinion, I will need to know where to send an invoice for my time. Please do not take this as a personal attack on you. It is not. But, you are being paid to respond to my email. The people who put the survey together are paid. The people who will work on the data are paid. The people who put together the website you suggest I view are being paid. The top-end guy whose name is on the original email is being paid – probably a lot.

The one person not being paid for my time to put together the data to report and to fill out the forms, to send the emails I have sent, etc, etc, is me. So, if there is an office where I can invoice for my time, I will participate. I will charge at the same rate that I charge when doing a deposition as I sometimes do in giving expert opinions in trauma cases.

Thank you again for your response. I appreciate getting the straight answer since that answer does not appear anywhere in the original email or in the survey opening page itself.”

It’s a small win, but a win nonetheless. Her response back to me said she would record my refusal. I should have immediately responded that she is technically incorrect. In fact, she was refusing to pay me, so I am refusing to work without pay. 

Forced work without pay. What do they call that again?

Obviously, I don’t like having my time forcibly wasted, but when government steals my employees’ time, that also costs me and is just about as painful to go through. 

My daughter Erica runs my office. We moved our office about five years ago. For five years she has been trying to change our federal tax address for state insurances through the Washington State Health Care authority. We have a post office box as well as a street address for our office, and we changed the street address. Let me rephrase, we moved our physical location, but the state is still having problems with the new street address.

I asked Erica to print off the correspondence she had regarding this change in address. She quickly gave me 44 pages of documents. Things hit the proverbial fan early last December when we had to “revalidate [our] enrollment as an Apple Health [Medicaid] provider.” This is “required by the Affordable Care Act.” I always seem to be one of the people paying for the Affordable Care Act. 

The last page of correspondence – after 5 years – has Erica documenting that she had the state worker talk her through the correct steps on the state web page to change our address. The state worker confirmed all the steps were correct, and then confirmed that she (the state worker) could see no changes in the information on the web page. The state worker’s insightful evaluation: “Apparently that is a problem.” 

A postscript to the 44 pages of documents notes that after 5 years, Erica has been assured the state worker has changed the address manually on the state side. Those changes don’t show up as having happened on our side of the web page; that is, the prior address remains, and this procedure has locked the page so we can’t even try to change it from our side now. So, I guess it’s OK?

When I started this article, I was frustrated and I needed to again discuss the theft of time by government. That theft of time hits small businesses harder than larger businesses. I suspect, for example, the CEO of Costco, also a Washington State Corporation, hasn’t received the same request for participation in a survey as I did. All of those extraneous demands from the state, if they even are sent to Costco, end up in someone else’s hands. If you are the CEO of a nano-business, all those extraneous demands end up in your hands or maybe your second-in-command’s hands.

So, I chose to vent my frustration by writing. Again. Then I was struck with the extraordinary sense of entitlement that government agencies and their workers have when it is my time at risk. Their survey announcements start and/or end with “Thank you for participating.” I do understand that represents a sales pitch, if you will, for participating in the survey. However, when the email comes from a department head in the state, it implies the forceful backup the state has.

That realization of their sense of entitlement to seizing my time fed my ongoing attempt to characterize the insanity that was manifested during the Covid pandemic, and broadly accepted during the Covid pandemic, in some way that makes sense to me. I need to understand why people accepted masks, lockdowns, vaccines, etc. I keep trying to make sense of the varied things regular (“normal?”) people say to me here in my office about the last four years. 

Maybe because I’m reading about the Swamp Fox, I see parallels to South Carolina in Revolutionary War times, specifically in the Tories versus the Whigs. 

The Tories – the supporters of the monarchy during Revolutionary War times – probably supported the sense of protection associated with the presence of authorities from the mother country (England) and the resultant sense of stability, as well as just having some loyalty to the country they had been part of. Also, demands in the name of the king or in the name of the Crown had the power of force behind them. 

Entitlement was part of the Crown. The justification for the power and force of the monarchy was the same as the justification of the power exerted by the government “experts,” bureaucrats, and politicians during the current pandemic times, as well as the justification that supports modern demands to do some survey: “Because.” We can demand you waste your time – without pay – on a stupid survey “because” we can. “Because,” again, is backed by guns or other threats from the state.

The Whigs, in contrast, supported freedom from the Crown and therefore supported Independence. 

If you’re willing to follow my parallel to the American Revolution, then those who supported masks, lockdowns, and mandatory vaccines are modern Tories. Fulfilling the role of the Crown in modern times is the cornucopia of elected officials, government experts, self-proclaimed experts, public health officials, and public school officials, all ready to demand others obey their proclamations based on, well, their positions of power that the media and others with power failed to question. Stated more succinctly: “Because.”

Whigs, then and now, reject impingements on personal freedoms. To Modern Whigs, Tory obedience seems pathological. 

Is that Tory pathological obedience a reflection of their income source, that being the government? 

Or, is that pathological obedience from schooling? Any schooling puts teachers/professors in the position of being the expert, so yielding to and recalling expert opinion is a matter of educational and therefore occupational survival. 

Or, is the pathological obedience because everyone else in someone’s chosen social and thought group is openly, even forcibly pathologically obedient?

Or, is the pathological obedience a response to the constant deluge of approving-of-government-with-superficial-at-best analysis “news” in the media? 

Does the source of the pathological obedience even matter? Sometimes pathology just is.

Tories have been and remain emotionally – sometimes extremely emotionally – attached to government, especially government experts, bureaucracy, regulations, and regulatory apparatus. Officially-encouraged virtue-signaling seems to follow with that attachment, although it isn’t openly self-recognized as virtue-signaling. They are also almost violently emotionally repulsed by politicians and people who disagree with conformity to government diktat and the current political hierarchy, bureaucracy, and regulations (“which are for the benefit of all of us”). 

Since I reject pathological obedience, that must mean I view myself as a Whig – a freedom and independence-loving non-Tory. Beyond a love for freedom and independence and a revulsion to totalitarian things like pandemic lockdowns, my link to Revolution-era Whigs is the nano-business. 

Whig farmers who were militia members had skin in the game. Whigs had to drift away from the militia during the Revolution to take care of the family farm. I reopened my practice early in the lockdown, and although I didn’t make a big deal of it by advertising I was open. It’s a little like how Whig farmers just sort of quietly walked away from their militia units for harvest. Is a current nano-business all that different from the family farms that necessitated all those Whig militiamen to go home for harvest? 

A difference between the two eras is that leaders of the militia had to let the farmers go. In the current era, nano-businesses during lockdowns were threatened with government retribution for such egregious violations as taking off a mask to breathe, or not enough Palliative Plexiglas Panels (I think that’s what PPP stands for). 

Government agencies feel no compunction about stealing my time since they are convinced that they are entitled, by law, to steal my time as duly paid representatives of the government. Tories tolerate no discussion of changing that government-entitled theft of time. In fact, no good Tory would put up with any suggestion that the theft of time (and therefore money) from small businesses during Covid lockdowns was anything other than required, justified, public-spirited, and completely legal. Cheering the sacrifice of the other guy will always draw a crowd of like believers and has always been downright comfortable for the non-sacrificed.

Do Tories sometimes change sides? Well, back in Revolutionary South Carolina they did when Sir Henry Clinton, the commander-in-chief of British operations in North America during the Revolution demanded South Carolinians sign an oath of allegiance to the king requiring active assistance to the British government. That demand drove people who up to that point in the conflict had been more neutral and even some who had been Tories to change to identifying as Whigs. 

In the modern pandemic world, I can’t tell whether the (in-essence) enforced “oath of allegiance” that was lockdowns and masks (and vaccines) had that same effect of changing modern Tories into modern Whigs. 

Having skin in the game – being a Whig, if you will – at one time was considered honorable and necessary for economic development. Covid brought restrictions to small- and nano-businesses not seen before. Those impingements have made the government’s free-wheeling theft of time and therefore of resources more readily, more easily, more irritatingly noticeable. How do rational people get across to government regulatory agencies, bureaucracies, and to government employees who carry out these thefts of time as well as the Tories who won’t protest these thefts of time, that we don’t need a time-consuming, waste-of-resources survey to verify that acetone evaporates? 

Time and freedoms also can evaporate – non-recoverably. Next time they call or send a survey, ask the survey-taker for a credit card number you can use to charge for your time.