Gina Said It So It Must Be True

Whether you want to admit it or not you, like the other 11, 654, 000 employed people in Australia, are not productive at work 7.5 hours per day, 37.5 hours per week. You, like all of us, will plug away diligently for an hour or so, then your mind will drift effortlessly towards your happy place. If you are outside on the tools, your lift/load/dump ratio will slip: if you are inside on the keyboard you will read or write the same sentence over and over again, or have to triple and then quadruple check a calculation you have done a thousand times. In both cases productivity plummets, Australia slips further into the Dark Ages, and Gina Rinehart will berate the lot of us for being lazy.

Remember she said Australians must work harder to compete with Africans who will flog themselves for $2 per day. She has a few quid in the bank, so she must be right. Though I hear on the news she is doing it tough at the moment and is begging Tony for a discount on her mining 'fees and charges'. Now that her net worth is a small fraction of what it was in 2011, I wonder if she will apologise for being so mean to us when she was worth 20 billion?

Whatever the case, I have a solution for the 11, 654, 000 working Australians that will keep Gina off our backs. 

Everybody knows, the second they open their eyes in the morning, that it is going to be 'one of those days'; one of those days where you can't concentrate, focus or produce a product that has any net positive fiscal value once labour is accounted for. My solution is that on any 'one of those days' you simply go and do somebody else's job!!!!

Stay with me here.......

Everybody has romantic and idealistic notions of what they would rather be doing: sort of a workplace grass is greener. Everybody has something they would love to do every now and then, knowing full well they could not do it day in day out as a career. For me it is driving heavy machinery: diggers, loaders and the like.

What if there was a Job Share app for your iPhone into which you simply log on, detail your skills and interests, where you live and give a rough indication of how much time you would otherwise spend day-dreaming at work. The app would process your info and then match you with a work-share buddy.

So when you 'just can't be stuffed' doing your own job, a notification goes to your buddy that you will be fronting up at his/her workplace and pushing him/her off the tools for the day. It is just so simple that I simply cant understand why no-one has though of it before.

Granted, there are some fatal flaws. Here are a few:

1) your full time employer might get a little upset when you are AWOL and, as a consequence, you miss an important deadline;

2) unless there was some type of police clearance or Working With Children procedures, there is a small chance that you may return to your place of work and find your very expensive machinery or (if you are in childcare) your customer's child(ren) missing.

But they are the only two potential issues I can come up with, so I believe I have succeeded, where others have failed, in deriving and developing a quick fix for the Australian economy. 

I know where my happy place is: where is yours?