“WORK" AS I SEE IT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18141, 12 January 1921, Page 6

“WORK" AS I SEE IT

Bx Geoegb A. Birmingham. “If all the world were playing holidays To sport would be as tedious as to work.” Shakespeare was certainly right when he wrote those lines. He might have gone farther and said that what we call sport would be work, tedious drudgery, if we were kept at it. One man’s sport is his neighbour’s work, and there is no real difference between the two. We call work sport if we only get the chance of it occasionally; and we call sport work if we have to do it every day in order to get a living. I spent an Easter some years ago at a popular yachting place in England. The weather that year was particularly stormy and wet on Good Friday and the following Saturday. Comparatively few yachts came to our port, but some came, and among them one small boat,, a five tonner or thereabouts. She, had on board two young men, and it was quite evident that she had suffered what yachtsmen call a “dusting.” These young men had made a passage in what, for so small a boat, was very bad weather indeed. Every single thing on their boat was soaked; their cabin cushions, their bedding, their spare clothes. On Easter Sunday, which was fine, they spread their belongings out to dry, and when there was not room enough on the narrow deck they hung things on the rigging. I know quite enough about sailing to realise what these two young men had been through. For ten hours or twelve, perhaps, they had been violently tossed about. They had sat in pools of water, anfi had felt water, cold and salt, trickling up the sleeves of their oilskin coats and down their necks. They had snatched at uncertain intervals scraps of cold, damp, .and unpalatable food. They had run a serious risk of being drowned, and had spent hours of acute anxiety. They had tugged hard at stiff, wet ropes, strained their eyes to see through driving spray, and pored, under the most distressing circumstances, over charts which they very imperfectly understood. They had —I have no kind of doubt about it—enjoyed themselves thoroughly. That was their .idea of a holiday, and they called it sport. A fisherman, whose business it is to go down to the sea in small ships, would have called it hard work and grumbled ht the fate which compelled him to do such things when other men sat warm and dry and properly fed in offices. One Man’s Work Another Man’s Sport.— The same paradox, that one man’s work is another man’s sport, meete us everywhere. I had a friend once who was a journalist. His job seemed to be to sit in the office of his own paper and read of scores of other papers which arrived every day by post. He may have had other things to do, but that was the only thing I ever saw him doing, and I went into his office very often. He regarded this work as very tedious, and his idea of amusement was digging in a small garden at the back of his house. Later on, when allotments came into fashion, he got one and took to digging more vigorously than ever. I do not myself care for digging. It strikes me as dull work, and very tiring. At that time I employed a gardener to do any work which had to be done on my small place. That gardener was inordinately fond of reading newspapers. He spent all his leisure time, and a good deal of time which ought not to have been leisure, reading paper after paper. He regarded digging as a disagreeable business, did as little of it as he could, and would have done none at all if digging had not been, in his case, a necessity

Now here, apparently, was a plain case of two men. wrongly placed in life. If they could have changed occupations, all —so one might suppose— would have been well. The gardener would have spent long, blissfully happy days reading paper after paper. The journalist would have dug in my garden with frenzied delight. But this would not really have been so. The journalist-turned -gardener would have hungered for newspapers directly gardening became his -work and reading his recreation. The other man, faced in the morning with an enormous pile of papers to read, would have yearned for a spade. The Monotony of Work.—.

I suppose that men who are paid for playing games, professional cricketers and professional golfers, must often wonder why people who are not paid ever play these games at all. It must seem obvious to them that bowling at a net, and smiting little balls towards distant holes are extraordinarily wearisome occupations,' and they must envy those who are free to spend their time otherwise. There are people, oldish women chiefly, who find great pleasure in providing medicine for the sick. There is nothing they like better than being called on for advice on a matter of health, and they ars almost glad when a friend, or a child of a friend,„ meets with an accident. A doctor, on the other hand, hates going near sick people, and would never do it if he conld, get an income by making himself agreeable to those in ' good health. Why multiplv examples of what everybody knows? The question is how this curious law of our nature can be used to our advantage. The world—taken a« a whole—is proclaiming the necessity ’of getting more work done. The only way, so we are continually assured, of avoiding national bankruptcy is to work harder. By increased output, that is by hard work all round, our soaring prices may be brought down, the American exchange established, the Russian trouble settled, and all other desirable things accomplished. On the other hand the world—considered this time as a' number of individuals —is quite determined to do less work. The ten-hour day of our fathers became, in response to our clamours, an eight-hour day, and the eight-hour day is turning into a six-hour day, which in its turn will give nlace to a four-hour day, three days being reckoned to make ud a week. And we are at the same time determined to do as little work as possible when we are at it. What do we propose to do with all the time we have over? No sensible, healthy man finds any pleasure in sitting still and looking at the toes of his own boots. Idleness is scarcely even possible for more than a few days at a time. We must be doing something. What? —Solving the Problem.— It seems plain that whatever we do will he what somebody else calls work. Even if wo go to a theatre and watch a play we shall be doing what seems to a' theatre attendant, a seller of programmes, toilsome work. The trouble is not that we don't want to work—for we do. Wo cannot help it—but that we do not want to go on working at the same thing all the time. It eeetns as if our whole difficulty would be got over by taking on each other’s jobs for a few hours every day. We could always call the other man’s work sport, and'let him draw all the pav for what was done. And he could call our work sport, and let ns draw the pay for what he accomplished when he was at it. So the actual 1 work of the world, the carpentering, the digging, the fishing and so forth, could be kept going at high pressure, for twelve hours at least out of every twenty-four. The output would be enormously increased. We should all grow richer and richer. We could reduce the hours of what we call work to an undreamed of minimum. Indeed there seems no reason why any of us would ever work at all in the old sense of the word work. We could spend our whole time in sport of one kind or another. The Millenium would be reached at a single bound. And all that is required is a little organisation. Why don’t we do it?— Weekly Scotsman.