Flex Time

West Side girls kvetching after lunch.

Ok...so my office is just BUZZING because our Executive Director decided earlier this summer that we would officially go to "flex time" during the summer.  I seriously had to ask a colleague in the office what this "flex time" business was all about.  "Well," she exclaimed, "as long as you put your usual time in for the week, you can take Friday off if you want."  She was beaming.

I must have had a PRECIOUS look on my face as the crickets chirped in the background.

"Ok," I responded.  "That's....that's great."  What I realized at that moment was that the entire L.A. metro region...oh hell, all of Southern California...runs on flex time.  If you happen to be in, say, West Hollywood, just take a walk down Santa Monica Boulevard at around 2 in the afternoon  on a Tuesday.  People should be working, right?  Yea, well I guarantee that the Starbucks will be packed, random hot shirtless boys will be walking their dogs, hot girls will be kvetching about their "problems" over a late lunch at Hugo's and others will just be meandering from Pinkberry to Nordstrom looking for something to do.  Now, the real kicker is that all these people seem to own nice homes and cars.  

This is a typical day in SoCal.  Everyone seems flush with cash, yet they don't do much other than get tan.  This is why I draw so much entertainment out of our new flex time schedules at the office.  Taking a friday off in the summer makes me feel a little at home...and now a little naughty.  The annoying part is that now if you ask someone if they want to meet about a project on a friday, it's as though they've been waiting for that question all day.  "Well," they say, "that's my FLEX day," with a big smile on their face.  It's almost a little smug....as if we're all trying one-up each other over how to flex our schedules.  Wow.

Now, does this mean that SoCal is just really lazy? Or, is Washington just typical of other East Coast cities that are obsessed with the clock and products of the industrial era?  You decide.