Hollywood and the Summer Hours
By Mary Beth Gentle
My little corner of Hollywood has decided to adopt summer hours. I’ve often heard of this concept. In the past it only seemed to apply to an elite few, but not this year. This year the Hollywood cube dweller has made the grade! When we first got the news that we could have half day Friday’s for the remainder of the summer, I nearly fell-off my chair at the generosity of the powers that be. My fellow cube dwellers immediately began racing up and down the hallways jumping for joy and spreading the news. For one brief moment in time we were kids again and the concept of a summer break actually meant something. It was the ever-elusive ‘golden ticket’ and we had just won.
Of course, we weren’t really getting our entire summers back. Those lazy endless days of summer from our childhoods were long since gone. But, we would be getting five free hours a week. Which meant that we would be starting our weekends five hours earlier, five hours of unexpected time, five hours to remind us of our lazy days of summer. Life was good. The sky was blue. The world was full of possibilities.
And on paper that was exactly how it sounded, it was beyond exciting. The first week of summer hours was only a few weeks ago and on that first Monday I was already making plans for that first half-day Friday. But, by mid-week reality had started to sink in. With summer releases looming at every turn, comic-com preparations hitting full swing and new movies prepping to shoot, the pile on my desk was growing by the second. It was becoming clear that I was going to have to work even harder and stay later the rest of the week to have a shot at an early Friday departure.
And there was the Catch-22. Were the powers that be truly being kind or had they simply devised a new and diabolical plot to get the Hollywood Cube Dwellers to work twice as hard all week for the promise of a few hours of free time on a Friday? Was it worth it? Were we all being played? By Wednesday I hadn’t left my cube to go home until well past eight o’clock. If I was going to make that early departure on Friday, I knew Thursday would be even later. But, it would be worth it after all I was going to get a half-day on Friday. I was going to have my lazy days of summer.
By that first Friday at Noon, I still had a pile of paperwork that needed to be put in order, a couple of crew members that needed travel approvals and a press screening that needed to be organized. How was I ever going to get everything done and still make my departure time? I was only one cube in a sea of cubes and I was surrounded on all sides by equally busy and equally frantic cube dwellers with the same story. Too much work to do and not enough time to do it in. None of us had ever worked so hard for a long weekend before.
So far, I have only managed to make it out of the office a few hours early. On the first couple of Friday’s I ended up spending my ‘free’ time sitting poolside with a blackberry in one hand and a cell phone in the other, it might not sound ideal, but I would rather be poolside returning emails than sitting in an office on a beautiful summer day! As one forever-hopeful cube dweller, I can’t help but cling to the dream that at least one Friday this summer I will leave early and without a cell phone glued to my ear!
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