Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [74]
While threshing with the crew, I had noticed something interesting. The work was heavy and the day long, yes. But there was something pleasantly haphazard about the scheduling; there were lulls. Lulls waiting between wagonloads. Lulls caused by lack of coordination of the persons overseeing, if anyone was overseeing. Lulls for eating and drinking. Lulls here, lulls there. If I hadn’t been alert to the question, these gaps could easily have been overlooked. The lulls did not constitute mere empty time; conversation, for instance, often continued unabated when the work stopped. Lulls were part of the natural flow of human activity and rhythm. They were a testimony to genuine human leisure.
So far my conclusions about Minimite successes had been based on my own experience and subjective impressions. Yet while Mary and I were gaining in proficiency, we could not speak for the Minimites themselves. For one thing, we still did not begin to approximate the time- and labor-savings, born of experience and skill, that they manifestly possessed. On the other hand, we didn’t farm nearly as much land as they did. And the Minimites, taken individually, had different work habits. Some liked to take life easy; others applied themselves punctiliously to the day’s work. Just because an opportunity for leisure existed didn’t mean everyone took advantage of it.
The timing of threshing could provide not only greater objectivity, but universality. The job was one that both the Minimites and I had performed—and the work came as a package, averaging together the efforts of different laborers from different farms. What’s more, it was avowed to be among the most strenuous. Thus it gave a sense of the maximum Minimite workload, the peak at the opposite end of the trough of lighter intermittent work in the off-season.
On two different afternoons during the threshing harvest, using a digital watch, I set out to clock how I spent my time. I used results from a typical workday at James Stoltzfus’s, another brother of Gideon, Elbert, and Alvin. Some strands of conversation are included.
12:30 P.M. Left home. Walked to James’s. Waited as the crew assembled.
1:13* (*Time interpolated). Rode on wagon down circuitous track to field.
1:22. Threshing begins.
1:37. Five minute break waiting for empty wagon.
1:42. Second load.
2:02. Third load. The new wagon was waiting for us, but we slowed down as crew members dropped their work in astonishment while I was telling them about life in Boston.
“The main industry in Detroit is cars; in Pittsburgh, steel; in Boston, education. There are one hundred thousand students in Boston at fifty different colleges.”
“What percentage actually do what they learn?” Elbert asked after a pause. The answer was very few, because if they don’t change their minds by the time they graduate, they often discover that what they were learning has already been outmoded.
2:27. Fourth load.
2:46. Fifth load and break. Now we were talking about New York. In New York, I explained (though I’d never lived there), everyone had to be paid more money because it didn’t go nearly so far as it would anywhere else.
“How much for a regular house?” someone asked.
“In the city? I have a friend whose dad lives in a three- or four-story brownstone—a skinny house all packed in next to other ones. Probably cost a million dollars.” (It was down the block from the Guggenheim.)
“What about just a regular apartment?”
“That depends on where it is and how many bedrooms and how nice.”
“Just a regular apartment.”
“Three bedrooms? Three bedrooms cost”—I was venturing a wild guess, based on my