Don't you call me a Stakhanovite, matey!

A couple of days ago, I wrote a comment on the website of The Guardian newspaper about how many workers in the UK don't seem to focus on getting work done. I gave a couple of examples.

One was from the time I worked in London. Before I found a permanent position as "P.A. to the Management", I signed up with a whole swathe of temping agencies. Unlike in Germany, where one temping agencies signs you up and pays you a monthly sum, whether you work for a company or not, in the UK, you only get paid when a temping agency sends you somewhere to work. I was hired for three days of data entry, i.e. entering data into a computer. Well, you can imagine the surprise of the company when I finished at 11 a.m. on the second day. I, in turn, was surprised that they thought that the amount of work they gave to me would last three entire days. Naturally, I was only paid for one and a bit days.

Or take a more recent example. When translating, many translators say that they can manage 200 standards lines a day. A standard line is 55 keystrokes, including the empty spaces between words and punctuation - basically, every time your fingers hit the keyboard. A while back, I got 1,200 lines to do and they gave me 6 days to do it in. Reader, I got it done in two.

And for this I was accused, by fellow Guardian readers, of workaholism and of being a 'Stakhanovite'. Yeah, I had to look that one up, too.

Apparently, a Stakhanovite was a worker in the USSR who was exceptionally productive, hard-working and zealous. (Alexei Stakhanov was a superstar miner in the 1930s who, with some colleagues, had mined 14 times the normal target of coal in just 6 hours.)

I refute  [widerlegen] those accusations, because, at heart, I am an extremely lazy person. Whether I take 6 days or 2 to translate the same piece of work, I still get paid the same, because I am paid by the length of the text and not by how much time I spend doing it. Thus, the faster I work, the sooner I can stop working and start relaxing. Why waste your time idling over a task when you could be reading a book? 

Don't get me wrong. I love my work, but work is not everything and I like to balance it out with other interests. When I worked in offices, like the one I was in for 3 years, I often ran out of work but still had to 'look busy'. I couldn't read a book, learn something, do handicrafts (in the office?!) or anything else but 'look busy'. I had to look as though I was a 'workaholic' rather than enjoying my free time.

Now that I work for myself, I don't have to appear to be busy to anyone. Which is bliss for this lazy person.