I wish this were a romantic post about counting the hours until seeing a loved one. It is not romantic at all, as here I want to comment on how our working time is being quantified to ridiculous extremes.

In Spain tenured university teachers are civil servants. The contract we sign with the Spanish state (or the regional governments) claims that we work 37.5 hours a week, 44 weeks a year (do we really get 8-week holidays? I hadn’t noticed). This amounts to 1,650 hours per year. The UAB considers that these hours should be distributed as follows: 560 (teaching), 560 (research), 200 (administration, excluding appointments for particular posts like head of Department) and 330 (training and free choice activities).

Here’s the obvious: you can’t really count the hours we work, much less distribute them in neat packages. Some universities are even trying harder than this –a colleague in Lleida tells me they keep a strange accountancy which details how many hours it takes to write an article. As if we were robots instead of thinking persons. Maybe that’s what they want, ‘they’ being the robotic bureaucrats that want to regulate our time as if we were factory workers (with all my respects to factory workers, including those in my own family).

Class hours, of course, can be counted but try to count the hours it takes to prepare one: from nothing, if you’re recycling last year’s materials, to anything if you’re reading a novel just for one or two sessions (plus criticism, of course). Then, everyone has the experience of reading a book or seeing a film in their leisure time and end up using that as the basis for an article, which becomes the basis for a seminar, etc, etc. How do we quantify this mixture of leisure and working time?

A good Literature teacher must read as much as possible, and this includes time on the train, the evening until early hours, weekends –plenty that falls outside the 37.5 hour contract. Writing is even harder to quantify as perspiration doesn’t always lead to inspiration and one piece may come to you as if dictated by the muses and another take ages, whether this is due to writer’s block or because, as I have said before, THINKING TAKES TIME.

Actually, I believe that there is no way teaching Literature, producing good research, being an improvised administrator, etc, etc, fits into a 37.5-hour schedule. Maybe if we counted all the hours we do put in, governments would realise how CHEAP we are, but, then, this is not what they want, do they? Also, if we shouldn’t have to waste our time making our own photocopies or being our own travel agents when we attend conferences, and if our groups were of 25 instead of 100 students, our time would stretch further.

And I’ll stop here, and I’m sure someone is already thinking that the 20 minutes it takes to write a blog post are wasted time or, even worse, time I cheekily take off my ‘well-paid’ 37.5 hours. By the way, today is Saturday.