The chocolate factory where I worked summers during university was called Beta Brands, and like many beneficiaries of nepotism, I spent one of my rotations there with absolutely nothing to do — so I invented the Beta Brands Shuffle. The Beta Brands Shuffle was a series of time-filling non-tasks that could be employed towards a twofold result:
- The appearance of work, thereby reducing the threat of real work;
- The passing of time, thereby reducing the threat of boredom-induced insanity.**
The basic path of the Beta Brands Shuffle was worked out in one of the rotations at that factory where I actually did have something to do. For a summer (or two), I worked the graveyard shift, monitoring the Wieneroto — the chocolate mixing machine at the very back of the plant. Sometimes it went bonkers and shat chocolate all over the place, so someone had to go look at it every fifteen minutes to make sure all the needles in all the dials were pointing erectly to the right Northern Stars. (Did this task need two workers, me and my brother? No. But let’s not cloud the issue.)
The backbone of the Beta Brands Shuffle was walking the same path to the Wieneroto and back — a long, leisurely loop (slow footsteps and a generally unhurried demeanour were absolutely vital to the Shuffle) around the circuit of the factory floor. (If you’ve seen my film Parallax, you’ve seen the route.)
The key prop of the Beta Brands Shuffle was, of course, a clipboard and pen. Every ten or fifteen steps, I would stop, look at a stack of raw sugar or a bin of bulk Sweet Tarts, and I would write mumbo jumbo on my clipboard, and frown thoughtfully. Then I would bear on.
The key unwitting conspirators of the Beta Brands Shuffle were my fellow employees, who really enjoyed talking to me; especially the guys in Shipping, who were happy to pull up a table with me at the front of the factory and shoot the shit, or play practical jokes over the loudspeaker, till an hour had convincingly vanished.
The key successes of the Beta Brands Shuffle were its scalability and repeatability. A Shuffle could take five minutes or three hours. It could be undertaken over and over again without pause, or anytime I needed a convenient excuse for slacking. It could, if I dared, buy me a daylight chance to gambol out the back door and make a headlong sprint for the vacant lot beyond – where, lying in the long grass, I could read Michael Crichton completely undetected, sometimes for hours.
And of course, the Shuffle can be done anywhere, with anything, in front of anyone. You don’t need a chocolate factory. You just need time to kill.
I think about the Beta Brands Shuffle a lot lately.
**There is, of course, an important question here: why undertake fake work to avoid real work, if real work would alleviate boredom and relieve the need for fake work? Well, obviously: I was nineteen.