On The Clock

"Nickel and Dimed for the Amazon age," (Salon) the bitingly funny, eye-opening story of finding work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly low-wage labor After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year, she travelled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. And finally, Guendelsberger was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments. Across three jobs, and in three different parts of the country, Guendelsberger directly took part in the revolution changing the U.S. workplace. Offering an up-close portrait of America's actual "essential workers," On the Clock examines the broken social safety net as well as an economy that has purposely had all the slack drained out and converted to profit. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest - and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity. On the Clock explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans.

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When the clock strikes one, a fun-loving mouse runs up the clock. But what happens when the clock strikes two? A cat gets hungry for mouse-tail stew . . . and the chase is on! Hour by hour, more animals - and even a few people - join in. The crowd charges into the barnyard, dashes through the kitchen, and eventually heads right into the middle of town. Keep your eye on the many clocks in this book and follow along until this twelve-hour race comes to a surprising end!

Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s. Influenced by colonial merchants' fascination with time thrift, by a long-held familiarity with urban, public time, by the transport and market revolution in the South, and by their own qualified embrace of modernity, slaveowners began to purchase timepieces in growing numbers, adopting a clock-based conception of time and attempting in turn to instill a similar consciousness in their slaves. But, forbidden to own watches themselves, slaves did not internalize this idea to the same degree as their masters, and slaveholders found themselves dependent as much on the whip as on the clock when enforcing slaves' obedience to time. Ironically, Smith shows, freedom largely consolidated the dependence of masters as well as freedpeople on the clock.

There's always time for a great clock in your life. Famed collector and clock enthusiast Wallace Nutting originally released The Clock Book in 1924, a celebration of the decorative properties of more than 250 clocks pictured with detailed descriptions of their functions and makers. Antique clock enthusiasts should find immense enjoyment pouring through the images and intricacies of this fascinating collection of clocks that span the ages, in addition to historic clock dates and lists of artist and craftspeople. This special edition reprint of The Clock Book enlarges the page sizes, includes a spectacular new cover design, and retains the original retro period font for a most enjoyable contemporary reading experience. In addition to photographs, illustrations, and historical perspective, more than 100 pages are devoted to classic American clockmakers and period manufacturers, as well as lists of European and foreign clockmakers from around the world. Includes: Notable Clock Dates More than 250 photographs and Illustrations An Introduction by Mr. Wallace List of Former Foreign Clockmakers List of American Clockmakers Description of Illustrations and more

Using the designing and building of the Clock of the Long Now as a framework, this is a book about the practical use of long time perspective: how to get it, how to use it, how to keep it in and out of sight. Here are the central questions it inspires: How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? Discipline in thought allows freedom. One needs the space and reliability to predict continuity to have the confidence not to be afraid of revolutions Taking the time to think of the future is more essential now than ever, as culture accelerates beyond its ability to be measured Probable things are vastly outnumbered by countless near-impossible eventualities. Reality is statistically forced to be extraordinary; fiction is not allowed this freedom This is a potent book that combines the chronicling of fantastic technology with equally visionary philosophical inquiry.

This guy is tough, and so is his message. (By Ruben Rosario, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, MN August 2011. Edited for length) Like the U.S. Postal Service, apparently nothing keeps Larry Bauer-Scandin - foster dad to 125 - from his self-appointed rounds. Not the weather. Not the heart ailments or the genetic neurological disorder that robbed him of movement and rendered him legally blind. The 64-year-old Vadnais Heights resident just gets up and does it. "My life was normal for the first nine years of my life until 1957 when my foot went to sleep, except that my foot never woke up," Bauer-Scandin told a group of inmates from the 3100 unit at the Dakota County Jail. But that's not the main message that Bauer-Scandin, a retired probation officer and jail counselor, wants to deliver on this day. "Whom do you blame for your problems?" he asks the group of 34 men, who are members of IMC, or Inmates Motivated to Change. Under the program, inmates with chemical dependency or mostly nonviolent offenses sign an agreement to take part in several programs and pledge not to make the same mistakes that keep landing them in lock-up. "What people need to do is stand in front of a mirror and ask: 'How much of the problem is mine and how much is it somebody else?' " I first wrote about Bauer-Scandin five years ago. It was centered on his life as a foster parent. As he told the inmates, two of his former foster kids are cops, one in St. Paul. Two are soldiers deployed to Iraq. One's a millionaire. One's an author. Most are raising families or staying out of trouble in spite of hardships. But "15 are dead," said Bauer-Scandin, author of "Faces on the Clock," an engrossing memoir about his life. The dead include suicide victims, including an 11-year-old, others from AIDS and "my last one, they found in three or four pieces, as I understand." Bauer-Scandin's worth writing about again for what he continues to do at great pain and sacrifice without pay or fanfare. He didn't sugarcoat or pull punches with his audience. "What I'm afraid is still happening is that the system is trying to figure out how to get tighter," he told them. "The sentences are getting tougher." And it's not the police, the sheriffs, the courts or even the folks in state and county-run corrections that are responsible for the race to incarcerate. "It's the legislature," Bauer-Scandin said. "And legislatures have been known to do very stupid things." He also faults the media and a gullible public that forms opinions and dehumanizes people strictly on what they watch on TV and not on real-life experiences or knowledge. "What do they see?" he said. "They see the Charlie Mansons. They see the unusual. They see the extreme. Most of you aren't that way. But that's what makes the news." Yet he doesn't divert from his main message: It's up to the inmate to take a positive step and choose the right way. "Get yourself back into a position where you can influence those people, to be able to go to a school board or a city council or legislative meeting and have your voice heard. "You can't fight the system from in here," he concluded. "You have to be out there." The inmates applauded and, one by one, stood in line to shake his hand on his way out the jail complex. His progressively debilitating disorder is taking more of a toll these days. But he steered the scooter inside the van and deftly wiggled his frail body into the driver's seat. He has no complaints, he told me. He will continue to go out and speak as long as God and his wife allow him. "I hope something stuck," he tells me before he drives off. I hope so too, Larry.