A Nine to Five Nation, or Rather, To Three

They still end their working day at 3:30 p.m. Their working hours were over, as one public servant, who I pay as a taxpayer to deliver public information to citizens, shouted back at me. In the old times, but not that old to not remember, most Romanians were calling it a day at around 3:00 or 3:30 p.m. Works and factories and institutes were emptied by the people leaving room for the next shift.

It was our run from the sick communism we lived in, that punched into our lives like a punch card. We were running to our homes, replacing the dull at the work place with the one at home. Always, at the same hour of the day, redemption came, as we were leaving for home as if we escaped prisons. As if our own cells and our families embodied the freedom. Unfortunately it was a second-hand freedom, which lasted only over night, deceitful, making you not ever forgetting it and wanting for more of it, to the point of becoming suicidal and then getting over it.

Those times are over, but the people who inherited the mentalities valid then are alive, strong, self assertive and standing as models to follow. The thinking behind the mechanism stayed unaltered! It went smoothly, without fault in the last 15 years since Romania, and even more so the world, changed. It does not matter who and what changed, but it matters who and what did not. These people still break the door in their haste to leave their work-place at 3:30 p.m.

As that public servant shouted at me when I asked her about a piece of public information, she was already out the door, while speaking to me, she was out and away. And she is not alone. A lot of people think that Romania is a capitalist state; hence it must run on a tight schedule, from 9:00 to 5:00, or to 3:00, rather. We cannot take away that luxury and go into extra-working hours. We cannot remove that privilege to serve prosperity! At the end of the day the people will be the one to suffer, wouldn’t it?!

It’s final: we cannot take away this right the people inherited from their forefathers. Let them break open the doors when leaving work at 3:30 or else the country could go on an uncontrollable spiral for too much work. And that is something we do not want to happen, do we?

God forbid!