Time Wastage

So it occurs to me that I'm spectacularly good at wasting time - or whiling it away, as the occasion calls for it.

Take the last few days. I've been coming in at seven-thirty in the morning to do labwork and finishing up at around two in the afternoon. (The actual duration of course varies with the nature of the work, the available manpower and the number of mistakes made by said manpower.) My ride home is at five in the afternoon. For anyone with a rudimentary grasp of arithmetic or calculator usage, that means three hours of spare time in school and away from chocolate supplies, art materials and other home conveniences.

What is to be done then, with this spare time? These are the possible options:

1) Finish up daily lab reports.
2) Go to the library and read a book.
3) Pig out at one of the canteens.
4) Do stuff on the internet.

The first takes an hour on the outside, leaving two more as spares. The second is a poor option because I make it a point to avoid non-fiction books as much as possible (they trigger flashbacks of the last few weeks before the O' Levels) and I haven't been able to find the fiction section in our school library. The third is a ridiculous exercise in wasting health and money. Therefore the last is usually what I resort to.

And considering that I can eat up two hours effortlessly simply by surfing the internet, I think we may have a serious problem.

It's not that there's actually that much to see. Although the internet is a very large place, hardly 0.01% of it is likely to fall into my range of interests at all, and when we factor in the fact that I actually have to be aware of a site of interest in order to visit it, the number of websites available for two hours of browsing drops significantly. Adjust for sites which are rarely updated, sites which I've decided to boycott and moods wherein I simply don't feel like visiting a certain page, and the number drops further.

The internet does, however, provide numerous ways of amplifying the time spent on a single site. Wikipedia, for instance, has a link at every other word, and so a single keyword could lead to twenty pages browsed in a single sitting. Archives are another trap - be it comic archives or Something Awful's index of Photoshop Phriday topics, they provide a library of multiple instances of certain media the internet user might enjoy, even if these archives have been perused multiple times. And of course mindless online games are a well-known draw into repeating one set of actions over and over again for an imaginary reward.

But perhaps the most insidious of time-wasting sites are those which require input from the user, particularly thoughtful input, because as we all know thinking takes time when carried out properly and sometimes even when it's not. Blogs are a prime example of this, and...

...Dammit.