Nap Time.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Social effects of work habits; how a strike by nonessential workers in Jan 2000 will help them - Brief Article - Column

Lots of people are making their plans for New Year's 2000, reserving hotel rooms, gathering in out-of-the-way places, or just staying home. Many Evangelical Christians are planning to be taken up into heaven during the Rapture. That will certainly make my gay life easier. I had been thinking of organizing a big farewell party. We'll all stand on a hill somewhere, waving, "Bye, bye! We'll watch your stuff." Plan on strong employment figures for the year 2000.

But I've changed my mind. In celebration of Y2K, I am calling a general strike. All nonessential employees will stay home for a couple of weeks, or until the millennial bugs get worked out, whichever comes first. Then we'll go back to our jobs.

America is working too hard. Quarterly-statistics-mongers exult that productivity is up everywhere in the United States. It should be. Everyone is putting in sixty- or seventy-hour weeks. Whatever happened to those Haymarket Square Riots for the eight-hour day and all that agitation for the five-day week? When I worked in daytime television and would leave bleary-eyed and delirious after ten hours, my co-workers would look at me as if I were some kind of traitorous slacker. Each day I would promise myself I would go home after eight hours, and each day I broke that pact.

Caffeine is to the United States as vodka was to the old Soviet Union. Global capitalism is the new global communism and everyone is jazzed on java, slaving away in different cells of the Internet gulag. I believe that Starbucks and other coffee concerns are in conspiracy against Americans. At first, I thought it was just in New York City where people swagger and proudly proclaim to each other, "I worked 120 hours last week," but from what I can see from my travels, it's happening all over the country.

It's getting worse. Bill Gates's chilling new book, Business @ the Speed of Thought (which was released by Time Warner Books and pimped on the cover of Time magazine--the synergy gives me goosebumps), lays out a twelve-step program for better business, and it's got nothing to do with recovery. Workaholics will never have to stop. A continual looping digital process will...