Anyone know how to use a saved minute?

ALL OVER the world there are brilliant people dreaming up new ways of saving time and labour. I sometimes wonder whether there are equally brilliant people dreaming up ways to spend all the time and energy we save. I also wonder how many modern time and labour-saving devices actually save anything at all.

The kitchen is a treasure trove of ingenious labour-saving devices.

Take the simple chore of beating an egg, for example. The old, labour-intensive way of doing it was to break the egg into a bowl then give it a thorough going-over with a fork. It probably wasted a minute.

Okay, maybe a minute and a half. The modern way is to break an egg into a bowl, take the electric hand whisk from the cupboard, plug it in, rummage through the drawer to find the correct accessory, attach it to the machine and switch it on.

By the time the egg is beaten it’s taken two and a half minutes. Score a one-minute victory to the fork.

I saw a wonderful time-saving way to make a peanut butter sandwich on the Internet recently. It’s quite ingenious. (Feel free to take notes.)

The night before you plan to eat your peanut butter sandwich you take a sheet of baking paper, place a big blob of peanut butter on it, spread another sheet of the paper over it, then use a rolling pin to squish it out thinly. Now you take the paper containing the squished peanut butter and place it in the freezer overnight. Then whenever you want your sandwich you take out the flat, frozen sheet of peanut butter, use the scissors to cut out a bread-slice sized piece, peal off the paper and slap it on the bread – voila! Instantly spread sandwich.

Apparently, it doesn’t take more than a minute for the frozen peanut butter to thaw. But hey, how long does it take to spread a peanut butter sandwich the old-fashion way with a knife? A minute? And you don’t have to organise freezer space, wax paper and scissors a day ahead of you sandwich.

In any case, even if the fancy frozen method did save you a minute, what momentous task would you accomplish in the minute you saved?

Humans are often so excited by change that we fail to see the results of the changes.

A new factory machine may do the work of 12 people in half the time, but are we any richer now we have 11 jobless people with extra time to stand at the roadside holding cardboard signs that say “God Bless You”?

Maybe we need to spend the time we saved on the peanut butter project thinking up ways of mass-producing “God Bless You” signs.

Last Laugh

The military regiment employed an efficiency expert to streamline its operations. After watching the unit in action for a month, the expert presented his report.

“I am worried about job duplication in some areas,” he said. “Take the regimental band, for example. You have 40 musicians there, all playing the same tune at the same time. I recommend that you reduce the number of players to 20 and order them to play twice as loud.”