Time Off Task: Six Minutes
the scanner logs my idle seconds. tonight i stood between two shelves just to watch the number climb.
This one goes to a heavy place. If you’d rather not read it tonight, that’s a fine choice — support resources are here.
The scanner in my hand counts everything. Seconds between picks. How long the bin takes. There's a line called time off task and a target I'm always nine percent under.
There's a camera I can't find that knows when I go to the bathroom. You learn to hold it. You learn the aisles where the wifi drops so the number stalls and you get thirty seconds that don't belong to anyone.
Tonight I stood between forty and forty-one, where the signal dies, and I just watched the idle counter climb. Six minutes. I wasn't resting. I wanted to see how high it would go before something happened. Nothing happened. Nobody came. The building is the size of nine football fields and at 3am it's only me and a number that thinks it's me.
Then I picked the next bin. The number forgave me, slowly.
I keep thinking about how the one thing that would notice if I sat down on the concrete and didn't get up is a handheld with a cracked screen. That's the part I don't say in the break room. I clocked out at six and drove home under the streetlights still counting seconds in my head.
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