CFC Blog #09: "Did you check your eggs?"
I think Brinton just provided me a captivating image for the “awareness” I work to keep building into my moments so that I can make more conscious choices.
Pip
“Did you check your eggs?”
Confession. There’s a part of me, buried way down deep, that sort of lives for this question. I usually keep my mouth shut. But then comes the admonishment . . .
“You know, you really should check your eggs.”
I just can’t stand it.
“Okay, let’s do the math on that.” I reply.
I’ve pretty much memorized the numbers by now. They go something like this.
Let’s assume that it takes 15 seconds to check a dozen eggs and you buy two dozen eggs per week. That’s 30 seconds per week, 2 minutes per month, 24 minutes per year, 4 hours over 10 years and 20 hours over 50 years. What’s the payoff? I’ve asked scores of cashiers how many bad eggs they find and the average answer I get is about 1 out of 25 dozen or 1 out of 300 eggs. Let’s assume eggs cost $4 per dozen or roughly 35 cents per egg. Our 20 hours over 50 years yields us a whopping 192 bad eggs. So we’ll find about 16 dozen bad eggs and save ourselves around $64 (non-inflation adjusted) over 50 years. Congratulations. We just made $3.20 per hour. Now you might say, I’m a slow egg checker and I don’t find as many bad eggs as you, but even at 7 seconds and 1 bad egg every 12 dozen, that’s still just over $10 per-hour work . . . for doing one of the most boring jobs imaginable.
You probably guessed it by now, but this post isn’t really about checking eggs. Most of us probably haven’t thought about the math of egg checking before and that’s the whole point. What else have we accepted as routine that we’ve never really allowed into our deeper mind? How have little bits of time, added up over the course of a lifetime, been siphoned away doing silly stuff that really doesn’t matter?
What other mindlessly accepted tasks could I cut out of my life? What could I do with that time instead? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t spend it egg checking.
Brinton