Living in the full depths of a recession, every lost work day - due to anything from snow and tube strikes to dead dogs and doctor's trips, deals another almost fatal blow to our finances.
When the city-dwelling office workers, just managing to keep the economy alive on a fast fraying shoestring, do manage to drag themselves out of bed, ply themselves with enough coffee to rouse Paul McCartney from the dead (we can but dream) and draw their swivel chairs up to their desks, how do they utilise their working day?
Tweeting, updating statuses and stalking photo-diaries of acquaintances so vague they fall outside six degrees of separation.
Facebook, the world's largest voyeuristic phenomenon, has infiltrated the workplace like a virus, costing employers billions - $28,000,000,000, in fact, in lost productivity every year according to one piece of US research.
And it doesn't stop here. The rise of the i-phone empire has infiltrated the soul of many a socially active human, reducing them to a shell, lobotomised to the air around them. Instead of socialising with friends in pubs, bars, up mountainsides and on holiday, they consult the shiny box of dreams to tell to all the people they don't know how much "fun" they are having with all the people they do know.
There are the lego-haired city boys who, giving credit where credit's due, do work hard. And late. Yet an unrequited love of their desks can mean an unrequited marriage. They crunch numbers and seal deals to feather their nests, unaware those nests will be filled with the bastard children of milkmen, salsa teachers and nimble-fingered gynaecologists.
Back to social networking. It's now socially acceptable to ignore your friends and liaise with strangers an ocean away. But it's seemingly unacceptable to strike up conversation with the person sat next to you on the bus. Such archaic behaviour is met with disapproving tuts and speculation over mental stability.
Ignoring stigma, and choosing to embrace this outdated medium of interaction, I recently stopped for an hour-long chat with a Red Cross worker in central London. A young girl who had spent the past two years nursing sick children in Somalia, and who regularly sacrificed her last pennies to buy a sandwich for one or another of the street-dwellers in the city that's paved with the homeless.
Earlier that day a businessman had roared obscenities in her direction, telling her to get a "real job" before scurrying off to work while his wife conceived their first born with the gardener.
The same girl told me of an experiment where a man faked a heart-attack. Collapsing in the middle of rush-hour human traffic, it took 45 minutes until a stranger finally stopped to assist. And who was it? A Red Cross worker on his day off.
Presumably everyone else was too busy tweeting or thinking about what to tweet as they rushed off to log into the nearest computer.
All this leaves me thinking, what the fuck is it all about?
