Clocking the Hours

Real time: 1:17 p.m. I’m eating lunch in the 20th-floor break room of the insurance company where I worked over January. “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” is on the TV in the background—or maybe the local news if more people are paying attention—and I’m savoring my peanut butter sandwich and the next 43 minutes away from my cubicle.

Watch time: 7:17 p.m. If I were still on my semester abroad, I would be walking beneath the almost 40 kilometers of porticos that line the streets of Bologna, Italy, on my way to an aperitivo—technically a before-dinner drink, but with a buffet of appetizers that served as our dinner.

Flying back from Italy and walking into an office building less than 72 hours later was definitely not my idea of la dolce vita, and maybe part of the reason why my watch was still set to Italian time.

Italian espressos had become weak office coffees, and I had traded in cheap flights on Ryanair and my passport for a commute on the Green Line and a CharlieCard. I wasn’t sure how a month of memorizing insurance policy numbers and coding data would compare to strolling through Roman ruins and learning to make tortellini from scratch.

Why, then, did I find myself at 5 p.m. on January 22 (11 p.m.: time to break out the euro-and-66-cent bottle of wine or get some late-night gelato) feeling almost nostalgic about clearing my leftovers out of the office fridge and packing up my personal belongings (i.e., my favorite pen)?

I’d become comfortable with the routine and the idiosyncrasies of the office. But more than that, I was spending 40 hours a week seeing the way so many other 40-hour weeks were spent. I got a chance to play at real life between my study abroad Euro-trip and life back on Harvard time, and now I’m seven minutes behind instead of six hours ahead.