The work computer was old and slow: the previous week I had to face a couple of turns of the hourglass while checking the words obconical and saturnine in the dictionary by my elbow.
My desk phone gave a fourth ring, which was usually as long as I could bear.
Hourglass imagery is not always coincident with a sense of hopelessness, however. In fact, thinking about it, sometimes it exists as a symbol for a certain necessity to seize the hour: perhaps for this reason hourglasses feature on many heraldic crests. I’ve looked it up. Of course I have. In one of its more savoury definitions, the online UrbanDictionary.com lists the verb hourglassing in reference to ‘a state in which a computer is “thinking” and is currently unresponsive. Not exactly frozen, hourglassing gives a potentially false sense of action on the part of the computer.’ Many families unite in baying, unfestive horror during games of Charades or Pictionary as the final grains of sand fall through the necks of supplied hourglasses. Hourglasses of this size are also called egg-timers. Although this is probably a practical description of its use amongst, say, the soft-boiling breakfast community, I do think that egg-timer lacks the poetry of the other possible synonym clepsammia. The lexicographer Noah Webster listed this word in his 1828 dictionary – its etymological roots are the Greek words for sand and theft, the idea being that as each grain slips through the hourglass’s waist another moment is being taken away. Clepsammia certainly has a pleasing clicking sibilance to it, and as a word evokes a slick trickling of the contents from bulb to bulb as well as the flipping-over of its body. Unlike Webster’s, Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary overlooked the word clepsammia in its published incomplete 1930 edition. It does, however, provide the word hourglass as a hyphenated noun. With its symmetry and little dashed isthmus between the two words, ‘hourglass’ on the page is like the object itself, lying on its side or balanced mid-spin.
The phone kept ringing, boring into my skull.
Of course, the hourglass is not the only symbol that accompanies hapless computer users (me) and their periods of waiting. There’s Apple products’ spinning orb known affectionately as the ‘Spinning Beach Ball of Death’ or the ‘Marble of Doom’. My old BlackBerry occasionally presented me with a graphic of a squared-off clock, its hands rotating uncontrollably. BlackBerry-time, Apple-time, egg-time. My laptop at home was far newer than my office computer and ran on a far more up-to-date operating system. Bereft of hourglasses, my waiting was instead accompanied by its replacement, its inheritor: a glowing ring, a tiny green ouroboros graphic forever eating its own tail. The same irritation existed, the feeling of being trapped in a state of suspension rather than progress being made, but stripped of the more esoteric timekeeping device. This glowing circle felt somehow more clinical and inhumane, its cultural implications less to do with pirates and Father Time and more HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the KITT vehicle’s front-scanning bar in Knight Rider. Armed with the iconography of vanitas, maybe other operating systems in the future will adopt symbols of futility such as skulls or rotting flowers. Perhaps a small pixelated Sisyphus could be forced to clamber up my scrollbar. As it stands and stood, the charm of the hourglass was gone and I missed it. Tempus won’t stop fugit, sure, but at least we once had the chance to watch it play out in style.
The word hourglass lost any meaning for me beyond frantic rage.
The phone made another petulant ring. I sighed and picked up the receiver, smiling fixedly at the stain on the wall opposite my desk.
‘Hello, Swansby’s Press,’ I said, ‘how may I help you?’
‘Burn in hell, Mallory,’ said the synthetically distorted voice on the other end of the line.
‘Yes,’ I said, and gave the stain a thumbs-up. ‘Yes, you’re through to the right department. How may I help you?’
There was the sound of breathing. Digitised breath shuttlecocked down the phone line.
‘Twice in one day,’ I said. I’m not sure why.
‘There’s a bomb in the building,’ the voice said. Then they rang off and the hourglass on my screen flipped one final time.
D is for
dissembling
(adj.)
Winceworth had an unqueer desire to delay the inevitability of his working day for as long as possible. Usually there was a gaggle of lexicographers outside Swansby House in a similar frame of mind, procrastinattering about the weather or the state of nearby St James’s Park lawns while counting their cigarettes and fiddling with glove fastenings. A game of etiquette usually developed amongst this fluctuating group with each member desperate to prolong their time beyond the confines of the office. The rules of the game were unspoken and certainly the sport was never explicitly acknowledged as a way of dawdling on company time. It involved tilting the brim of one’s hat up on the forehead and voicing admiration for the streaky-bacon brickwork of Swansby House. The more architectural terms you were able to use in order to express your admiration, the more points you gained. The game was over when you ran out of things to say or the silence became too awkward. At that point, the working day began.
Winceworth’s working day was starting at a later-than-conventional hour and there were no fellow idlers to join on the front step. He tipped his chin above the lapel of his coat to look up at the building and list terms over the chaos of his headache. Streaky-bacon brickwork probably wouldn’t sit right with an expert in the field, so that was already a duff start. Was it Queen Anne, the building style? Is that what he had been told on one such milling, loafing morning or had he misheard and queenan was an architectural term for Swansby House’s shape, design, material? He had just nodded along at the time, accepting it as writ. Language is something you accept or trust rather than necessarily want to test out. Queenan wouldn’t be the most unlikely-seeming architectural term he had come across, certainly – current work on the S volume of the New Encyclopaedic Dictionary recently necessitated research into scutcheon, squinch, systyle, each one rolling around his mouth with unfamiliar textures and sloshes. Every word seems a nonsense until you need it or know more about it. Winceworth’s eyes drifted from the queenan steps and rashered walls up to the windows of the first floor, the quoins of the second floor, the oriel windows in the storeys beyond that and thence to the pediments and chimneys, the stupid blank January sky, the blotch of a starling or a pigeon on the wrought-iron weathervane, &c., &c., &c.