You gussy yourself up, shine your shoes, get yourself looking real smart and head out to an interview with a prospective employer. The interview progresses nicely. Mostly just some softball questions derived straight from your resume. Then it's your turn. You begin to ask some questions about their expectations in terms of responsibilities, output, etc. This is when it happens. The “oh shit I actually wore a suit for this?” moment. This is when they lose cabin pressure. It would be much easier for many in this situation if the interviewer just started drooling like the criminally insane degenerate he is. Instead, the truth is exposed when he or she tells you that most employees are working for 60 to 80 hours a week, but not to worry because they play hard too. You look around the office and see the foosball/pingpong/arcade/rumpus room accoutrement. He tells you about their latest staff retreat that, of course, was held on the weekend. You look past the modern MTV facade of the office and dare to ask why people are working so many hours? Is the staff really productive for that long? Are they happy about this servitude? Your question gets the only answer possible, "We don't force rules on employees. No one is clocking their hours. We just know that everyone is busy. Look around. There is a lot to do. And, did I mention we have free soda?"

I've worked on projects that have required long stretches of late nights. When you are working so late you discover new things about the office, such as that it is programmed to turn off every light switch at 11pm. Even the building does not expect people to be occupying it at this late hour. But these rallies were during crunch time for a project; working long hours to meet a poorly planned schedule. When the project ends, sanity returns. Eighty hour weeks are not the norm and under no circumstances should you expect more than 40 hours a week as normal. The truth is, being in an office 80 hours a week does not equate to 80 hours of productivity. Nor does 50, 60 or 70 hours. In fact, by letting staff know that they are expected to put in absurd amounts of hours on a regular basis, I daresay that the staff is even less productive than those working a normal 40 hour week. Why? 80 hours per week in an office results in staff living in an office. Those personal hours, that thing you call your life, is forced to take place inside the office. That time outside the office that we spend on reading, eating, sleeping, socializing, drinking, sex, spacing out, and whatever else we do to pass the time in our lives gets forced to take place in the confines of the office park. Next time you are in a hip/dotCommy/web2.0 office look around. Look around for anyone over 35. You won't see them. If you do, they are not working 80 hour weeks. Why? Eventually everyone grows up and realizes 80 hour weeks are for suckers, for slackers, for show, for folks who cannot get a life outside of an office. Eighty hour weeks are for those who have never had time to adjust to life outside of a structured regiment. For glee club members. Eighty hour weeks are for the kids that went to school and then when the school bell rang went straight to sports/tutoring/music lessons/therapy. I, like most folks, struggled through the horror of finding out how to spend my own free time and not being forced into a constant schedule. I, like most folks, prefer not to spend any more time than needed in an office.

Who are these vile people that want you to work 80 hours a week? What drives their compulsion to watch their fellow human beings suffer under the sickness of fluorescent lights? I've looked into the face of these creatures and they are, well, lonely. The 80 hour a week crowd are the managers-by-mistake. They are the folks that got into management because they were promoted by someone as inept as they are or, worse, they started their own company. Either way, they are the same. These cretins think that if they can see you in the office you must be being productive. When in reality those of us pressured into the slave labor of 80 hours are generally being anything but productive. We are IM'ing about the sadness of the management, we are watching some inane video of cats falling off of TV sets, we are playing video games, reading blogs and eventually we are all working on our resumes. Those who equate time spent in an office to time spent working are being, at best, dishonest with themselves. They, the evildoers who created this environment, are not actually working 80 hours either. They are busy wasting time on email, IM and videos of cats falling.

Think about your current job, whether it is of the 40 hour variety or closer to the 80 hour type. How much time do you actually spend working? From my experience if you have a good work environment you are only putting in 25 to 30 hours of actual work in a 40 hour work week. If you are present for 80 hours you are working even less. Where does the rest of that time go? Meetings, bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, long lunches, reading junk on the web, IMing friends, office gossip and staring into space take up the rest.. You do not have any more work do to than the 40 hour trooper but now you have to spread that work over twice as much time. Inevitably, you forget what the hell you were working on and needed to do because you are sitting in even longer meetings, gossiping more and playing more ping pong.

If you accept a job from one of these sad beings, you can expect the oft used comedic vehicle of the company meeting. In this case, there will be nothing comedic about it – it is your life. The staff crowds into a room two sizes too small and the managers begin. They begin with no agenda other than to look around the room and ask, so what is everyone doing. The eager beavers rattle off some garbage about how they are marketing the company's products via Twitszer, the latest, cool thing mentioned on Tech Crunch. Everyone else sighs. The end of the meetings are my favorite. Where the management tells the staff how much they know everyone has been working and how they really appreciate their dedication. Dedication and work it is not. Instead folks stay in the office too long because we are too weak to tell the managers that we are done.

Questions from management about why the staff would not stay later are frequently asked. I've always asked what work was not getting done on time that requires staying later? And have you considered asking the staff why they have decided to leave at 6, why they prefer to be elsewhere? My questions were never answered. Instead they were followed up with more questions. Questions like how can we get the staff to stay longer at the company sponsored happy hours?

In one case this particular joker never realized how good he had it. His staff showed up for 40 hours each week and he actually got 40 hours of work out of them. They had zero interest in hanging out or slacking off. They wanted to get their work done and get the hell out. I think he wanted them hanging around because he was lonely and did not want to face the truth about his sad existence that confronted him at the end of every day when the staff went home. By the staff leaving and going off to their family, friends and drug dealers it highlighted that he had nothing else but his office.

That extra 40 hours a week they want from you, that's 2000 more hours per year. 2000 hours all because someone above you in the food chain is lonely. Do the math: that 2000 hours equates to close to 12 full weeks of your life. Not five day work weeks, but 12 weeks of 7 days that are 24 hours long. No one, not even the Spaniards, get that much in vacation time and these jokers expect you to march happily along with their program.

If working for the severely lonely is your idea of a good time, selling your non-refundable life for some shillings, then accept the job where they “work really hard”. Don't say you weren't warned.