"Hey, Boss..."

It's good to stop and realize that people are pretty much the same and always have been. We are often surprised to hear that our parents cut classes, drove fast, and dropped f-bombs with alacrity, but people didn't just start doing shady things when TV came along.

That's the point of a recent article on the Open Culture website: all the things we see from antiquity, all the marvels produced by men and women, were just that: things made by the work of humans.

They discuss the pyramids of ancient Egypt. They were made by men working together in great numbers to produce miracles, and yet...for everyone on that work crew on any certain day, there had to be a strong core group of folks getting things done, and someone who had a doctor's appointment and someone who showed up late because he had to take the cat to the vet and someone who was sick and did not show up for work.

Yes, people will need to use their sick time now and again, and today's modern office keeps tally of your hours on a computer. Back in the day, though, they used a laptop!

Well, actually, it was written on a real laptop.  And a tablet.

“Ancient Egyptian employers kept track of employee days off in registers written on tablets,” writes Madeleine Muzdakis at My Modern Met. Pictured above, we see a stone tablet that is on view at the British Museum. It dates back to 1250 BCE and is what Ms Muzdakis calls "an incredible window into ancient work-life balance.” 

The Egyptian word for these tablets formed from limestone flakes was ostracon (plural ostraca). Using a stylus, with the stone sitting on their laps as they etched their entries, people used them like notepads to keep lists and notes like laundry lists, expense sheets, private letters, and cartoons where a gimlet-eyed cat bickers with a screaming blond woman. 

Tomb builders had a village called Deir el-Medina, and the ostracon above was found among thousands of others there. They show us a lot about the everyday lives of working men and their families. For instance this one covers 280 days worth of work attendance records, replete with excuses for missing time at the job such as "I was brewing beer" and "My wife's Aunt Flo was visiting."

Well, you know what I mean.

Ms Muzdakis points out that beer “was a daily fortifying drink in Egypt and was even associated with gods such as Hathor. As such, brewing beer was a very important activity.” It was so important, we can deduce, that it was ok to use personal leave time to sit home and whomp up a batch.

And she also says that while one's wife having her period might not fly with the 2022 workplace, in those days men actually picked up more child-and-home duties when women were unavailable due to their monthly visitor:  “Clearly men were needed on the home front to pick up some slack during this time. While one’s wife menstruating is not an excuse one hears nowadays, certainly the ancients seem to have had a similar work-life juggling act to perform.” 

I guess someone somewhere in modern times has called out sick due to a scorpion bite, and such absences are recorded on this notepad - as well as "having a feast day," "making an offering to a god," and "embalming my brother."

Let me know if they work for you.