Today at Aroma I saw Eric Idle. Now I love Monty Python as much as the next person, but my favorite celebrity sighting at Aroma was Michael Biehn, (Kyle Reese/Corporal Hicks/Crazy SEAL from the 3 best movies by James Cameron).
Aroma is where I go when I need to get out of the house and write or sketch things for my various projects. Working at home is better than sitting in a corporate cube and pretending to work all day as long as you change things up occasionally. Otherwise monotony eats your brain.
Speaking of which, has anyone noticed how much harder it is to pretend to work for 8 hours than to actually work 8 hours? A rough guess is that most office people do maybe 2 hours of work a day, and who knows how much of that is productive (creating value rather than playing politics or having hollow meetings). At every office job the rare days when I was slammed with work seemed short and sweet. On the long stretches where I was done by 10:30 and had to fake it till 6 I’d come home agitated and grumpy.
Productivity per worker has tripled since the 1950’s with a marked increase from the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s. It’s hard to imagine that workers are more productive than ever what with all their Minesweeper and web surfing.
5 Comments ↓
So? You sighted Michael Biehn and… what? Was he nice, pissed off, hungry, what? Do tell!:)
Biehn looked good, seemed kind of intense. Like most actors, he was thinner and less physically imposing than you’d expect.
Seemed like he was hearing a script pitch; there’s lots of that at Aroma. The Toluca Lake/Burbank area has 2 Warner Brothers lots, Disney Studios, Universal Studios, and all the entertainment offices and production companies you could want. It’s kind of weird being a entertainment “civilian” around here. Like you’re buying lunch meat at Vons and suddenly George Lopez is behind you in line with celery.
Ha! Thanks for the swift reply.
It’s kinda funny that in every acount I read about people meeting him, whether they say he was nice, funny, rude, whatever, that intensity is always mentioned. Even funnier is that in several interviews he said that he doesn’t know what people are talking about.
“entertainment “civilian”” :) Great way to describe that!
When I look at ppl’s timesheets around here sometimes, I often notice things like 4 hours of “research and development”, which totally means 4 hours of looking at myspace and chatting on IM. We can get things done faster nowadays (for example, editing film/video with software vs. the old school way), but it seems wrong that with the added efficiency comes added slack. Instead of using the advantages of technology to be more productive and take on more projects, most people tend to get the job done as quickly as they can so they can continue slacking.
anh, I think the problem is that employees aren’t empowered to do anything productive with their extra time.