The scandal plagued, $700 million Citytime system (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/nyregion/contractor-in-citytime-payroll-scandal-to-pay-record-500-million.html) was the bane of our work life existence. Conceived of during the administration of the former “America’s Mayor,” and completed during the term of the technocratic, billionaire Mayor, Citytime was an attempt to move the City from the pencil and paper keeping of time records of employees into the blazing efficiency of the mid 20th Century. The system was designed to maintain the employment records of over 300,000 workers in scores of agencies – from cops to accountants – all in the same system. Citytime is driven by a program design that every city worker should devote every precious minute of that employee’s seven-hour work doing the people’s business – and nothing else – whether walking a beat, teaching a class, inspecting buildings or sitting on one’s butt at a desk. Woe be to him or her found not to be rendering to the City the full measure of 35 hours a week (or, more accurately, given the way the system works, 70 hours every two weeks). Unfortunately for the programmers of Citytime, no one outside of an assembly line actually works that way.

            When we first joined the City’s employ, no one provided us with any training as to how to put our hours into Citytime. But, if we wanted to get that paycheck every two weeks (lagged by a week, in order to buy the City an extra week of float, to ensure that payment isn’t received for time not worked, and to make clear to City employees that the City didn’t give a fig about them as human beings from the outset), one had to make sure one entered one’s time into the system. Once logged in (a challenge in itself), on the initial screen in Citytime one sees fourteen boxes below the seven days of the week, where one is to enter one’s start and finish times. Non-managerial employees have stated work hours, to which they must adhere. Thank goodness, being on the bottom tier of managerial workers, we had some flexibility as to when our seven hours of daily toil might take place (with an hour or two of daily leeway). One checks a box to create fourteen more boxes into which one enters the beginning and end of one’s lunch period (mandatory for non-managerial employees). 

            The system seems to have dozens of toggles, most of which we have never used. It allows for the entry of the normally routine paid vacation and sick days – as well as many other permitted paid and unpaid uses of workdays (like jury duty). Two hours of leave time appeared in the system available for each COVID vaccine appointment (as we got our shots on the weekend, we used the time to go to a museum on a work day). The system made no accommodation for remote work – as until the pandemic, remote work was absolutely verboten for City workers (under the belief, we assume, that without City workers being on-site, in the office, they would be doing the heretical non-city work during city time). This made the system even more ridiculous for the 80,000 City office workers who were required to telecommute during the pandemic. We made do (and took quite a few naps).

            We struggled to deal with the system as a managerial employee, who was called on to work non-continuous nights and weekends – since other than for the lunch break, the system only recorded start and finish times. One was forced to provide inaccurate information. For example, if you ended your day at 5:30, and then spent from 8 to 11 on phone calls with the boss, you either put in 11 as the end of the day (even though you commuted and had some quality time with the dog sometime between 5:30 and 8) or you added the three hours onto 5:30 and entered that you ended the day at 8:30, which you actually didn’t do. We constantly wondered whether some timekeeping Gorgon was going to descend on us, dragging us to Citytime hell for gross malefactions in accurate timekeeping. 

            Our initial major run-in with Citytime occurred during our first long vacation from City employment. Being a responsible person, with (supposedly) managerial responsibility, we stayed in touch with the office while in Europe, spending as much as three hours on a couple of days on City business (much to dismay of Mrs. Publius) during a two-week trip. When we returned, we entered the daily time we spent on City work and recorded the rest of each day as vacation time (which was tracked within the system as hours accrued, rather than days. One earned so many hours of vacation and sick time for so many hours of paid work time). We submitted our data into the system and received back a flamer from the timekeeping Gorgons – “YOU CANNOT DO THAT.” It was then explained to me (for the first time after a year of employment) that the system requires each managerial employee to record seventy hours of work during each two-week pay period (allowing for some flexibility in hours among the two weeks). But equally importantly, one must record at least one hour of work in each day during the pay period. If less than seventy hours were recorded, the balance must be made up with leave time. If an hour a day was not recorded for every day during a five-day week, then the week must be taken as leave time. So, the system was designed to dis-incent working while on leave. In our previous experience in the private sector, while we generally were provided with four weeks paid vacation (the City provides new employees with two paid weeks, regardless of seniority), no one paid much attention to how much vacation time we took, because we were always available while out of the office, and often spent full days working during crises or major projects while at the beach. The City’s gargantuan system provided no means for such flexibility. It actually is designed to punish it. Maybe this makes sense for sanitation workers or police officers, but it is nonsense for senior managers. 

            Given the weaponization of infractions by jealous or disgruntled co-workers, and the Javert-like mind-set of the human resources Gorgons, it is important to toe the line and do it right. We were often receiving communications from HR that we had not followed the system correctly and were being docked for this or that. The system required doctors’ notes be provided for sick time (like in third grade). The system required one’s supervisor (or in my case, where our supervisor couldn’t be bothered with ministerial tasks, the supervisor’s designee) to check a box in the system next to one’s time record to approve it, in order for a paycheck to be issued. We were often chasing after our supervisor’s designee (a loathed colleague, who was both a bully and the very model of an inflexible bureaucrat) to beg them to approve our bi-weekly pay records. 

            Making matters more fraught, was the fact that we were rarely kept busy full-time while in the City’s employ. We would estimate that our job called for our complete attention for about three hours on most days. We had to find ways to fill the rest of our time that would make us appear to be busy – but not doing work that was proscribed. This included not only the writing of books or essays which might be published (we had a friend who was heavily fined for writing an op-ed for a newspaper on a City computer – for which he was paid $50. Of course a bureaucratic foe had ratted him out), but also non-profit board service or pro bono work of other kinds. Such work on City time was against the rules. So, we read The New Yorker and books (we tried to make them books at least tangentially related to our work. We did not read news websites or shop on-line during business hours, which appeared to be a major occupation of some of our equally underemployed colleagues). We also took long lunches. The truth can now be told: we almost never recorded a lunch break; first because we felt we were a slave to our iPhone at all times (both to phone calls and emails.) and because if we did, we would NEVER have been able to record 35 hours during many weeks. Because the time keeping system really seemed to prefer that time recorded as working hours be spent at our desks, we also spent many, many days staring at the clock at 5:30 or 6 PM (depending on when we arrived) in order to appear to be performing an actual seven-hour day. We were not presented with the alternative of ditches to dig (and perhaps fill back up) or assembly line widgets to produce when not otherwise occupied with the people’s business. 

            We do think we provided good value to the City for our work – but we suppose everyone does. We were effectively available to the City seven days a week, during all of our waking hours (the City iPhone lived on our nightstand). We brought to the City decades of relevant experience in a specialized, highly technical role. We were occasionally called upon to work late or on weekends. But we sat at our desk filling time for many unproductive hours without actual City work to do, as a slave to the inflexible (notwithstanding its many mysterious toggles) Citytime system.