@ the rest of the discussion:

1) I think work hours should be far less static.

2)I think that employers should be vastly more cognizant of the fact that "hours worked" is not nearly as simple to define as they seem to think. As far as I can see from my small handful of friends who have salaried jobs, "working" means sitting at a desk in a set location. "Work" can just as well be entering figures into an Excel sheet as it can be looking at cat pictures. Also, from what I can tell, copy and pasting figures into an Excel sheet and emailing your boss to say "Okay" are both seen as exact equivalents of doing the parts of your job that are actually difficult. Actually, brainstorming how to present a proposal (or whatever it is business people do) while at home at their dinner table can actually not be recognized at all as work, while just reading the memo that says "there's a meeting at 1 today" can be recognized as work.

Not that I can imagine how any revisions to the current system could actually HELP workers, but I think that the whole system is kind of ridiculous. I just think that it's ridiculous that the same structure exists for a receptionist (where being available to answer phones and greet people who walk through the door and etc is actually your job so just sitting at your desk between 9-5 seems like the best way to fulfill your job description) as it does for writing for a magazine (when I was working for a magazine, if I just could've given people my cell phone number, then wait for them to call me back and then come into work for like the one workday it would take to turn those interviews into a story, good god would I have been at my desk getting in arguments on FTR a lot less) as it does for an engineer as it does for any other number of things.

I think if people got salary for doing work when there are projects (or whatever) for them to work on, sometimes working 65 hours in a week when something really needs to get done and other times working 25 hours in a week), and the first priority was to put people in a position where they can best fulfill these projects, instead of just having the static, "You work from 9-5, Monday-Friday, you must ALWAYS been here those days and you're not allowed to work on any other days or at any other hours of the day," then the whole system would make a lot more sense.

A lot of run-on sentences, but I just don't understand the system. I guess it's just a hold over from when everyone worked in factories?