Just hit my 100th hour cleaning a single Roman mosaic and the number made me stop

I've been working on this villa floor near Pompeii for months now, slowly picking away at volcanic ash with a dental pick. The site manager told me to keep a log, and when I added up my hours yesterday it was exactly 100. That's like two and a half full work weeks on a patch of floor smaller than my kitchen table. It really hit me how much time we spend just to reveal a tiny piece of the past, a single picture made of a million little stones. You think about the person who laid it, how long it took them, and now here I am centuries later taking just as long to uncover it. Makes you wonder if we're preserving history or just slowing down time. Has anyone else had a moment where the sheer amount of labor for one find just stunned you?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannahhayes11d agoMost Upvoted

That "slowing down time" feeling is everywhere now.

nancy3519d ago

Try waiting for a pot of water to boil.

hannahhayes11d agoMost Upvoted

Right? I was just at the grocery store and the checkout line felt like an hour. The clock said five minutes but my brain refused to believe it.