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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?
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hannahhayes6mo ago
That "slowing down time" feeling is everywhere now.
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nancy3516mo ago
Try waiting for a pot of water to boil.
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hannahhayes6mo ago
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.
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