Five seconds

Five seconds can be a long time when you are in pain or can't sleep. The more you fixate on the time, the worse it gets. Do you regularly look at the clock, or do you distract yourself with daydreams? Or are you busy planning what to do from your to-do list once you wake up again?

I have a tight schedule and am used to it—happy that I can divide my time between everything I love to do alongside my work. Five seconds only feel long when I think I’m wasting time, like waiting for public transport that never comes because the bus driver didn’t feel like stopping in a village. They probably overslept by more than five minutes this morning, and when the day starts like this, the delays pile up. Over a whole day, five seconds quickly become five hours—or in my case, one hour, if you have to clock in and the system rounds up. Being five or six seconds late counts as an entire hour.

Isn’t it strange that being early is never rewarded or compensated?

Picture created by gemini - what is this I asked Gemini. The answer was: I can't show time so I showed the timeline between 5 seconds and 5 hours. Interesting idea but I don't see it.
Prompt by @freewritehouse