Getting enough sleep is a forgotten art | Emma Brockes

The desire to 'lean in' at work must, occasionally, be superseded by the need to keel over. A nap isn't always badSome years ago, I worked in an office where the second floor bathroom had a shower room attached, with just enough floor space to accommodate a body. If the door was locked in the middle of the day, you knew someone had taken the filthy towels off the back of the door and laid them on the ground for a nap. It was warm in there, like an airing cupboard, perfect for soothing a hangover, and after an hour on the floor you might emerge fighting fit, the sheen and consistency of a freshly steamed pork bun.It was a liberal sort of office (alright, it was the Guardian), but still, such things are, we know, widely frowned upon as forms of degeneracy, laziness or the term favoured by more brutal management systems, "time-theft".Last week, a new word for the activity entered the lexicon, care of a front page story in the New York Times about police officers on duty doing things that they shouldn't.The list, seemingly compiled by an auto-generator of police cliches, included frequenting donut stores that gave them a discount and going to Irish bars. Worse than both, said police bosses – in fact, floating at the top of the Orwellian sounding "integrity monitoring list" – was something called "cooping": parking the patrol car in a secluded area and stealing a crafty nap.It's not ideal, obviously, in that line of work, and hard to spin an upside to chasing a robber down the...
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