One thing that I've noticed within the past decade or so was that you actually had a standard 8 hour work day. Hence, the 9-5 work day. Hell, even Dolly Parton made a song about it that turned into a movie (or the other way around – who cares?). Today, they've snuck in an extra hour of our time and call it our “lunch break”… but we don't get paid for it anymore! Then they actually want us to believe that they're doing us a favor by not slave driving us to work straight on through.
This made me think of ways that I used to sneak a in a break:
When I was in the military, the only way to actually get a valid break was to go smoke a cigarette. This was usually done in a specific area that was almost always somewhere far away or packed with breakers that it you adding an extra 5-10 minutes to the actual break time itself. Smokers could be gone a whole 30-45 minutes, a couple times a day and nobody would bat an eye. If you took a bathroom break for more than you designated 15 minutes, though… there was hell to pay. So I learned really quick that the only way to get a break was to take a “fake” smoke break. I'd buy a pack of smokes, just to carry. If someone wanted one, I gave them one. I would literally go to the smoking area just to take a long break.
I took this practice into the corporate world where I had even more freedom to “smoke” as often as I want. If I needed to get away, I said that I was off to “smoke”… maybe I'd wander about. Maybe I'd discover a good hiding spot. Sometimes, I'd make my way to the smoking area just to make appearances. Nobody would bother me about my frequent breaks and when I returned, I did my work.