The Time Sweepers Short Story Analysis

The Time Sweepers is a short story written by Canadian author Ursula-Wills Jones. The story focuses on a group of invisible people called “time sweepers”. These “time sweepers” are described as blue people wearing overalls if they are men and “old fashioned tweed jackets” if they are women. “Time Sweepers” sweep up wasted time. If Time Sweepers did not exist, we would be stuck in a world of infinite time. The Time Sweepers do not like taking holidays as it loses time. The story seems to focus around a small conflict between the Time Sweepers and the human beings. The humans waste lots of time so the Time Sweepers must remove the wasted time, where it is recycled. The author establishes a large presence of these time-sweepers by saying they are “around your desk, in your office, in a railway station”. The Time Sweepers are hinted as being secretive beings who act slightly like robots with no or little conscience. The Time Sweepers are not known about in large detail, as said in the quote “What the Time Sweepers do in their spare time is unknown”. The story tells about many people who have had a major use of Time Sweepers, such as the person who “spent 15 years thinking before asking his girlfriend out to dinner, by which time she had grey hair.” The story makes a comment on human life at this time saying that humans waste more time than we have ever done so in history and states that time that is enjoyed is not time wasted, contrary to many people’s thoughts on the topic. Overall I liked this short story because of the poetic prose the author took and the peculiarity of the story.