What I did this afternoon:

Sent this email to Bill at 4PM after 2 hours of research. Can any of you two help me out with this?

"Hi Bill,

I'm doing some generals reading, and I found a connection and I wanted to know if you've heard anything about it.

So, I'm reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. And on a whim, I do a wikipedia search to see what events were going on in 1910 and 1911 (when Eliot was composing the poem in paris before returning to Harvard in 1911. The poem wasn't published until 1915), basically to see what the status of war and mustard gas was (yellow fog, etc.)

So I find this tidbit:
March of 1911- The first installment of a serialized version of Frederick Winslow Taylor's monograph The Principles of Scientific Management (online version here) appears in American Magazine. The complete series runs in the March, April, and May issues. It is the first time that The Principles of Scientific Management is widely read. The efficiency movement, which has been simmering of late, boils over and becomes a craze.

So I tried to find some stuff on Frederick Winslow Taylor, and all i find is really business-y and technical about the efficiency movement.

But, I did find out that Taylor and his wife adopted 3 of the 4 children of Anna Potter and William Aiken after William Aiken kills his wife and commits suicide. The one child who doesn't get adopted by Taylor is Conrad Aiken, who refuses to give up the name Aiken, which Taylor requires. So Conrad Aiken lives with other relatives

And here's where the Eliot connection comes in. Eliot and Aiken were good friends at Harvard, Eliot often going to the homes of Aiken's family for dinner (perhaps one of these being Taylors?)

All of this goes to say that I think there could be a connection between the treatment of time and measuring in Prufrock and the efficiency movement. Have you heard anything about this? I tried to do a preliminary search and didn't really find anything. But there's a possible personal connection if not a broader societal one (and if Conrad rebelled against Taylor, perhaps he is figuring as some one who Eliot is trying to rebel against as well in Prufrock? Prufrock serving as a Taylor-like figure, measuring his life with coffee spoons?)"

This kind of stuff is my favorite part of generals reading, I think. Going on ridiculous hunts for stupid pieces of information you think may pay off