TUESDAYS

I’m the sad guy at your office. The forty-something guy you see without a wedding ring and wonder if I’m married. You look at my face and try to guess at what joy I may find in life. My head is down, my arms slack, my shirt just a little wrinkled with the top button undone. I typically don't wear a tie to work. My hair is thinning a bit, but most people don't notice, or don't care.

I eat my brown-bagged lunch at my desk. I talk to a few people while getting coffee, but mostly I’m a quiet guy. I have acquaintances at work, but no friends. You wouldn’t invite me to your summer barbecue and you wouldn’t send me a Christmas card because you don’t want me to know your home address (just in case).

I don’t mind. I know how I must look to people. Lonely, depressed, and constantly musing at just how my life ended up the way it is. And that’s pretty much the way I feel. At least when I’m at work. I perk up a bit when I go home. A little more on the weekends. And when I take a long vacation I think that I should quit my job and be happy again, but I never do.

It's not the work so much that gets to me. Given my choice of vocations, I wouldn't pick my job first. But there's a thousand thousand jobs I would not pick over it. There are no showers, emergency eye was stations, or number of days since a lost day of work sign at my office. I never worry about losing an arm when I’m riding on the elevator in the morning.

I'm a cog in my company, which is another cog in this huge machine that runs on enormous barrels of money and takes tens of thousands of people to operate. It’s a marvel to look at on paper. It’s an even greater wonder from the inside. You wouldn’t think my bosses and the rest of the middle management schlocks would be able to keep such an operation running.

What do we produce? It's nothing that does much good, especially when you consider the amount of time, effort, and money involved. I won’t bother mentioning it here. Anytime I try to tell someone what my company does they get a glassy eyed vacant look. Usually I just lie and tell them I’m an accountant, engineer, or architect. I pick a job that people don’t know much about. That way they can’t ask too many questions I don’t know that answers to.

What do I do? It doesn't matter. I'm one of those twenty-million people in this country who come in, work at their computer, shuffle papers to this client or scoop some others off to their boss. My boss nods, then scoots off to his boss to report on the latest figures. Then I go home, having done nothing particularly valuable - nothing that anyone would want to hear about.

I went to college. I studied history and philosophy. I can build computers from scratch. I’ve traveled to four continents. I’ve read all of Shakespeare’s plays and a good deal of his sonnets. I know the difference between a transitive verb and adverb. I can tell you what transistors and capacitors do. I can tell you why World War I really started and just how the British Empire came to be.

I sigh whenever someone asks if I watched American Idol last night. “No,” I say “I was building an atomic bomb last night.” People always laugh at this. Always. Some think its funny, but others are convinced I’m going to bring a gun to the office one day and they want their face to be remembered as a friend. I’d take it as an insult, but at least they don’t ask me if I can break a dollar or some other nonsense, so I let it slide.

But like I said, its not the job so much that gets to me, it's the monotony.

My routine: Get up every morning - rarely looking forward to my day, shower, get dressed. Notice I’m running late and quickly find something for lunch. Shuffle to my car. Drive to work with a bunch of other miserable assholes who are also running late. Park the car, walk eight minutes from my economy parking lot to my office. I’m sweating (doesn’t matter what season it is) by the time I get to my desk - not because I'm particularly out of shape or overweight, but just because I sweat. It's something else that helps me to feel awkward.

Then its the same shuffle. Same dance at my desk as the day before. Punch keys on the keyboard, make some copies, fax some papers, attend some meetings. Count the clock until its time for lunch, time for an afternoon break, time to go home.

But home is only a temporary respite. Before I know it it’s time for sleep. Staying up late only makes me tired, then I have to fight off sleep the next day, dozing off then snapping awake, wondering if anyone saw me nodding off, wondering if it was for eight seconds or two minutes. Then thinking, Does it matter anyway?

Then the whole shuffle repeats the next day. And the next and the next and the next. My only relief, probably the only thing that keeps me from buying that gun, is that usually I don't have to do the shuffle on Saturdays and Sundays. Yah for me!

If I had to pick my least favorite day – if I were chairman of the 148th Annual Miserable Awards and was presenting the award for the worst day – I would choose Tuesday. Monday is the obvious pick, but also wrong. Everyone knows what Monday is, you're not surprised on Monday morning when you're tired and sluggish. When you're looking sluggish and tired and someone asks you why you are in such a mood, you can say "It's Monday", and they understand. They’ll usually come back with some tired nonsense response. Hump day or working for the weekend. Ten thousand years of human development for this?

Besides, Monday isn’t as bad as people think. You can be late on a Monday and no one really notices. Probably because they’re late as well. There may be some sort of start the week bullshit meeting led by some coffee-drinking supervisor to break up the morning. You can head across the street for coffee. With a little luck you can play Monday mornings so you don’t do any work.

But Tuesday is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Most of the week is still ahead of you. Whatever happy memories of the weekend you may had have been crushed by the depressing reality of your workplace. The coming weekend is too far away to contemplate being a tangible thing. Tuesday - a day in which you survive only to still have the majority of the working week ahead of you. I would guess that more suicides are committed on Tuesdays than any other day.

I’m stuck.

Ten years ago I never considered what I should do ten years from then. I never made a plan. I figured life would just fall into place, which I suppose, it did, but not how I thought it would.

I always took the job at the bigger place that paid more, that had better benefits. I would start out as just another person, but could work my way to the top. That never happened. The company would always hire from outside and I would sit at the same desk doing the same thing for years. After enough of the frustration I would move to another job, falling into the same trap each time. Eventually I realized I wasn't moving up. So I quit job-hopping, I didn't want to be ten years out from retirement and looking for a new job. Eventually they don’t hire old people for jobs young people can do.

I decided that my current job would be my last. I would put all of myself into it and try to make a name for myself. But apparently I’m only good enough at what I do to get my work done quickly and well, but not enough SOMETHING to get promoted. I’ve given up on trying to find that magical SOMETHING. I tired working long hours and weekends, impressing my boss with impeccable work, dressing for the position above me, and everything else those career books tell you to do. Bleh. My place pays me well, gives me good benefits, and pretty much leaves me alone. So I stay. What else can I do?

I’ve decided that I should look towards the future. I put lots of money into my retirement account. I daydream about buying a condo in Florida. I’ll buy a metal detector and comb the beach for old pirate coins or diamond rings. Daydreaming only does so much to get me through the day. I’ve had to come up with a few more tricks to help the time pass.

Some days I will make a tick mark for every five minutes that have passed, grouping them into twenty-five minute sections, writing below the groups the total amount of time that has passed that day. I’ve discovered that time moves oppressively slow. Do you know what it’s like thinking that there is only two minutes until the next five-minute tick mark?

Given a choice I would work more of my required eight hours per day before lunch, but my employer does not permit this. I feel the day goes by more quickly when lunch can be taken later in the day. But we must work half the day, take lunch, and then work the second half of day. I'm a grown man, and I am not permitted to take lunch fifteen or twenty minutes later than the rest of the people here.

Which brings me here. My latest idea is chronicling my life at work. I figure I’ll get enough stories together that maybe I can publish a book or something. I can see myself on some big show, the host asking me about the main character. How did I come up with all of this? “Oh, I used to work in a very similar job. But I’ve changed all the names to protect the guilty.” And the audience will laugh.

Oh what a card I’ll be.