Hump Day is Over

Well, no pictures to upload for you today, but what an interesting day... Because of the nature of my job, I unfortunately get paid to sit and do nothing from time to time. People will pay me to do the seemingly impossible too, people will pay me to do the impractical, the extraordinarily difficult and the mundane as well.

Some days, people will pay me to do all of these things- all in an hour or two.
But today was different, today they paid me to do an ordinary job... The long way, and the most boring aspects of my job were amplified ten fold. Like a network administrator (I feel sorry for you guys) with nothing to do but watch traffic, I sat in pure unadulterated boredom. The progress bar on the file transfer meter inched (or should I say millimetred) along at an agonisingly painful pace. I was there so long that somebody mistook me for a piece of the furniture, and yet another employee threatened to give me jobs to do if i stayed much longer. I sat there, staring at the blue background occasionaly glancing up to see the regular stream of punters entering in and out of this well known government institution. The blur of white writing and slowly creeping progress bar barely keeping me conscious: It's funny but you get used to seeing this. After a while it can become almost surreal. It seems to become a part of you, but is separate at the same time. Like it forms part of your background conscience, providing some semblance of warmth in this otherwise cold and meaningless digital matrix of information that they call work.

In the movie ‘The Matrix’ there is a scene where Neo drifts off to sleep behind his PC. The computer screen drops to a command prompt and mysteriously, type is entered in the display… ‘Wake up neo’. This scene resonates with me, like a Cello resonates with an orchestra. As harmonious fountains of data are heard gently ticking and pinging away on hard disk drives all around me, I feel a sense of peace. Even as the tap, tap, tapping of keyboards threaten to drown out the unceasing read/write operations of all of this wonderful data. I see it day in and day out the same data. There is a pattern, and like Neo, you are alerted when the pattern is broken…Almost instinctively by the change in the regular whirring of the fans, or by the luminosity of the display.

Before I drifted off to sleep, I thought I’d better get up and go for a walk. With at least ¾ of an hour of relentless (but unattended/automatic) software loading to go, off I went. Aimlessly walking, with the sole intent of killing time, I wandered about the street, breathing in the cool and refreshing (non-conditioned) air. Upon my return and to my satisfaction, the rectangular window of the Novel Login screen greeted me, indicative of another job well done and yet another public servant put back to work (insert sarcastic comments here).

Well, I hope tomorrow is a little more lively!