Dolly Parton Has Never Been More Right

My job is one of those Monday-Friday, 9-5 variety. I sit at a beige desk in an office that is really just a cubicle with overgrown walls. I stare at a computer screen for the better part of seven hours. All day long I overhear snippets of crises whispered into phones -- one half of the HR team's awkward, employee-discipline related conversations, and one half of the intrigues and misadventures that make up the executive assistant's personal life. I pay 25 cents per cup of watery coffee squirted from a vending machine.

You know what I'm saying; I work at an office.

The quality of any given work week here is measured by the emotional distance between Monday and Friday. For example, my relationship with the front desk receptionist is largely based on the following observations:

All of these gems, I hate to admit, are courtesy of me.

Monday: “Ugh. Wow. Monday.”

Wednesday: “Wait…is today Wednesday?”

Friday: “Hey! We made it!”

There are other niceties that follow, of course. I happen to really like our front desk receptionist. But all the dialogue about dropped calls, errant children, and the relative merits of Three Musketeers versus Milky Way are stories that I’m sure I need not recount. Either 1) you will not be interested; or 2) you already have those conversations of your own.

So I started thinking about it today, as I scrambled to the building's front door, late and harried and happy for Friday. It occurred to me as I mentally rehearsed my melodramatic “Phew!” of an entrance: what am I racing for? Or, more important: what am I racing toward?

Where am I going in all this hurry? Twenty years of service to a company that I’m ambivalent about? A retirement party punctuated with me exclaiming, “I can’t believe I’ve been here this long. Where has all the time gone?”

In other words, am I hurrying so much to stop myself from noticing the weight of the grind?

Oy.