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An empty office, in the stifling heat and humidity of a summer's afternoon. The window is jammed shut to give the malfunctioning air conditioning a chance to work. If anyone were to walk in, the sweat would prickle instantly on their face and neck, trickling down their back and staining their clothes. A lazy fan turns, moving hot air to hot air, achieving nothing. The water in the cooler is warm, with stale card cups sat in the dispenser.
A desk is cluttered with paper, heaped up, with small landslides. It's impossible to see the surface of the desk. It could even be a big box, filled with paper, painted like a desk with handles on the sides pretending to be drawers. The paper is piled on other paper, over and over. It's impossible to remove one piece without removing more, causing more chaos. The filing cabinet is the same. Paper is heaped on the chair, on the floor, on top of the broken phone, off the hook, buzzing gently.
The office is my mind. I'm sat here, staring at the screen, unable to focus. The office (the real one, the one I'm sitting in) seems full of thin white smoke. Maybe it is. Maybe it's burning, and the mess in my mind is stopping me from realising. Maybe the ultra-safe, megacorporate, futuristic smoke detectors have failed, no piercing alarms to wake me from my semi-conscious reverie.
As I sit here, I'm trying to think, to pick up the paper and read it. Every time I try, I just get a jumble of ideas, a wild confusion, overwhelming me and leaving me confused and dazed. I know that there's stuff of value in there somewhere - there's some pretty nifty database concepts which could be tied into a Perl wrapping module, open-sourced, and let loose to help people in cyberspace. But concentration is too much like hard work. Rather than trying to read individual paper, I picture the piles, the heaps, the twisting, confusing mess of a mind. This meta-cognitive process seems to keep the individual thoughts at bay. It's this or sitting here drooling.
I need direction. Something to do instead of wasting my hours reading Slashdot just for something to do. There are occasional good things - discovering some esoteric tech, or being brain-raped by The Parking Lot is Full, but mostly my days are just pure tedium. I've begged my boss for something to do, but he seems content to leave me here, being payed for nothing. Maybe he's trying to test me, to see how much I can endure before I snap and laugh and scream and shout and fight and fuck, before I'm carted out of the building by a pair of burly security guards, screaming all the way, and left twitching and giggling in the ash-filled gutter.
Either way, I hope that something happens soon. I'm too bored, too dazed, to do anything of my own free will. I have no free will. All I want is to go home. If something doesn't happen soon, I'll probably snap...
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