I take a meandering approach to my time in the office: I drift between tasks, sometimes starting one before another is finished, getting things done in a random order to keep my day interesting. I’m there from around 9.20 a.m. to 6.20 p.m. and I get my job done. The guy next to me has caught my attention recently. We don’t converse much; it’s not because I don’t like him, but when I’m in the office I try and minimise mindless banter. My companion, we’ll call him Terry, is Taiwanese and he has tidy hair and a splendid pair of glasses. He’s a little older than me, but what has me worried is that I’m almost certain he is heading for a heart attack.

Terry arrives to the office at 7.30 a.m. every morning. The first thing he does is take a nap until around 9 a.m. He then works solidly until 7 or 8 p.m., sometimes even later. He doesn’t eat during the day, except for large bags of Frays crisps and occasional cheeseburgers. About half-a-dozen times a day he puts his head down on his desk as if in a state of utter despair, or sleep, or both. I’m never sure how to react when he does this. He’s translating our website into Chinese, and by all accounts it’s a lot of work.

He drinks more coffee than I thought was humanly possible and he is consistently on edge. He’s told me before that he works when he gets home and he often comes into the office on weekends. I’m not sure if anyone except me notices this. I often feel a little disillusioned that I’m not as dedicated to my job as Terry, and there are times when I’ve wondered: to get ahead in this world, do you have to work yourself to the bone to prove yourself, to make people take you seriously, to shine a little brighter than the others?

My personal feeling is that it’s better to work adequately and be seen doing it rather than work yourself to death and not have anybody except the guy sitting next to you notice. I could, however, have made a gross misjudgment, but I live in hope that happiness is not the result of 12-hours days, seven days a week. When you work that hard, what else do you have time for? I know that there is always the future, and that you could argue that when you’re established and successful you will find the perfect time to take the pedal off the metal; but once you get into this relentless, working frame of mind I think it must be difficult to get out of it.

I need to have a few more periods of employment under my belt before I can really make any deductions about the working world, but from looking at Terry, he doesn’t seem particularly happy whenever I see him, and I don’t want to spend my time being unhappy.

The really big television: So far I've had two offers for the TV: one was for an Anime-related trade, the other as yet undisclosed. I'll keep bidding open for a little while longer, but I must emphasise I'm most keen on books, Nintendo DS games, and anime (in that order). For some reason a duplicate post about the TV appeared today. For a moment I thought maybe time and space had malfunctioned, but it turned out to just be a Firefox plug-in I've not really figured out how to use.

Techno' tags: People, Office work