The Dead Zone

Every day at work I meet the same events - arrive, get tea, check email, receive/do work, stare at desk, eat. The routine can be somewhat comforting and I'm kept relatively busy after I get to the office. There's usually a little flurry of activity after lunch, too, providing a jolt of reality from midday's brief reprieve.

But it's after this that the worst comes...the dead zone.

I can be plowing through a Herculean amount of work all day, but as soon as the clock hits 3pm, I hit zombie mode - zombie in the classic sense, not the speed-walkers in 28 Days Later. If my day is "Hey Jude", then 3-5pm is the part where they keep singing "naaaa, na na, nana na naaa..." for about 20 minutes. I think that song actually ends on a fade-out, which would complete a nice metaphor.

Me, 11:48am

I'm assuming most other people I work with suffer from the same, crippling malaise. I know Mrs. Wrasslin' agrees. I rarely get much correspondence from anyone past this point and if I do, it has a "we should probably work on this tomorrow" air to it.

But it's a prison more than anything else. Papillon's got nothing on this; Steve McQueen could try his damnedest to float away from Devil's Island, but I'm stuck behind the cruel bars of employment - and I don't even have an ornery Dustin Hoffman to keep me company.

Me, 3:23pm

That's what they should do with our jails - pay the incarcerated to work in an office-jail hybrid, performing menial tasks all day. Try as they might to leave an over-crowded cell block/cubicle, packed to the gills with extras from Oz, they can't resist the pull of that sweet, sweet paycheck. Worse yet, let's give them all desks with slightly uncomfortable chairs. After the clock hits 3, they might as well have life sentences.