Boredom, Thy Name Is Work

Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast, Toast... What do you put in a toaster?

That’s how bored I am. Faint snatches of childhood riddles fill out this grey night shift like a downy pillow. A steel encased slab of glass is my only contact with any kind of movement. Beyond is the bile yellow fug of a vast warehouse; eighteen thousand pallets of breakfast cereal racked militantly for anonymous national consumption. Something approaching fifteen million boxes of cereal are ferreted away in this angular monstrosity, dutifully attended to by an incumbent army of dour faced plebeians incessantly perplexed by the abstract digital hand that guides them. The time according to Rodney is 01:28, four and a half interminable hours till my emancipation and the gracious retreat of my newly acquired king sized bed. My ponderous Shift Manager, despite the quietness of the hour and the lack of work, chirps relentlessly on my radio, spending my precious energy on vacuous diversions, then becomes dumbfounded, like a charmed snake, when I approach him with an issue of genuine import. Temporary escape is achieved only by the long walk to the gate to wish away a cigarette in the taunting rain. I return, damp, to the clatter of an antique printer.

There is a scene in the movie The Matrix where the sumptuously evil Agent Smith confides in the shackled Morpheus: “I…hate…this…place… this zoo; this reality, whatever you want to call it. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink, and every time I do I feel I’ve somehow been infected by it. It’s repulsive.” That’s about the size of it, Smithy.

Working sucks.