Storytime: Break Time.

May 31st, 2015

The steering wheel is sun-warmed shit under my hands. It’s wobbling like it has carpal tunnel. I bet that’s expensive to fix. I bet I’d better make an appointment. I bet on most days that would be a straw fit to drive a hole through a camel’s spine and out its belly.
But not now. Today is the day. With a capital THE.
I am calm and I am in control and I am so happy you could probably get a Geiger reading off my face or maybe somewhere else. I am so relaxed my muscles have turned over management to my tendons. I am cooler than a cucumber could dream and nothing will stop me. Nothing can stop me.
I want this day. I want this moment, and then a lot more just like it. I want a cold one in my hand and a warm one in the sky and I want them five minutes ago but it’s okay because it’s all happening.
At last.

It was the overtime that did it. Paid overtime, so how bad can it be? Ask the man who’s been getting four free hours a day for forty months. You spend it all on caffeine and energy drinks and you brew them into nasty things that are probably illegal and then you lean on your mop until you can hear it talking to you.
Then you drive home (one hour) go to sleep (two hours) and then wake up already getting into the car and chewing something you hope was breakfast (one hour).
And then you’re back again, back again, jiggety jig. Enjoying that nice quiet hallway. Digging that clean calm boardroom. Trying hard not to launch a broom through a particularly insolent cubicle’s monitor, or empty toiler cleaner all over the chair of a noxious smiler.
Some days it’s hard, you know? Real hard.
Man needs a break. Man needs a holiday. A holy day. One day.

Smell that? I can. I’m not even trying but it’s all I can smell now. It’s salt on the breeze. At least, I hope it’s salt. Sea salt from salty seas, with salty beaches. Not the other kind. The kind that came in a tiny bottle and never stopped growing once it got out.
Bad stuff but a good job, that one. I wonder whose idea that wa-
No no no. We leave work AT work. We are not at work. This is a new concept but we will adjust or I will disembowel us and give us something to REALLY contemplate.

Work is not for contemplation. Work is for doing.
This is a philosophy that extended beyond me, you understand. This was the rock upon which the whole institute rested its aching back. So many things so many meetings labs silos bunkers fridges hot rooms all devoted, every last one, every room, ALL OF THEM places and spaces that existed for specific reasons and purposes none of which any of which had anything at all to do with anyone actually thinking. They were for doing.
I should know. I’ve cleaned every last one of them six hundred and no no no numbers. That routine goes BEYOND numbers. I am my mop and my mop is me and I clean and I spray and I spit quietly when no one is looking which is surprisingly common even though every square inch of this building is covered in cameras. When you have machines to do your looking for you, why bother? And this, of course, slides readily into the next step: when you don’t bother, why bother EVER?
I experimented, you know. This place is all about science (applied in a specific and practical way). I did my part by spitting on one camera in each wing for ten days straight.
No word. As it should be. Anyone who can take the time to notice the janitor clearly isn’t working hard enough. So no one did.

I’m running down the turnoff, wheels grumbling to themselves. I can’t complain too much about the car. It’s an old vehicle that needs more love than I can afford to give and more care than I’ve had in thirty years and also it’s not mine. But no one was using it. At the moment, that’s the best ownership there is. I needed to beat the rush and my old clunker was too fat and slow.
That reminds me of a thing I don’t particularly want to be reminded of: I wonder how many of them got out of work? It’s not like I went out of my way to pull the alarm or anything (Christ, do we even HAVE those? We’re too high-security for a lot of important things, maybe fire alarms are on the list), but at least some of those doors I went through started kicking up a damned fuss.
Fuck ‘em. I can already see the little yellow strip at the edge, where the blue meets the green. Even the spreading purple coming from the east hasn’t touched it. It’s perfect.
It’s so close.

One day. Everyone has one day.
Except me.
I filled out the forms, you know. In triplicate. On my lunch break. Which was technically breach of contract because I’m not allowed to have one, but I kept scrubbing with one hand through the whole thing. The bio wing has really shitty A/C and the vents practically hurt to look at with all the crud they get baked onto them, a job for two arms and maybe two feet, but I did it anyways. I did not complain. Complaining could get me denied.
I filled out the forms and then I passed back the forms and then I waited and I waited and I waited and three months later when the day came.
(it was yesterday)
I asked someone and they said oh no sorry never got that try again tomorrow.
And that was when I nodded and smiled and cleaned the physics corridor seventeen times in a row and then I put my mop on my shoulder and headed down to the labs.
One day.

It didn’t even take one day. It was barely even one hour. I have no idea why they wanted the paperwork for time off in so early, and so badly. Control freaks.
Pretty shitty control freaks, though. I walked through those doors like they weren’t even there. You know this, my security badge only stopped working by the time I was heading into the silo, after visiting the whole of biohazards, and that was only because the system claimed the shards of broken glass embedded in the mop handle
(labels include: variola, lyssavirus, some other latin shit that all breaks nicely if you smack it hard enough)
were choking hazards? And then I just had to thump the door a little. They want me there to do my job as 24/7 as possible but some shithead had just thrown up a door and then gone home forever. Double standards, but who’s surprised?
So easy, all of it. We design for ease of use. We design for maximum effectiveness with minimal effort. We design for big returns on small actions. We design for results, we are results-oriented people. I was already seeing some results scream overhead at about eight kilometers a second when I pulled out of the parking lot. One of them couldn’t even do that properly; it landed off to the east and turned half the morning sky all orange and shitty, shot through with black dust and white heat.
Fuck it, it’s someone else’s problem. This is it.
One day.
Everything we’ve ever built here was meant for one day. And now I’ve gone and

I’m in the sand. I’m here.
I’ve got a cold thing in my hand I found abandoned in the beach bar and it’s even liquid and I’ve got warm stuff overhead and underfoot.
I sink my feet deep into the underfoot and oh man oh god that was what I needed. I can feel each toe individually. How long have they spent wrapped up in those boots, in those galoshes? One point two thousandish days. Twenty-eight-point-eight-thousandish hours. One hundred seven-
Nah.
I lean back my head and squint into a burning blue sky that’s already turning green at the seams. That’d probably be the carnivorous algae. Or the ‘messiah’-strain anthrax. Maybe one of them ate the other, or fucked it? Who cares.
I did a lot to get this day off. For now, work is someone else’s problem.

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