Beserk

I mainly entitled this post “Beserk” because it rhymed with my original title: “A Day at Work.” And it is truly one of those rhymes that rests well with the soul because it is a synonorhyme. Haven’t heard of that word? Go look it up. Can’t find it? Come work a day at my job and you will.

Disclaimer: I am thankful for my job. But in my dictionary, the entry

thankful: a state of not complaining 

was misprinted into

thankful: often a complaining state

So, I drive to work, and as I park in front of the big dreary building wanting to leadbrake my head into the steering wheel, my oxygen supply gets carbon monoxonized by the six-hours-in-a-cubicle-monster. Short, clipped breathing begins.

I trudge up the stairs to work. There’s probably 25 total, but no matter how in shape I am, it always seems to add additional shortage to my breath. But maybe that’s the monoxonized air and not the stairs. Sometimes, I’m right along there with *Mildred,* the eighty-year-old whose antiquated voice and mundane comments have come to taste like a cool and refreshing ice cream treat amongst the dry tasteless quiet of the office, particulary chocolate ice milk, which, to my detriment, I have not tasted for numerous years due to my lac of lactose digesters. (K omitted intentionally all you Type A’s.) Mildred moves up the stairs as if each one was a sparse surfaced stone pathing a waist-deep river.

As I open the door into the actual office, I greet the stacks. Large stacks of journals whose articles never get read by me, only glanced at, mourn the attentiveness of my eyes as I trek past them toward by cubbie hole. Oh no, wait. Cubbie holes were fun little spaces filled by my imagination as a kid. So let’s call it instead my cube in hell. Much better and much more imaginationless.

I spend my first 15 minutes at work preparing my coffee and breakfast. I count this as work. Perhaps I shouldn’t count my breakfast, but I do since I make it while the coffee grinds steep in the French press. And making my coffee is justified as working time since work does not provide edible coffee. It should be a necessity, like clean water.

I go to the bathroom.

I take my yumyum gluten free cereal with berries and almonds and rice milk back to my cube in hell, along with my aromatic, enticing cup of Major Dickason’s, grind #12. At this point I usually suppose that I should actually start working, so I grab a batch of abstracts to proof. 

The next thirty minutes I think about my coffee while I proof the abstracts.

When I’m done proofing the abstracts, I realize I should probably reproof all of them. But I don’t. Fortunately, they go to Editor *Dakota*, who lets out a loud groan of misery whenever I pass them onto him for checking queries. He surely won’t mind the lack of pen marks.

I go to the bathroom.

Next, I try to find some computer task I can do so I can start chatting on G-chat. And looking at food blogs. I capitalize, I delete, I change “essay” to “article,” I put articles in the abstracts from Chinese journals, and I say to myself, “Next time they should pay someone who speaks English to do the English translation. But why would you, when you could pay someone who doesn’t speak English a lot less to do it?”

I ponder how my degree of analyzing Tolstoy, Poe, and Tony Morrison flew me to such ambitious heights of capitalizing letters that should be capitalized and were not. 

I go back to proofing abstracts on paper since the fuzz of my old monitor screen has grown mold in my brain. However, this time I have no coffee to think about, so halfway through page 2 of 26, my green proofing manual binder knots a plastic bag over my head, and I start suffocating. He likes to do that to me early in the day so that my day seems longer.

The clock moves like a slug.

I go to the bathroom.

(To be continued…)