Jamie sits at his desk, looking out the window at the yellow blossoms of a kowhai tree, their upside-down cups like butterscotch versions of fuchsias. He counts four bumble bees hovering among the petals and notices how the different golden shimmers come and go with the passing clouds.
“Holy shit, I’m bored.” He says aloud. A key part of his job is to handle issues pertaining to the Education Commission’s website. And when there are no issues, there is no work. Jamie has been as proactive as he could in the past weeks validating huge chunks of the site’s HTML, completely rebuilding and redesigning the directory, and generally making things work more smoothly. But today, as the Kiwi expression goes, he couldn’t be bothered. He was complacent, perfectly happy to stare out the window and wait for things to happen.
“Quiz time!” he heard a voice shot from the other side of the room. The office floor was completely open with small, pod-like workstations arranged in clusters of four. For whatever reason, the entire IT department gathered on Jamie’s end of the building for the daily, 5-minute quiz.
Jamie loved quiz time. While he was hopelessly ignorant to most of the questions, he did manage to nail the odd one that had some kind of American theme. Like who was the first African American actress to win an Oscar? Or in what state is Mount Rushmore? In any other quiz, he’d be beaten to the punch, but here, as soon as the word “American” is spoken, everyone goes silent. Often, the others look at Jamie as if he’s obliged to answer, like if he doesn’t know it he somehow fails as an expatriate. But mostly, they’re all happy to have this little distraction. If people don’t immediately have access to a distraction—be it sport, a career, or the 5-minute quiz—they become anxious.
Think of your most-prized distraction—your job, say. You may respond, “If I didn’t have [insert distraction here], I don’t know what I’d do.” Now imagine it’s gone. Completely gone. Forever.
How long can you keep doing this?
1 comment:
Hmmmm. How long? Is that directed south? Anyway, the reply has to be somewhere along the theme, "Nature abhors a void". In other words, not very long at all. Once we stop looking back, we must look forward, which is where we should have been looking all along.
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