Right before leaving the office for the day, a coworker of mine said that life was like a copy function, in particular a BPS copy function which we use for configuration in SAP. He said you copy yourself from L.A. to Chicago each week. We have the same meetings each week. We have lunch at the same time each day and get to work by a certain hour each morning. You run every day and he takes the same train back and forth each morning and evening. He said all this to create some laughter, which we all smiled and agreed with nods, but little did he know these things torment me all the time. I end up with another year that has passed without knowing where all my days went. The only time I’m not copying myself in daily routines is when I travel, and only when I travel for fun. Each day is different from the next and what I eat and see varies tremendously. There are no routines when traveling and everything is made up as you go.
When I first started out from college looking for my first job, I interviewed with a lot of companies, but only a handful did I actually do an office visit. I had an interview with a company called Morton-Thiokol, the company that makes propulsions and missiles, the company that blew up the Challenger with their faulty O-rings. While there, I interviewed a lot of employees, and they were very knowledgably and seemed extremely shrewd. They were also in their fifties. While sitting having lunch in their cafeteria, I felt like I was in a senior citizen’s housing center. I was drinking chocolate milk and they were all drinking coffee with their meals. I grew very alarmed and very troubled as I saw myself sitting there one day just the same.
So here I am today doing my mini-copy functions each day but my career hasn’t always been the same copy functions. I feel like I had a good run and my work locations have been more like Ben & Jerry’s flavors. Even though I have been working with the same application since the very beginning, I have grown into an expert in my field and extended my original skills to beyond what I started out as. Even still, what is really mundane is really at the micro level. There are too many daily copy functions and I do feel the drag sometimes. I have the questioning thoughts of my existence, my purpose, and the question of: have I given it all that I have to my life or have I just wasted most of it. What exactly is there to give anyway? The only way to get rid of these copy functions is to travel and see the world. It’s the only time in my life I feel really free and alive. There are new things to see, other cultures to experience and learn from, other types of food to taste, and different terrain to unearth. Your stress level should be around whether or not you’ll make the next train or bus schedule or where you will have your next possible shower or next possible place to sleep, do you have enough toilet paper, or where you can find the next public bathroom. It shouldn’t be about getting an excel document out before the deadline to leadership who can’t even bother to open it up, and if they did, they couldn’t understand the damn thing anyway. Your stress shouldn’t be centered on people seeing you walking in late in the mornings or worrying about if people will question your time entry when you take long lunch breaks. Not sure how things should change or could change, but the mini-copy functions are everywhere, and I wonder if my coworker knows how depressing and dreary his statement really is. It’s not something I can change either by sprucing up my days, but I do lose sight of the copies because it is a routine we all do and get comfortable with, having each day merge together, having each day just roll onto the next day, and unfortunately, having every cell in my body age with time and many are dying and falling off, their spunk lost forever. A different coworker wrote ‘There’s just not enough hours in a day to do everything’ in an apologizing email sent out to people fearing that he sent something out too late that he thought was vitally needed. It was neither too late, important, nor was it desired to begin with, and his comment about not having enough time in a day to do more work than he could possibly do, just shows you how focused people are with this useless crap. I find that there’s not enough time in the day to go for my long ass runs or to surf the net or read books or do music or eat out with friends or just do the basics, living! How I would like to practice cooking or improve my French or pick up my art again or workout for 3hrs straight! Ahhh, how nice that would be to workout for 3hrs straight! ....sigh....
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