Some days are busy and you spend them haplessly dashing between floors and buildings just to make sure you’re not late for the next round of meetings. Other days have the distinct feeling that you’re working in a funeral home and that someone will yell at you if you make a noise louder than scratching pen against paper. The thing that these two distinctly different types of day have in common: They both suck. And strangely enough they both suck for more or less the same reason.

On one hand, meetings blur together leaving you in a hopeless, glaze-eyed torpor incapable of doing much more than maintaining respiration. On the other, the day crawls by at something approximating the average groundspeed of road kill. In both cases, the result is suck. Suck and days that drag impossibly slowly. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but I’m fairly certain I’ve actually watched clocks run backwards under both sets of circumstances.

No one knows that work is just another dirty four letter word better than I do, but really, all I’m looking for is a couple of days a week that don’t feel like they’re running in slow motion. That’s probably more than I can realistically hope to see any time soon. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my cube adjusting the time circuits.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.