Do any of you read this on the weekend? I know some bloggers only write on weekdays, and if you ever look at your webstat page, it's easy to see why: nobody reads anything on Saturday, and less than nobody reads anything on Sunday. Not having committed to the regular work week since 2001, I'm a bit of a stranger to that way of thinking, but I do remember what it was like.
The one thing that truly sucked about That Internet Job besides "everything" – was that I couldn't come home and surf the internet for kicks, because that's all I did all day anyway. Even though I didn't mind the sensation of swapping one screen for another, I hated feeling guilty about it. Oh, don't get me wrong – I still had "friends" and we still "did things" and I saw "art" and the occasional "movie." But nothing beats the long stream-of-consciousness internet surfing of the your own, private, onanistic lair. At work, there was always this fear of being discovered, making all internet goofing-off unsatisfying, like the peculiar half-sleep of an airline trip.
At work, I used to have a file open at all times: a graph with some nonsensical words around it, followed by a Summary of Nothing. Whenever one of my fifteen vice-president bosses would wander too close, I sprang that stupid graph to life. I did this for a year, the same file. I would prefer to stitch soccer balls together like an underpaid Djakartan house elf than to live through that kind of slow-leak paranoia ever again.
Posted by at May 16, 2003 8:58 PM