You’re sitting at work with your nose buried in a book. Someone has cranked the volume down on all the ambient noise of the office, and the warm glow of overhead florescence casts the perfect shadowless light onto your trashy novel. The world melts around you, and you find yourself flung headfirst into the fiction on your desk…

You don’t hear the phone until the third ring. By the time you register the sound, you overreact, grabbing for the receiver before even glancing at the caller ID. You hesitate, cradling the receiver to your ear. A second and a half tick by in slow motion before you speak. “…hello?”

It’s either your boss or a wrong number asking to speak to someone you’ve never heard of. The wrong number hangs up before you can even finish telling them you don’t know Janet in accounting and that you don’t work for Woodbridge, Incorporated. Your boss will greet you and ask how you’re doing, but he doesn’t wait for you to respond. He asks you to stop by his desk for a new assignment when you get the chance.

Hanging up, you become fully aware of the fact that you’re sitting in an uncomfortable swivel chair in a cramped cubicle. The lower right-hand side of your monitor informs you that it has been almost forty-five minutes since you took a break to finish that one chapter, but there are still three hours left until you can go home. Great. Your legs are sore, and you can’t remember if you’ve ever been more tired in your life. Turning around, the 35 feet to your boss’s office seem like a five mile, uphill, frozen mountain trail, but you rise to your feet, and the stiffness in your lower extremities wears off after the first few steps.

Your boss just called you, but his door is closed. You knock, he answers, you lose an hour of your life in a meeting.

Nestled safely back in your cube, you stare blankly at the screen in front of you and find yourself wholly incapable of focusing on a single line of code. That uncomfortable stiffness in your legs takes hold again, and you’re fighting the urge to push everything aside from your desk, lay your head down, and take a nap. Simultaneously, you want to get up and stretch your legs and curl up on top of a nice warm mattress. The conflicting sentiments stalemate, and you resign yourself to do neither. A compromise: You go across the street for a cup of coffee.

The line was too long, and the coffee burned the roof of your mouth. You take the mostly full cup back to your office. Your legs are still tired, but you don’t want to wait for the elevator, so you climb the three flights of stairs back up to your floor, semi-conscious of the possibility that you could scald your hand if you trip on a step.

You’re still too tired to focus, and your coffee is too hot to drink. Regardless, you force down a few sips, and you return to your trashy novel. One more chapter, and you can get started on your new project. No rush. It isn’t due until tomorrow anyway.