The Nine-to-Five

Last week I started work, eight hours per day and five days per week, in a start-up firm that is only some twenty minutes away by subway. Fewer than thirty of us work in three large rooms, dark carpeting white linoleum(?) beneath us and gridded pale ceiling reminiscent of the school ceilings into which some of my classmates once threw sharpened pencils to see the leads stick in them like darts, and windows to courtyards all around. Today a duck quacked loudly, and it was impossible to tell whether someone was listening to something on his computer or whether in fact a courtyard had received a visitor.

The working rhythm begins at some point before 9:15 a.m. This is when my sister usually arrives. We each have our own computer, and I have a laptop on ergonomic stilts as well as a flat screen so that I can see everything on two screens — internet tabs, text files, G**gle spreadsheets and all. The computers are far out on the table so that I am forced (again, ergonomically) to rest my forearms and to look fairly straight ahead. Coming after a lifetime of having screens inches in front of my eyes and hunching over to look at them, this came as a shock, but not unpleasantly so.


I fortunately have a yearly public transit ticket. So I just walk into the U-Bahn platform and whisk out a 'transit' book I am reading: The Quark and the Jaguar or A Writer's World. Within two minutes, perhaps, the next train arrives. In the mornings it hasn't been overly full. At work, I might go to the kitchen for a glass and pour myself the first round of orange juice, or I might purposely go hungry and thirsty until lunchtime and instead start up the laptop and flat screen right away.

A great deal of our tasks takes place on the internet, so we sit in tall, well-padded rolling chairs that are a luxury in my point of view. If needed, we hitch up a stool or another chair to a colleague's computer. The person around the corner from me, and other colleagues, put on headphones to concentrate particularly (I think) when there is chatter. Aside from meetings and conferrings, and some much-needed advice or revision from the colleague who is training me to take over his tasks, I tend to sit there until, and after, lunch. We overhear, too, the ringing of a telephone from other rooms, and intermittent loud coughing from colleagues who are presently suffering a cold.

For lunch, we are fetched by — for instance — the shouts of a colleague, who sticks his head in the door, because our lunch is ready when the take-out delivery man has brought it. Today we had Thai food, with pastel or vermilion sauces of ginger, coconut milk, knobbly nuggets of chicken, pineapple, etc., and thin white rice, and deliciously greasy light-battered filets of white meat.

We each emerge from our rooms in a growing throng until we have each stood in line and spooned our portion of the food onto the plate — a riskier enterprise for the vegetarians, since part of their meagrer allotment is sometimes scarfed down by meat-eaters in search of variety. And then we gather in a room (I've shuttled between the two eating-friendly ones) around a large table, and talk — let's say — of politics or culture, or who has travelled where recently.

After around 6 p.m., I receive permission from my supervisor-colleague to leave, and I turn off the computer and wander out, cheerfully. There aren't many trees or flowers on the rest of the way to the U-Bahn, rather racks of clothes at bargain prices and pedestrians and a homeless woman who lies in her sarcophagus-shaped or rectangular sleeping bag along the wall. Today the weather turned muggy in the early evening; and only now the heat has broken as the forecast thunder and lightning split the skies, and rain drops against the double windows and spurts down the street. The U-Bahn, at any rate, is more crowded in the evenings than the mornings when I need it; so once I've already skipped a train and waited for the next, which was indeed a much more appealing ride.