The Martians: Day 15

The Martians: Day 15

It really becomes a game of strategically managing your snacking and your email checking and your web browsing – working 9-5 that is. How many more minutes until the next 15 minute break? How can I break that up by taking a walk to the water fountain or by pretending to need to research a company on facebook or just having a bite of my granola bar? Maybe I have to pee again. Before you know it, it’s lunch time. And that hour you can easily squeeze into 90 minutes if you have a site visit or a conference call of maybe you just sit in your car and cry for a few minutes and once you’ve hit that level of emotional vulnerability it’s no big deal at all to stretch your lunch because if someone asks you you can tell them that your dog died and they’ll feel like a prick and never bother you about lunch time again. The afternoon is a little trickier, because it tends to drag out quite a bit longer. That’s why I find it really important to have cheese and crackers and other snacks that can be rationed out over the course of a few hours. I think it’s safe to say that by 3:30 it’s cool to be streaming hulu on your phone, with headphones of course, and you know, hammering away on a spreadsheet that you created just in case someone finds their way over your shoulder, one that is at least 40 pages and filled with algorithms that no one would understand and if they asked you’d just start talking about the relative cell reference of an active range and the alphabetical organization of over 3,000 contacts that you’ve been working on for 6 months and they would be so ashamed that they don’t even know how to do the =sum equation that they would leave and consider you to be a person that works so much harder than them that they resent a little bit. Now it’s 5 and it’s time to leave. What a day.

I’m just hoping to get anything up while I’m still alive because it’s my last night in Malaysia and one of the people we brought has turned out to have a pretty severe alcoholism problem and tonight he is stumbling around the apartment talking about us recording him and plotting to attack him and he keeps mentioning something about how he knows about the martians.

He also happens to be 6’2’’ and 240 pounds. And angry. And paranoid. So we’re locked in our rooms. Ben and I aren’t talking because we think he’s outside the door listening. Hoping that tomorrow morning things are calm. Also, my phone just stopped working completely.

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