At Work...Failure...

I'm at my desk. My legs are shaking. I occasionally glance at the taupe fabric of my cubicle walls. My head is often supported by my hands. I often forget what I'm doing: moving my mouse across the screen to discover I don't know which of the 40 windows I was seeking, or why I was seeking it...(quick aside: I had to step away, came back, and discovered my head in my hands again). At other times, I sit staring at the screen, just quietly sighing to myself and just...staring. Sometimes, I sigh loudly enough to be heard by other cubicles, and they'll sigh a sympathetic sigh, which has been known to set of another sigh. A sigh chain: the sound of small implosions of the soul. We often walk bent over and discuss the failures of our efforts and how much we wish we could do more than just enough, and how it wouldn't matter if we worked 40 hours a day, the work to be done would just bubble up and so we would continue to fail. Unstoppable, immense failure. The daily tasks are just the tip of the monstrous iceberg of...failure waiting for us weeks, months, and years from now.

A last note: one of the senior folks stopped by my desk to chat at the end of the day. To quote:

"Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck".

He was suffering the effects of, yes, you guessed it, failure.