One guy has his lunch (FINAL)

 

 

One guy has his lunch

 

(Written in 2013. Tidied up for publication 2022. Post LTW comments.)

I have a theory about where Mickey sits and its relation to how his workday is going. Each day he goes outside and sits down at one of four picnic benches. I get a clear view of him from my first-floor window, down across the car park.

Come rain or shine he always sits there for lunch, but anyway, this is the theory:

If he is having a bad day, he sits with his back to the building, facing a concrete wall. If he is having a better day, he sits side-on and looks up the hill to the wild land, the trees beyond and the sky. I’ve never seen him in a good enough mood to actually sit facing the office. I guess work never goes well enough for him to consider that an option.

He always waits for the tables to be quiet as well, everyone else has had their lunch and moved on by the time he gets there. He evidently prefers his own company.

Today he is sitting sideways, so he can’t have been annoyed by anyone recently. His job must be going ok. Perhaps one day he’ll just pick up his coat, abandon his sandwiches and take off into the woods?

It’s funny how some people find what we do here difficult. It isn’t, it’s just computers and stuff. I suppose some people’s brains work better with computers than others. I know mine seems to do ok and I never feel the urge to sit facing away from my place of work like a sulking Buddha.

He has a ponytail and a handlebar moustache. He would have done better as a roadie than a computer nerd. Sitting here on my lunch break watching him eat an apple in the drizzle, I want him to walk away from this life that apparently brings him misery. Go, Mickey, go! Go into the woods and never return. Or go and get a job as a bouncer or as the drummer in a heavy metal band. You’d be happier, if not richer.

Find a girl. Settle down. Or not. Just be. Just be anything other than what you are, which is a big man sat at a small desk, whittling hours off your life each day to pay your way through this existence.

Maybe I’m just projecting my own desires onto him. I feel happy in my life, comfortable at my desk. But am I worse off than him? Am I so institutionalised I don’t even know enough to rebel any longer? After all I sit and eat my lunch at my desk. At least Mickey has some spirit left in him, even if all it is, is a silent defiance. A silent protest that says, ‘I prefer to face a blank concrete wall than look at the office I work in for one moment longer than I have to.’

I imagine most of Mickey’s problem is he has too many bosses none of whom care enough to do him a favour and sack him. His Line Manager is busy with his own projects. His Group Manager is happy that he has someone on hand to do all the rubbish little jobs that everyone else is too busy to do. His Department Manager only has a vague idea who he is and the Managing Director, of course, has no idea at all.

You know, the more I think about it, they grind you down with apathy here. The company doesn’t hate you because the company doesn’t care enough to hate you. It is a big faceless entity that changes its head once every six months. It is a truism said many times here that if you don’t like your current manager then just wait and you’ll have another one in under a year. Some go up, some go down. Some go out and some come back. The company, the machine, rolls on.

And what’s worse, most of us meet apathy with apathy. We clock in, we work, we clock out. We trade some of our life for money. Perhaps Mickey, the free spirit, has had enough of this. Please, Mickey, if you get up and walk off into wood, I swear, I’ll pick up my coat and my keys and will be right behind you. There has to be more to life than this, a soulless cog in a mindless machine. Go, Mickey, lead and I will follow! Take us to the promised land, where men’s dreams can come true, where people can live, really live, and not just merely exist. Is this what our parents imagined for us? Is this all there is? Like a duck swimming against a strong stream, paddling furiously just to stay in the same place. A long path of boredom and toil leading to late retirement and an early death? It would take just one man to stand up and say, ‘I don’t want this.’ Be that man, Mickey. Stand up and a thousand others will stand up with you! Throw aside your name badge with the scorn it deserves! Rip up your door pass! Shrug off your printer card of contempt! Arise Sir Mickey and be a man of action, a man of consequence, nay - a man of destiny!

Or it may just be completely random where he sits. It’s just a theory.