Weekend Shift

Five forty-five, I scan my ID to get into the building. I dump my plastic bag into the refrigerator in the TV studio. It's ham and cheese, always ham and cheese. Small talk with the other worker and I frown at the computer, checking it for errors and filling out some paperwork. It takes three minutes tops.

Then it's six hours I spend, hunched over, jittery and restless in a room walled with sound absorbing foam from the 70s. It's dirty, yellow, and flaking. I like to pretend it's asbestos. I even daydream I'm sitting on a pile of cash breathing out of an oxygen mask listening to NPR from a Houston station.

I slip out of the dream, toss aside a folder of useless forms and pull myself up to the computer in the studio, clicking unconsciously on Firefox.

The internet makes me nervous. I click and click and click and end up marooned on some God forsaken archipelago of knowledge through Wikipedia. Irish Potato Famine. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Ferris Bueller. Butters from South Park.

This chaotic tumble lasts for two to four hours.

For twenty minutes I read a book I brought, glancing up distracted by the radio volume lights every two minutes. With the door shut in the studio, I can't hear the ear splitting opera we're broadcasting world wide to the fourteen soon to be dead bodies sitting on piles of cash breathing out of oxygen masks. I've got to make sure I see those lights, rising and falling, a good combination of light green and bright red. If that's not happening, that mesothelioma crowd will be a hard sell come pledge time.

I black out.

It's midnight and I'm scanning my card again to get out. Security is tight here because everybody wants to be in that back room with the foam walls. Everybody wants a stack of money and an oxygen mask.

The air is fresh outside, cold and clear right after a front, clean and free, and I go home with my windows down.