2001-07-12 - 11:42 p.m.

You notice strange things when you've been stressed and busy in a place all day and suddenly run out of things to do. At least, I do. I shouldn't say you do because, well, I'm not you and thus have no reason to pretend I know what you notice.

Anyway, all day today I've had my fair share of stuff to do for work. It just hasn't really stopped, and frankly, I have no problem with that. I'm actually happier having something to do at work, though I don't have anything against a break, either. But now, we've just completed everything we really have to do for now. That is, we've completed everything that I can help with. And so now, instead of sitting in a back room with my notebook, hidden away from my coworkers like I did when I was working at Ames, I'm sitting one computer terminal away from my manager, Ben, and about fifteen feet from his boss, Sharon, writing this diary entry in my notebook, with his permission. That's how extreme this lull in work is, and it's probably going to last another twenty minutes, depending on whether the courier is on time or not.

I stood for a bit, staring, hypnotized by a sorter. Anyone outside of bank people who've—

That break in entry was the point that the courier arrived, fifteen minutes early. And now I have time to write again because we have just gotten to the end of *that* batch of work. And why is it that we can do that? Because we are that damned good.

Anyway, as I was saying, if you don't work in an area like a bank that uses one, you probably know a sorter from any sort of video of the work that goes on at the post office behind the scenes. Maybe a news piece on the amount of mail they get at Christmas and tax time or something like that. It's a machine that spits letters (or, in our case, checks and other bank items) at a very high speed along a track where they seemingly randomly swerve into carefully organized pockets.

John, one of the other people who works in Items Processing (my department, for those of you playing at home), was putting a run of General Ledger Credit forms through one of these as we ran out of work the first time. If you don't know what a General Ledger Credit form (or GL Credits as we professional bankin' types like to call it) is, don't worry, I don't either. All I know about it is that it means that I don't have to do anything while someone else puts it through the sorter. And so I stared at it, hypnotized, because it seemed to be putting the whole batch of GL Credits in the same pocket—pocket #2, in fact. So it seemed to be working very fast and hard but didn't seem to be *doing* anything. Then suddenly I'd snap back to reality when it would, without warning, spit something over to pocket #9, then go right back to pocket #2, as if to say "Are you awake?"

Then, when that was done, I went and looked at the new dry erase white board hanging on what was a big bare wall not two days before. In that short period of time, three main messages had been written on it. One was a big "Welcome to Items Processing" across the top of the board in thin purple marker, one was a small message about someone taking a day off on Friday in thin blue marker, and one was a message with medium-sized letters in thick purple marker about a shareholders meeting in a couple of weeks. What I noticed about all three was that though I knew they were all written by the same person, the handwriting was different on each one. And what I started to grasp as I stared stupidly at it was that the larger the handwriting got, the fewer flourishes there were on the letters.

That was the point that I sat down and started writing. The moment that I found myself analyzing the differences in my boss's handwriting was the moment I realized I had something to talk about. And so I sat down to write. Because it's almost like I couldn't handle how drastically more relaxed everything suddenly seemed, I felt like I had to do *something*. So I sat and wrote until the courier showed up. And then I worked and kept asking what I could do next until there was nothing more to do. And then I wrote more. And then, it was time to leave, so I biked to the bus stop. Then I paced the parking lot until the bus got there. As soon as I got on the bus I took out my laptop and started writing.

I don't know what it its, but now it seems like from the point that I'm at work, until I finally decide to go to bed, I'm supposed to be doing *something.* Weekends can be spent vegetating, but every working day must be spent working. Beginning to end, I work. Granted, that means every lunch hour is spent working on my new screenplay, which is now 24 pages long and going strong every day. But that's because I can't not work each day.

I'm worried about it.

Because I'm becoming one of those guys.