Scene 1: "The Real World"

On Wednesday morning, he walks into the office and waits for the elevator – another day staring him in square in the face. It hadn’t taken long for the allure of interning at a San Francisco startup to turn into a struggle – an internal struggle against monotony, Excel spreadsheets, and scripted encounters with supervisors. And with each day that passed, each struggle became slightly more dreadful. As the elevator doors separate on the 4th floor, this struggle, and this battle, is what he mentally prepares for. He takes out his white key card and begrudgingly holds it to the reader, unlocking the door, but effectively locking himself in for the day. He walks in and eyes his three computer monitors, his desk, and his black chair with disdain, well aware of the eight impending hours to be spent sitting in that chair, carefully tracking the minutes until 5 o’clock. But before he can finish grappling with this thought, he is confronted with the even more unsettling realization that he is only eight days into the internship – not even 20% done. There are many more battles ahead. Many more days. Many more weeks. He worries about how he will feel in four weeks’ time, let alone by the end of the current week, or even the current day. Now steps away from his chair, time is running out to think, so he resigns himself to the idea that ‘this is just what an internship is’ – a boring, monotonous, and obligatory prerequisite. And with that, he puts down his backpack, hangs his black jacket over the seat, and falls into the chair, nothing more to greet him than a dispassionate “good morning,” uttered by his neighbor whose eyes remain locked on his own screen. “Morning.” He logs into the system, and the clock begins. 9:14 A.M.

His sales internship is a far cry from the summers that he’d spent back home working as a camp counselor. Before he opens up his email and throws himself into the dullness of office life, he fantasizes about those glorious summer days – days when the hardest parts of his job consisted of issuing piggyback rides and breaking up arguments over who got to play shortstop – days that were spent basking in the hot summer sun and hanging out with the campers that he’d grown to know and love, playing with them so mindlessly that he began to feel like one of them himself – days when the reward of a cold popsicle and a sweat-drenched t-shirt in the afternoon was more than enough to compensate for the pitiful hourly rate that he was being paid. But instead of giving him comfort, diving into these memories only fuels the resentment that he feels towards his present situation. He could be at camp, reunited with his campers and making new memories, but he’s not. Instead, he sits in his chair, bitter towards the system that put him there and sold him the idea that without the all-important summer internship, the perfectly streamlined path into the “real world” would somehow be broken, causing everything in life to unravel. Because of them, he finds himself surrounded by computer screens instead of ballfields, cups of coffee instead of Gatorade, and lifeless silence instead of the sounds of summer, locked at an ecommerce lifestyle company that sells tech gadgets, upscale clothing, knives, sex toys, and expensive art to men with disposable income. He doesn’t care, and he never will. He checks the top right corner of his computer screen to find that, somehow, it’s only been 15 minutes, and that it’s time for the Wednesday morning meeting.

The fifty-foot walk from his desk to the conference room represents the most activity that his body will undertake all morning. He takes his seat on the periphery of the meeting space, reminded of his minor role as he stares at the backs of those that are powerful enough to claim a seat at the actual table. For the next hour, he listens to sales projections, and revenue updates, frustrated that he doesn't have a single line to contribute. The only time he had ever spoken at one of these meetings was on the very first day, when he was asked to introduce himself. But even then, he was unsure of what to say. Eventually, the hour passes, and each member of the 25-person sales team brings their hands to the middle of the table for the ceremonial break that marks the end of each meeting, where they would, in unison, shout the monthly sales goal on the count of three. He reaches his hand in and halfheartedly follows along. “1, 2, 3…10 MILLION!” It occurs to him that this number (10 million), and this cause (selling ego-boosting lifestyle products to rich men), is what each member of the sales team dedicates their days to. Forty hours per week, 48 weeks per year, all in order to reach this arbitrary number and deliver products to men who need to bolster their image of success. He finds it all laughably hollow, and he wants no part of it. In fact, he looks down on them for it, knowing that one day, he would be above all this, enjoying a career that would revolve around something bigger than what was happening around him.

After the meeting, he moves back to his chair and finds a message from his boss, summoning him to her office. The door is open, and he takes a seat across from her, nervously anticipating whatever task she is about to dump on him. The spreadsheet, she explains, is 1034 rows long, with 7 columns in each row. He peers over at the document that is to consume his life for the next several days, and immediately tunes out whatever else she is spitting at him. He envisions himself fettered to his chair, plugging numbers into the endless spreadsheet for hours on end, and in this moment, he flirts with the idea of walking out the door and never returning. But this is a fantasy that he will never live, so he forces a smile and stays on script: “Yup, I’ll have it done as soon as I can.”

The imminent drudgery overwhelms him, so he walks to the bathroom in an attempt to gather himself. Shocked at what his days have become, he feels sorry for whoever he sees in the mirror, and this moment of self-pity gives him just enough life to get out the door and back to his chair. But first, he stops in the kitchen to grab a handful of sour gummy worms – a ritual that had become one of the highlights of his days in the office. The realization, however, that gummy worms had become one of his greatest joys in life, cancels out his enjoyment of them, instead turning them into a symbol of his pathetic situation.

“How’s it going,” one of his colleagues interrupts.

“Not bad, you?”

“Good! It’s Wednesday…so…we’re getting there.”

“Yup.”

Surely, Thursday would call for the same conversation – winding down the clock until Friday only to have it wind back up again come Monday, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down time and again. And just like Sisyphus, he sits in his chair filling out row after row on the spreadsheet, each completed row only rewarding him with another blank one. The task is so mindless that he hardly has to pay it any attention, but this only makes him more aware of his boredom. The patterns of what keys to punch and what information to copy become muscle memory, leaving his mind free to engage the slug and dread of his task. He distracts himself with music or podcasts to the extent that he can, until eventually, he becomes desensitized to his own frustration and morphs into the machine that they want him to become. Highlight, right click, copy, paste, tab, repeat.

It’s 3 o’clock, and his spreadsheet quota for the day is finally complete. But somehow, the two hours of nothingness that lies ahead is just as daunting as the four hours of number plugging that lay behind. With no work left on his list, and no desire to inquire about anything to add, he begins a thoughtless exploration of the endless macrocosm that is the internet. If he’s lucky, whatever random phrase he throws into Google or YouTube will yield something that catches his attention just enough to have a small chunk of time – maybe 20 minutes – go by without it feeling like more. In the midst of this virtual wandering, he is careful to periodically check over his shoulder, always feeling that his supervisors or colleagues are watching him – judging him. But this is never the case. Everyone is too busy viewing their own screens, immersed in their own realities. He observes their blank, inanimate gazes and wonders if anybody in the room truly loves what they do. All his life, he’d heard inspirational anecdotes about “doing what you love” and “loving what you do,” and he assumed that this would be reflected in whatever professional environment that he found himself in. But to him, what he sees looks more like despondency than love, and he wonders if he is helplessly doomed to the same bleak fate.

At 3:30, he computes that his day is 80% complete. He’s already endured four times as much as he will have to endure from here on out, and the light at the end of the tunnel finally begins to come into focus. The percentage agonizingly creeps up with each article that he stumbles upon or each video clip that he consumes. He submerges himself into the music video for Oasis's “Champagne Supernova” until a fellow buyer pings him and jolts him out of his immersion.

“Ping pong?”

“Sure.”

The two of them venture to the other side of the office space, into a small room housing a ping-pong table and a bright red bean bag chair. They start rallying, and for a few minutes, he enjoys being at the table instead of behind it, taking advantage of the day’s only opportunity to feel significant. His forehand is relentless, and his backhand is crafty. They exchange playful lines of trash talk and battle it out until their office responsibilities eventually tug them back to their desks. He emerges with four victories, each of which provide him with a hint of triumph sprinkled into an otherwise unenviable day.

He returns to his desk at 4:07 P.M. – only 53 minutes to go, and only 45 if he makes use of a bathroom break. But this time, instead of floating around on the internet, he plugs his headphones in and flips to a blank page in his notebook. He sizes up the page and ponders the infinite possibilities, but when pen meets paper, he begins by outlining a stick figure of himself in the center of the canvas. The drawing is now about him, but still, but the directions that he can take, and the stories that he can tell, are endless. He contemplates his stick figure for a while, looking at it just the way that he had been looking in the bathroom mirror a few hours earlier. Before long, his vision comes into focus, and he tells the notebook his story.

Upon completion, he marvels at his work. He is satisfied with his creation, not necessarily for its artistic value, but more so for its essence. Clearly the victim, and clearly at the forefront, the stick figure stands alone. It's 5 o'clock.

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