Sitting in the back of the room, arms proped under chin, the man looked out at his surroundings. The tables, highstools, and white plastic fan wobbling off its corkboard ceiling panel. Glancing out the window his eyes followed the shadow of the tree to his left. A deep navy blue contrasted the periwinkle sky, turning back his gaze settled on the occupants of the room.
Each head was bowed, looking intently at the glowing screens in front of them. Eyes were rubbed, glasses adjusted, and the clacking of fingers against keyboards lent a rythmic beat to the office air. About halfway across the room, one manager smiled and joked with an office worker. The worker looking fown at their keyboard every few moments while they waited to go back to work.
Beeping caught the man's attention. To his right, a young man in a grey sweatshirt fought with the printer, his lips a thin line as it refused to cooperate. A few sighs later and the printer groaned and ejected the sheets of paper he had been waiting for. Walking back to his disk reading over the documents, the room fell back to the tapping melody.
Standing and stretching, the man closed one eye as he twisted himself back and forth. Sitting down for the last few hours had been a chore and with each passing moment his desire to escape only increased. 4:53pm his clock said. Only 7 minutes more until freedom. Sitting back down he buried his impatience underneath work again, but not before he had stiffled a chuckle. His mind having gone to the "7 in Heavan" game he had never played in his life.
Wondering briefly what it would have been like to have been one of the wilder kids in school when he was growing up, his mind wandered. Eventually mulling over and coming to the conclusion that he had turned out alright. Rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck, he looked at the clock again. 4:56pm. Well, at least he had passed almost half the time left in the day.
Still typing out data entry, he paused every few pages. There wasn't much point to doing this work with only a few minutes left. It would just make it harder later on to remember what he had and hadn't done. He stopped typing. Then restarted. Then typed again, unsure of what to do. Luckily his answer came to him easily enough at another glance at the clock. 5:00pm, and he was out the door.