Matt sighed. There were days when the “day job” was arguably less of a way to make a living and more of a slow decent into madness that could hardly be called a life. The worst part was how much of his personal time this job was taking. The idea was to have some free time to work on outside projects and hopefully build enough of a clientele to eventually be independent, but this was a time-suck to end all time-sucks.
Nothing was ever good enough, the tiniest little changes had to be made, and unmade, and remade several times before the next tiny change could be discussed, and every single change meant every version of the file had to be updated or the backup was no longer accurate. There was supposed to be only two—one redundant copy—but somehow there were copies all over the place, dated versions, separate files for particular problem-child scenes, and no one was 100% sure they were working with the complete updated version at any given time.
How does one compensate for watching the equipment make changes while one is helpless to effect it? One stays late, of course. Eight hours of work will be accomplished sometime over the course of the twelve hour day, and since Matt was on salary all it meant was being tired and having no time for his kids.
Matt was stuck in the machine—too busy and tired from his job to look for a better job—and was therefore hopeless. To make matters worse, he knew what he was supposed to do and just couldn’t manage to do it. His life’s calling was clear, it was just on the other side of a vast chasm labeled “place miracle here.”
Matt stared at his screen, the little wheel still perpetually spinning. He sighed into the quiet of the otherwise empty office. “This can’t be my life.”