Out of Office

This is a tale as old as time. I need to get up early tomorrow to travel to a work thing. I set my alarm like a skydiver packing their parachute: I need this to work every time, but this time, I REALLY need this to work.

The chute opens at 4:30am. I’m both relieved and terrified. The next two and a half hours are a balancing act between efficiency and biology. I’m Matt Damon getting the instructions from George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven. Move fast, but don’t forget anything. Be polite, but don’t really talk to anyone. Eat, but don’t expect it to be satisfying. Stay awake, but be prepared to kill time by sleeping.

After shoving my carry-on overhead and tumbling into 29B, the first step in the crucible is over. All that’s left now is to stay productive and maybe send some *falls asleep immediately*.

Have you ever watched someone wake up? I’m not saying go out and find someone to watch, but it’s something you’ve definitely encountered. Sleepovers, long car rides, sneaking past an oafish security card to steal a cartoonishly large jewel, you know, real moments from life.

It’s the closest thing humans have to a boot-up process. There’s consistencies, no matter who it is. There’s a deep inhale and then limbs stretch in all different directions, like they’re trying to hatch from an egg.

Being a flight attendant must be bizarre for this reason. Plane sleep is not the same as normal sleep. They watch people enter and exit states of trance like a psychedelic congregation, each acolyte displaying their own form of worship to the deity of sleep.

There’s limited options to get comfortable, and there’s always an announcement or a bump to rip you out. The result is a constant oscillation between being asleep and being awake, a stone skipping along on the surface of unconsciousness. We always laugh at dogs and cats that take too long to do their walk-in-circles routine before they lie down, but I always end up thinking they’re on to something when thirty thousand feet in the air.

I land and find my colleague, and we ride in to the city together. We check in to our hotel, navigate to our rooms, and the world is then shut out with the click of the deadbolt. It’s all over.

These moments during the first few hours of a trip always set a strange precedent for the rest of it. It’s an empirically uncomfortable process, and those feelings reach their peak during my first few minutes in a new hotel room.

A place I didn’t know existed 24 hours ago is now the center of my existence for the next 72 hours. Everything feels alien, but also similar. Hotels have beds. I know what a bed is. This one is not mine, but I have permission to use it. This internal process gets repeated with the TV, the bathroom, etc. until the whole place is coated with a thin layer of your identity. This really is just a different version of a dog circling its bed.

After making sure all is well, I slink into bed for a nap. The room is just a little too cold, which I find is the perfect environment for sleeping. The next hour’s nap is like misting incredibly dry soil, soothing more than sustaining.

Later that day, I wake up at ease. I decide to explore the hotel a bit - mainly because I forgot to cut my fingernails before leaving. I always forget something when I travel, but I never forget the same thing. This time, it’s forgetting to cut my fingernails.

After finding the hotel store, I see a stairwell to the basement levels. Ignoring horror movie logic, or perhaps giving in to it, I decide to see what’s down there. I come across something I’ve only seen in films, and having seen it in person, it’s far more unnerving than you’d expect.

At the end of this hallway is the business center. And mounted on the wall is what I can only describe as the heart of the building. It’s six clocks, each calibrated to a different timezone. The subtle discrepancies in each of their ticks make the whole group sound as if time is literally marching on.

It’s just me down here. The room is empty, devoid of natural light, and hauntingly quiet. The dark wood paneling seems to amplify any ambient sound, so I feel like I’m either hundreds of feet beneath the earth, or many miles above it.

Try painting your identity onto that. Economic intricacy sprawls and sprawls, yet here I am, stuffed into my own special socket. London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Los Angeles, Chicago, me.

It’s easy to see this system and the structures we adhere to as something mechanical, like a computer routing processing power to support the programs it’s asked to execute (no matter how harmful or unfair they might be).

The reality, I think, is more strange. It almost behaves like a living system. A brain. A collection of biological processes with one motive: persist. Don’t adapt, keep the world from changing. I’m caught in a web, and staring at me are the six eyes of the structural tarantula.

Thank you for your time.

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