Routinized motion

The minute hand came to rest on the “30”. Peter rose (it would be more descriptive to say “semi-unfurled”) from the lunch table and hastily (or as hastily as he was able) shuffled his way back towards his office; eyes downcast, shoulders hunched, arms dangling.

There was a time when he used to shuffle only a little while walking. Now, it seemed as if life’s tiny defeats began to manifest themselves as invisible weights that he was burdened with carrying.

If his posture over the last twenty years had been photographed daily and assembled into some sort of cruel flip book, it would illustrate a man whose head appeared to be gradually compressing into his pelvis. His carriage had become such a crass comedic sketch of defeated human movement that even the most pedestrian analyst of body language would handily conclude that this was a man who was severely lacking in confidence.

Lack of confidence implies that a person is deficient in only a small complement of the components of the human soul. Someone lacking in confidence needs a small corrective push to set them right.

The withering of Peter’s abilities ran to nearly every aspect of his personality. He had devolved into a primeval human, operating mainly on cerebellar and other lower brainstem functions, which allowed him basic motor and ritualized communication skills. He also retained some of the functions of memory and inhibition, but only those that were absolutely necessary for day-to-day existence.

Lack of confidence didn’t even begin to describe the servile idleness of Peter’s personality.

Clearly he was still capable of movement and speech, and he was responsive to most stimuli but over time he had unwittingly shut down the parts of himself that we tend to associate with the most beautiful bits of humanity.

The less you feel, the less you feel angry, sad or lonely.

The people around him failed to notice that they were talking not to a man at all but to a hollow shell; a crude impersonation of a man. Some of them were similarly hollow, if not perhaps to the same extent as Peter. The rest of them were too busy to notice.

“You’ll like Peter, everyone likes him! He’s really pleasant and quiet. A real team player!”

When the pulp and paper mill opened, he was hired as part of the implementation team. He had just graduated from university and naturally, he was looking to be involved in a project that would provide a good opportunity to learn his craft. Helping to implement the mill allowed Peter the opportunity to apply in practice much of the theory he had learned in university.

Automatic controllers had to be tuned so that the mill would process the rough wood into paper as smoothly and efficiently as possible with minimal human intervention. The roles of the mill operators had to be defined so that they could work well together as a team. There was a great deal of problem solving and teamwork among the management, and it was a very exciting time for Peter. And at the end, perfect reams of paper rolled out of gargantuan reels in an unending automatic river.

At the conclusion of his workday, Peter would stand at the end of the paper mill and watch the paper roll out. Its perfection made him well up with pride.

In conversation, and with perfect honesty, he would liken his job to that of an artist painting his first masterwork and later, a ballet director ensuring the various dancers in his performance moved together in perfect harmony.

He didn’t mind the rotten egg smell so much; the work was exciting, and eventually you don’t even notice it. You habituate.

As the years passed, however, the bulwarks that were the creative challenge of his job were eventually flooded by a rising tide of mundanity.

He still stood at the end of the mill on a daily basis, but for no other reason than the fact that he had done it every work day for fifteen years.

Since he was so consumed by his job in his youth, Peter made little effort to engage the outside world during his spare time, preferring to spend quiet evenings alone at home with the television and a drink. Sometimes, he’d bring some work home with him.

His job didn’t settle into routine instantly; inertia rarely sets in quickly.

Exciting late-night planning sessions transmogrified into menial daily data entry.

The tantalizing challenge of determining unknown operating parameters inevitably became a predictable series of cause and effect relationships. When output A is high, turn dial B down to 65%.

Now, he’d sometimes bring some papers home with him, but these papers were never of any importance or interest to Peter, lacking as he was in the ability to be interested in anything. Recently, he’d been collecting all the product manuals and trade publications that came across his desk and bringing them home simply due to a general paper-carrying reflex. He had a pile in his living room of over ten thousand seperate bundles of such information. All of it remained unread.

Sometimes, he would lose his footing on the pile because haphazardly stacked glossy magazines provide very poor traction. When that happened, he’d usually just fall asleep right there on his living room floor.

Eventually, every task associated with his job was procedurized and before he knew it, Peter was no longer painting a canvas or directing a ballet. Now, he was simply a fleshy link in an impenetrable machine.

Peter’s nightly drink became a few nightly drinks and ultimately a nightly cascade of booze.

Eventually, he didn’t even need the television.

Eventually, he would just sit at the kitchen table staring at the wall and drink himself unconscious.