Thursday, December 31st, 2020

My direct boss asks me what I’m looking for in the kitchen cabinets. I’m looking for a coffee mug. I need coffee. “I thought perhaps you were looking for happiness.” That too, but happiness is best appreciated when awake. When I get to my desk, I see that part of our computer system has stopped working. I need to use it to do screenshots for the manual I’m finishing today. The boss isn’t in the office. Many of us are standing around. I overhear some coworkers, speaking in Spanish, mentioning the chant “The people united will never be defeated.” I don’t know what they’re saying about it. I know the song. It gets stuck in my head for hours. When I go downstairs to the supermarket, I see a woman slip some envelopes into a tall red box. I couldn’t identify it before. So that’s what mailboxes look like here. Knowing that, the sign about pickup times on it makes sense. I had thought the box held some kind of meter. The only times that I've mail letters here, other people have handled it for me. When I get back upstairs, the computer is working again. No one is sure what had happened. I finish my manual on time. Many workers leave for the weekend a bit early. As I head out, I think of wishing our Spanish and Russian speakers a “Feliz Novy God,” but no one left in the office would get it.