The realities of my day job: watching flags and buttons on a computer screen, and knowing that everything is alright with the world as long as they remain green.
As soon as a flag or button turns red, it's time for me to leap into action with the calm precision of an assassin and do whatever it takes to make it green once again.
It's dull, it makes the days seem overly long, and I've been known to sit there with a red flag or button for, oh, minutes, because the nature of the task is so mind-numbing that there is some part of me which refuses to concentrate on it properly.
The red and green objects relate to sales, incidentally - when they're green, the company I work for can continue to sell things and the money can keep rolling in. When they're red, I need to amend something or other to bring about the optimum state once again.
It occurred to me on Wednesday morning, as I was cursing the fact that my life had turned out this way, that there's no difference between my job, which I complain about without end, and computer games, which I enjoy.
Thinking about it, both have an ideal or goal state which must be reached, less-than-favourable initial conditions, plus obstacles which make reaching the former a challenge. Both have in-built warnings (implicit or otherwise) when performance is not up to the required standard, and both are embodiments of real*, physical situations encoded in the language of machines.
Yet one is considered to be 'work' (boring work, no less) and the other is 'entertainment' (in some cases, so entertaining that it can eat up an hour.) It goes to demonstrate that it's perception which is the key to progress in an individual's life. Perceive the sales machine as a terribly interesting computer game, and eight hours a day will fly by in a haze of traffic-light coloured symbols.
