What is there to be written about the life of an office clerk? While the receptionist could be a game enthusiast, the cleaning lady a loving mother, the IT specialist a geek, a clerk always seems a clerk, one of those looming yet anonymous figures at the corners of the office, mostly typing on the keyboard of who knows what words, and occasionally staring somewhere with an attentive gaze of empty thoughts. In those moments, it seems almost counterintuitive to envision for the office clerk a congenial group of friends, a colorful arrangement of events, or a distinguished habit of enjoying a series of refined tastes after the daily ritual has finished. The stern, inexorable face of blandness and bore extends beyond the boundary of a firm, leaps past the crowds and restaurants and tram stations, and terminates only in bed where the loose cotton collar of the pajamas replaces the strangle of the tie, bringing in an unfamiliar, even hostile sensation of freedom and aimlessness - only before sleep does the clerk get to undress from his hefty costume and entertain a shiver of animalistic sloth, perhaps just like a woman after her sixties, when the urge to feign a layer of femininity begins to subside, and when scarcely anyone would pay attention.
But according to the more established, and hence more resigned of the clerks, life with all of its moments of hope and ecstasy, is fundamentally unglamorous. The majority of those who take the pleasure of walking under the trees entitle to it by bearing the grind and angst that came as a price for one's subsistence; the couples who buy movie tickets and popcorns could afford them precisely because they have earned their money, paid their rent, and would not mind spending some extra time having fun; the pianist performs flawlessly on-stage for he has played endlessly off of it; even the smile of a clown could not be lastingly maintained without some aching of the muscle. And hence to be a clerk, a hermit, a clown, or a poet is to be no different, all are but gimmicks that they deployed for the comfort and illusion of the sense of belonging with which they gild themselves. These are ways in which most of the people live by; even for the few who are accustomed to life's tedium, they serve as rare solaces, that after all, to have a mode to follow is to have a pat on the back, however wicked and impenetrable things are to become.
Perhaps, the clerk has already known, that if life is the confusion over a long road trip leading nowhere, then it is infinitely easier to be thoughtless and vague than to be pensive and agonized. For after all, with only the intermittent reassurance of voices of the radio and the engine that seems to accompany it forever, the trip will consist mostly of a gradual process of realizing, and reconciling with its inevitable end. And hence if to be thoughtless and vague is to desert from an unwinnable war, those who fought heroically and dramatically face their demise quicker, after which they experience neither joy nor honor; however, for those who have the foresight to plan out the details of the retreat before the battle has even begun, the pleasure lies in the aftermaths, where they gloat at the graves of the heroes, and revel in the unique privilege of being able to do so.
However, having not the courage of entering a battle, nor the ignorance of a useless escape, the clerk chooses to play along with what life has to offer with only half-hearted interest, and half-hearted remorse.
Then, beneath the green of an Excel sheet, he lights up his imaginary cigarette for a subconscious smoke.
