He slumped back in his swivel chair, listless and lethargic in his boredom, his arms lolling loosely on his sides, his feet on the cluttered desk, his eyes riveted on the ceiling like those of an infant who still wonders what the world is all about.

Once again he found himself at loose ends, struggling to cast off that sense of endless ennui and idleness. He was never an indolent man---dawdling and dallying had never been his style---but somehow he just felt nothing was worthwhile at the moment or at least so he assumed.

“Gosh! What the heck am I doing? Ain’t I supposed to be working hard?”

He muttered to himself, but elicited no answer. He soothed himself with the notion that his very languor, or rather inactiveness, which he surely preferred, was to some degree attributable to his high efficiency which had allowed him to finish all his tasks way ahead of schedule and thus left him with nothing to bustle about.

He began to look around in his seat, twisting his body and craning his neck so that he could better snoop around on others. He saw that most of his colleagues were busy working, their minds preoccupied by the work at hand, their eyes transfixed on the computer screens, their backs set tight like the scarp of a moat....It struck him that these people seldom talked, except when they had to make phone calls to customers or translation applicants, and that when they did talk to each other at intervals of work, their subjects were usually so far away from the epicenter of his interest that he never bothered to chime in. He didn’t quite understand how work had come to take up so much of their time, their energy and ultimately their lives without them ever grunting a complaint or seriously reflecting on what all this might entail. There were many people in the company, he reckoned, who would tell him that work ethic and professionalism were the unquestionable creeds of every successful corporate culture and that in a society where corporate hierarchy still prevailed, employees were rightly expected to do more than they were paid for, sometimes even more than their physicality and stamina would allow ....