What We Do

It's 4:24 a.m. and i'm sitting in Oslo airport, waiting for time to pass. At 7:25 a plane will erase me from here and rematerialize me in Spain a few hours later.

I lay down on a hard bench and managed to sleep for a few hours; then discomfort overcame tiredness, i suppose, and i got up and went for a walk. Now i've been sitting on a lounge chair in the arrivals hall for the last hour and a half, reading and chatting with friends on facebook.

The chair is right in front of a cordoned-off area, inside which a guy is polishing the floor, sitting atop a machine that looks like a massive, movable throne. He controls it with a joystick under his right hand and the throne inches forwards at about a meter per minute, trailing behind it a thick power chord. Once in a while the guy climbs off, repositions the chord so as not to have to drive over it, and then climbs back up again.

The floor is covered in a beige dust that looks very fine, and i wonder how much of it is getting into my lungs. The guy is not wearing a mask, though, so it's probably alright. His face is impassive as stone, and he yawns once in a while.

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My job drives me crazy sometimes: too much excitement, too much personal drama, too many crises. But looking at this guy i feel grateful for it.

Or maybe i don't. The previous comment may be interpreted as disparaging under a certain light, but i don't mean it to be. Apart from the fact that everything would eventually crumble to pieces if jobs like this weren't done, i see on a day to day basis that maintenance people are some of the unsung heroes of the modern world. They work hard, and we others tend to take what they do for granted.

This last is a bad habit i've observed in a great many areas: only obvious innovations or novelty projects are celebrated, but the everyday, all-pervading and absolutely indispensable struggle against inertia goes unnoticed. This is a great flaw in our educations.

Anyways, what i meant to comment on is the seeming boredom and repetitiveness that pervade this man's job. Granted, it's nighttime and we humans do tend to feel naturally sleepy at this time, but the machine he is driving goes so slowly that sometimes he closes his eyes for many seconds at a time.

And yet, imagine all that time to think and build new worlds in your head, listen to music, chew over an idea...