Why not? The overabundance of drab surroundings and rigid corporate composure could drive any mere human to seek play in the most brief and fierce fashions. Dive in it, she thought privately.
The beginning, it was mostly a short arc: a start, enough to get one's feet wet. No hours of endless toil, sweaty and smelly for mostly meager wages. Climate control, snacks, precision: simple little luxuries. But as weeks turned into months, endless daily repetition and stilted conversation with adversarial opportunists brought her to sluggish alarm that something was greatly amiss to her person. It was as if each day began afresh at the end of the day's work: as she peeled off dismal slacks and polyester button-up blouses and became herself again. What part of herself has broken off and really inhabited the work she did anyway? Copies and email messages were the product of the better part of her labor's time and energy.
Morning, eight-something. Coffee. Fluorescent lighting taupe sanitary planes. Enter computer, launch software. Every morning, the same. Sometimes there might be the sweetness of a shared breakfast, fleeting. Perhaps the quality of the morning sunlight is particularly fine. Route: the same, the fastest. Each task she handles efficiently, checking out of thoughtful modes of consideration, or imagination, to complete. She is a completing machine.
Coming to, at home, her heart sings. At last! A moment to one's self, to order as one pleases. She thinks for a moment how it might be possible that it was okay: these few hours in the evening, when she really came alive, these were enough to get by on. It's as if she were asleep all day anyway. Yet these mindless trances produce nothing but a pitiful hypnoia. Such a way to live one's life. It slips on by, each day nearly the same, punctuated by flare-ups of frustration, or troughs of disappointment.
What of some bit of color? Some splash of sensory stimulation to trigger delight, and to keep the mind alert. These aren't distractions, they're what a child locked in a closet lacks. Juicy reds from a ripe strawberry, alternating blues of an evening sky. The brilliant green of moss. The flash of wings on a butterfly. Or even a well-paid compliment, a genuine shared laugh, an honest unusual opinion. Such depth of character and contrast in the sophisticated decor were largely unheard of. It was such a large mass of conformity to rebel in, a banal glass house. She envisions the structure built on the backs of millions of other numbed secretaries. What a vision! She wonders if it were stones they were throwing, or does she take things too seriously?