Every day that my boss and I motored to work was a photo-copy of the preceding one - duplicate, triplicate, never varying. They were trimmed, fitted and glued to the same, precise template.
     Some routines have a vitality to them and bring a sense of satisfaction. They might lighten a burden, such as when laborers lift up their voices in song; sometimes they bring courage, like the whoops of warriors. This rote movement had nothing of that.
     At seven-thirty in the morning I was in no mood for talk radio. Nothing of me was enthused to hear about date-rape drugs, right-wing conspiracies or a meth lab bust in Daly City, but that was how much the ride cost.
     Once at work, we first powered up the music system and set the lights. Then we cashed in the bank, sipped some coffee, downed a couple of donuts and then opened the doors for business. It never varied. My employer took any variation in procedure quite personally. Variations were acts of insubordination.
     One time he wrote me up (with great flourishes, circled offenses and exclamation marks all done in red ink) because I did not bank-face my notes in the cash register. He required that I sign the document, for the files. "I've told you and I've told you! All of the presidential heads of the greenbacks must always face to the right!" 
     To what purpose he wrote me up for this I could not dream to comprehend; after all, he was the president of the company, and the four of us in sales comprised the entire staff.

The poor fellow was never still. When he sat at his desk he drummed his fingers on the tabletop. If not that, he was jiggling his knees. If he was not talking, he e-mailed or faxed or audibly swallowed. When that sequence subsided I prepared myself for the dreaded humming.
     There is a comfort in, and a sweetness to, a hum. My mother would hum sometimes. The memory is dear to me. Oh, but this! These buzz-saw renditions of Londonderry Air followed by Bridge Over Troubled Water in torturous repetitions made me want to reach for the airline Smirnoff-miniature I had stashed in my day pack. On the upside, when I heard the hum from the far end of the warehouse I could steps out to the patio and sneak a smoke. As it began to become closer and louder I could return to my station and look busy.

One afternoon we had to go to the boss's storage shed to pick up a Duncan Phyfe table. Whilst there I glanced across his yard and saw his next door neighbor standing there - an older man, seventy-something, Hispanic. He was looking at a large leafy tree. I could see him make slight, quiet, movements of his head to scan the scudding clouds or to watch the birds that sparked from the trees' high branches. They disappeared through stages of flight from full-formed body, to blur, to speck of dimness and finally became invisible where the blue sky met the white clouds' feathers.
     I have seen a few men stand in the presence of Nature's hush. It would be inaccurate to say they were lost in thought because thought itself is noisome. It even borders at the limits of immorality to presume that such quiet issues from lassitude or from dullness of sense. If anything, it is quite other than that.
     My boss said to me, "He does that every day! Always it's the same. Sometimes his wife and grandkids join him and they barely even talk to each other. Christ! Could you imagine living like that? Poor bastards! It would bore me to tears. Give me Vegas any day, I can relax at the tables, enjoy the babes and the booze... Now that's life!"