Artistic License: REVOKED

July third is not a holiday for state employees.

However, most everybody is taking tomorrow off. Only two other members of the break set will be there, so it's hardly worth it even going to break; and break is after all the focal point of my job.

Hey. There aren't any taxpayers reading this, are there? No? Thank God.

So I am torn, deeply torn as to whether to call in tomorrow and tell the most senior person in the office, who is one of my fellow three-martini breakers, that I'm not coming in. But my apartment could really stand to be cleaned, and I sure as hell don't want to do that. I'm torn.

To work or not to work: That is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The construction plans of outrageous highways,
Or to call in against a sea of boredom,
And by opposing end it. To stay home, to slack off -
Not work - and by slacking off to say we end
The dullness, and the thousand phone calls from Corpus
That work is heir to! 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To call in, to slack off -
To slack off - perchance to clean the house: ay, there's the rub,
For in that staying home what cleaning up may come
When we have shuffled off this office coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of working every day:
For who would bear the workplace with no break,
The district coordinator's call, the email from the boss,
The endless beige decor, the phantom fart,
The snoring, and the office smoker's barbs
The patient merit of th' unworthy takes
When she herself might her quietus make
With a single phone call? Who would these burdens bear,
To slave all day over a hot mainframe,
But that the dread of something at home,
Where untold dishes, laundry, toilets wait,
And one must clean, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear the ills at work,
Than fly to others that we know too well?
Thus laziness makes cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is weakened with this sickly shade of doubt,
And decisions of such grave import are not made,
With this confusion my resolve turns awry,
To lose the name of action. -Soft you now!
The fair reader! -Sweet, in your perusal
Be all my breaks remembered.

I write all this confident in the knowledge that rotten tomatoes cannot be transmitted electronically.