I've experienced monotony from both sides, now

IN TRANSITION #11

By Benjamin Toff, Globe Correspondent | October 9, 2005
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Today marks exactly four months since my college graduation day. The monotony of subsisting eight hours a day hunched over a keyboard, banished to a remote cubicle, is already weighing on me.

Is this what I have to look forward to the rest of my life?

The transition from full-time student to working stiff -- despite a few detours along the way -- happened rather seamlessly and suddenly. When did I stop going out to the bar for drinks with friends and start spending my nights packing a lunch and ironing slacks? Instead of pulling all-nighters on papers anymore, I fall asleep before getting through a two-hour rented DVD.

(On a related note, I got a haircut last week. Discovered to my horror that my hair is thinning. Really thinning. Like when wet, I can see my scalp.)

At this rate, I'll be comatose by the time I'm 30.

Admittedly, the job itself is fine. My working conditions are relatively cushy: I have a window beside my desk and a fair amount of privacy, responsibility, and variety of assigned tasks. My co-workers ask about my life and take a genuine interest in me.

But it's the routine that's hollowing out my soul from the inside. The 9-to-5 slog, day after day -- fax, photocopy, file, collate, stamp, send, delete. I navigate through the empty corridors of a faceless, cold bureaucratic machine. Sometimes colleagues glance in my direction, bathed in the blue glow of their computer monitors, their eyes twinkling with fantasies of Bermuda or skydiving or anything involving actual human contact. But I push on, entranced as if sleepwalking.

Yet every so often something -- an event -- jars me awake after weeks of coasting along through shapeless time. I recalibrate. I am reminded that every day is new and every moment, no matter how bleak, presents new opportunities for discovery and beauty.

I had just such an experience last week. The weather had turned sour. It was one of those inexplicably windy days. I had listened to the storm developing all afternoon through my window, threatening to burst through the glass and relieve me of my e-mail turmoil. When I arrived at my car after work, I found it covered in leaves -- and, to my utter disbelief, an enormous tree branch had fallen from on high and pounded into the roof.

''Is that your car?" a former professor of mine asked incredulously as he strolled down Prescott Street. I was in the middle of dislodging the log from between my side mirror and driver's window.

Miraculously, the car still rolls. The only significant damage: a large dent above the driver's door (the same door whose window I had just finally fixed). Just a few more inches and that branch would have shattered my sunroof -- and likely put an end to my driving days. To make matters eerier, I had only parked there the night before so as to rush to get to a 6 o'clock meeting.

''I think God must be trying to send you a message," my friend Phoebe taunted later that evening in the car.

Message or not, my ears have perked up. I walk home from work each evening noticing new things. A friendly couple walking their dog, a baby crying, the sunset igniting the sky in brilliant purples and reds.

I've driven this same route countless times, zooming by, letting it all pass without ever really seeing any of it.

No wonder if felt so monotonous.

Benjamin Toff lives in Somerville. Reach him at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.