Miles Birch wakes to the sound of sharp metal rapping across the room from his bed. Twisting the pillow beneath his neck to raise his head, he watches the long copper handle of his bedroom door bend down, and then spring back up again once every few seconds as if by magic. But it's not magic. It's Pixel, his ex-girlfriend's cat, attempting to open the door with all of the grace and intelligence of a blindfolded eight-year-old swinging his dad's putter at a dangling piñata.

"I wish you were more like the memes that inspired me to buy you." (Source)

Miles sighs and reaches his hand down to the floor near his bed. He takes a few blind swats at his phone before catching it and turning on the screen. It's 7:50AM, exactly ten minutes before the alarm. 

Exactly ten minutes of precious sleep lost to that idiotic cat that Becky left behind when she moved out three weeks ago. He sharply points a finger toward the kitchen and commands the cat to make him coffee as penance. Pixel licks the inside of his thigh in response.

Miles stomps to the kitchen, where he makes his own coffee and drinks a full mug before getting dressed and leaving the apartment just fifteen minutes later. Outside, the bus shows up exactly when his transport tracking app predicted. He spends the ride playing the most recent level of Paladin Shadow, an RPG he's been working on in his spare time for over a year now. He doesn't take notes; he'll be able to check the session's analytics from his own computer once he gets back from the office.

He arrives at the Mogulify office five minutes late, and waves at Melanie as he walks past their shared workstation. He'll catch up with her in a minute; this job is all about priorities. He finds the coffeemaker where it always is and slides an off-brand K-cup into the machine's modified top. The coffee is ready in about thirty seconds and, fuel in hand, Miles walks back to his desk to start his morning routine of putting out fires.

The fires aren't literally fires, though Miles sometimes wishes they were. All I'd need then is a bucket of water, he thinks as he scans the twenty or so emails that arrived overnight. He makes a few notes, and organizes the actionable tasks into a list. First thing's first: Sales appear to have abruptly stopped in the Chinese version of Mogulify at around 3:27AM local time. No one seems to know why.

Though she's seated only a few yards away, he talks to Becky through IM.

Miles (9:13): Chinese pay not going through?
Becky (9:13): Saw that.
Miles (9:14): Run a test order. Let's see what we get.
Becky (9:14): You can't do it?
Miles (9:14): I'm too busy looking up cat shelters with open admission policies.
Becky (9:14): I told you, my new roommate is allergic to cat fur!

Miles minimizes the window, and reads through his personal RSS feed. He chooses a few interesting articles to read on procedural generation that might help him with Paladin Shadow...or, you know, his actual job.

Becky (9:23): Okay, the order failed.
Miles (9:23): Coming.

Miles wheels his chair over to Becky's desk and pores through the error log with her. After about ten minutes, they've discovered the culprit: It's not their fault, it's IT's. They high five, and Miles rolls back to his desk where he emails IT about the issue. Investigating the rest of his morning list eats the next few hours.

It's like being that guy from The Matrix...at the beginning of the movie when he still has a day job. (Source)

It's 11:30AM. Normally, Miles would start on this week's primary task, implementing a more robust user profile into Mogulify, but with only thirty minutes left before lunch, he decides instead to drink another cup of coffee and take a short course in advanced JavaScript instead. He doesn't learn much from it, but that happens sometimes.

He leaves at noon and won't sit again until he returns to the office. Lunch is as much about food as it is about walking around. With over twelve hours a day in front of the computer, just looking at trees and moving his body takes on a special importance that only people working in tech understand. 

It saddens him when 1:00PM arrives, but he's excited to make progress on the new profile system. It's a feature he'd personally campaigned for, and a great opportunity to show the suits why they hired him.

Despite his earlier excitement, most of his afternoon is spent in meetings. There was the tech team at 3:00PM, the designers at 3:45PM, and the all-hands at 4:30PM. 

By the time he leaves for the bus station at 6:00PM, he's worked perhaps two hours total on what he'd actually planned for the day. It wasn't unusual, but he decides that he'll need to prioritize actual progress tomorrow to make up for it.

He spends the bus ride home texting Becky about work. He complains about the meetings, and she complains about IT. He complains about the cat, and she abruptly stops texting him.

Miles opens his front door, and heads straight for the coffee. He feeds Pixel begrudgingly as his coffee heats in the microwave, and then takes his mug to his desk to continue work on his own project, eager to prove Becky wrong by launching Paladin Shadow to a million or more happy users. Maybe then she'll—

Pixel meows from the kitchen.

"Well, nobody asked you," Miles says. He gets to work.

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