Manual was high enough on the food chain to merit his own office with walls and a door. He even had a window! His window faced another building, and looked out over a city parking lot, which looked like a concrete garbage dump at this time of the day, before anyone had come into the city. The office workers didn't really take their cars into the city, not unless they had a sales meeting to get to or needed to look important. And if they needed to look important, there were car services for that.
Manual put the remains of his small coffee on his desk, took off his hat, and threw his overcoat on the back of his chair. He was wearing his ugly plaid shirt and his "classy" jeans today. His "classy" jeans were his dark wash skinny jeans that he felt made him look sleek and ready for action. He was obviously deluding himself.
He looked at the laptop on his desk and wondered if he should wake it up right away, or if he should wait a while. He decided that he would wait until the truck backing into the parking lot managed to dislodge itself from between the garbage dumpsters.
After watching the truck move back and forth for five minutes, Manual got bored and sat at his desk. There was no one in the office to disturb him, and any email he sent now would probably not be read for another hour. This gave him enough time to have a nap before he had to do any kind of work.
Manual's days always played out in similar ways, with small deviations here and there. He would come in early, before almost everyone else. He would stare out the window while finishing his (normally large) coffee. He would then answer emails and send emails. Then he would evaluate what he had to do for the day before taking a short nap. He would wake up just before 9am when the office started to fill up. Then he would go make himself a tea and talk to whomever was in the kitchen before going back to his office to pretend to work.
His job was low-stakes. He was important to the process, but not so important that he would be missed if he left for two hours in the middle of the day. If he was missing for longer, someone would probably notice and people would start to complain. By his own estimation, he'd have to be missing for more than two days for that to happen.
The important thing for Manual was for the day to go along almost exactly the same way as the day before. Organization was the key: the fewer steps left to chance, the fewer things could go wrong. Of course, there were always unexpected events, and even some days where things appeared to go wrong quasi-randomly, but in general, there was no event that could not be solved through careful planning and execution.
But then there was the coffee: he had somehow ordered the wrong size coffee this morning. This was operator error and this wasn't something you could plan for.
