I was filling in for a colleague at The Institute, so I put in full days this week (well, two full days, at least). This meant grabbing lunch on the go and racing around to run errands on breaks. I don't know why people put up with it, to tell you the truth. I mean, I know why people say they do, but I don't know why they really do. Maybe they don't even know.

I suspect a lot of people do it because everybody else is doing it, and maybe because the people who aren't are all miserable, destitute, or mad, which is what happens when you don't do what everybody else is doing for any length of time. And then, of course, you've got those types who are doing what everybody else is doing but have their faces tattooed, or do it wearing black nail polish, or with a bone through their nose, or chanting "Yes We Can!" and think that means they're not.

That's the thing about being a member of a species, though, and a competitive one, at that. You really can't escape it. On the one hand you have to do what everybody else is doing, on the other you have to stand out if you want whipped cream on top. You can stand out by doing what everybody else is doing better than everybody else, or by simply being cuter than everybody else while doing it, or by having exceptionally large and impressive genitals (I'll take Door Number 3, Monty).

But the truth is: it's really the luck of the draw, innit? If you aren't obviously and effortlessly better than the rest, they call you a social-climber and scorn you. If you're not cute, they ostracize you all through school, and you end up a mass murderer. And, although, personally, I can't imagine what it must be like, not everyone can be blessed with impressive genitals, now, can they? Too bad. It would certainly be win-win.

What's left for the rest of you, then? The Unlucky Mob? The Unelectable? I don't really know what to tell you, frankly. You might want to consider having your tongue pierced, getting a tramp stamp, or joining a "movement." Because barring a miracle like winning the lottery, or a lucky break, like a bird flu epidemic, you're stuck working nine-to-five.

But buck up. We all find our proper place in the food chain eventually. And there are those who find they're perfectly comfortable with life in a cubicle. Even so, they often feel they have to justify it to others by talking about trade-offs. Salary. Benefits. Y'know, how would they pay for the meds that make their job bearable without the health benefits from the job that makes the meds necessary? And then there's the fact that they actually spend half the day watching youtube videos anyway. Which it's like they're paying you to watch, and which are so much funnier when you're on the meds that the health plan from your job pays for. Plus you can forward them to your coworkers, and laugh about them when you catch up at the water cooler. It's like having friends, only better, since you don't have to go to the trouble of making them, or even really liking them. I mean, you're on the clock.

I'm pretty fortunate in having had colleagues throughout most of my working life that were relatively easy to like. But then I have been underemployed most of my career, and haven't worked a standard nine-to-five for any length of time in over a decade. People are bound to bug you if you're forced to spend eight or nine hours a day with them and it's not spent sleeping.

Don't get me wrong — I like the idea of people coming together with a sense of purpose for a common goal, but all this busy work to fill the time isn't about a common goal, it's about keeping people off the streets, because when people have too much time on their hands they invariably get drunk and set things on fire. Work as we know it is less about productivity than it is about fire prevention.

But I'll admit that what bugs me about the old nine-to-five is that it seems like everybody's doing it. It's a little adolescent, but I would almost rather do anything but what everybody is doing. Of course, "everybody" is relative, innit? In high school I hung out with the crowd that wasn't doing what everybody was doing. By the time I graduated college, it seemed like everybody wasn't doing what everybody was doing, more or less the same way everybody else wasn't doing it.

Of course, my aversion still seemed deeper and more desperate to me than everybody else's. I thought it might be linked to birth order. Growing up, the youngest of three boys, what everybody was doing often seemed to involve calling me by the endearing nickname "little faggot," ordering me around, giving me wedgies, and locking me in closets for hours on end. It was a little like coming of age in Abu Ghraib.

Being different wasn't a choice, it was a necessity. Not doing what everybody was doing was not an expression of self-actualization, it was a survival mechanism.

Plus, nothing I saw in my working class household or neighborhood growing up argued for working nine-to-five as a worthwhile trade-off. When you're a kid, the benefits of work, like the benefits of society before the discovery of sex, are not self-evident. (The discovery of sex is a palliative for a time – a kind of booby prize upon entering society – but society imposes itself rudely even in this purest, most private of pleasures.)

The long and short of it is, While I prefer polite society to anarchy where possible, I also prefer solitude to society, as a general rule. While society provides a pretty good solution to the problem of anarchy (replacing it with acrimony), anarchy is not a problem one comes up with on one’s own. The eight-hour shift is as fine a way to structure society as any, and depending on how much you as an individual need structure and society, it can be a fine personal solution, too.

I fully appreciate many of the things society offers: clean water, adequate infrastructure. I love electricity. But society tends to proliferate problems it alone offers solutions to, which I find suspicious. Take fashion, for instance. One of society’s biggest problems is what to wear. There are very few places you can go these days in the state of nature.

My point is, people work eight-hour days because they need to have money to buy clothes to wear to work, and, of course, there’s the health plan that pays for the meds that make the workday bearable. But my formative experiences of work and society have caused me to question the fundamental problems they propose solutions for, as well as the solutions themselves.

But I'm not philosophically opposed to work. It's our culture of work that doesn't work for me, possibly because of what's behind Door Number 3. But I do recognize, and am grateful for the fact that our culture of work does work for a great many others who would otherwise have nothing to do with themselves but get drunk and set fire to things.

As I was saying, for two days this week I was an office zombie. Now that it’s over I sympathize with those of you who are not careerists but find yourselves in nine-to-fives five days a week, week after week, for months and years on end. But while I was doing it, I have to say, I had about as much sympathy for the other zombies doing it as they had for me. And zombies aren’t generally known for their sympathetic natures.

Truth is, for nine-to-fivers, it is always a sprint to the Friday afternoon finish-line, over an obstacle course littered with other nine-to-fivers. Because they all get to work between eight and nine in the morning, they have a dreadful, interminable commute. Because they all take lunch between twelve and one, they have to wait in line for half an hour and then inhale their meager meal. If they have any personal business to conduct, take a number! By the time they see the five o’clock light at the end of the tunnel, they’re zapped. The commute home is the coup de grace. For people who love their jobs, none of this applies, of course, but for the lion’s share of office drones, this is the workaday life. It may bum them out, but it keeps them from wandering the streets, setting fire to overturned cars, which, as I've said, is the point.

I have done a little bit of everything over the years, from night watchman at a factory in Portland, Oregon, to foreman at a New Hampshire orchard, from briefing an assistant to the Prime Minister of Hungary daily when I lived in Budapest to teaching NATO troops in the Baltics, but the last nine-to-five office gig I had was almost a decade ago, for a summer here in Boston, as a temp at the Dana-Farber. I worked in infusion, scheduling chemotherapy sessions. I’m still struggling with the PTSD from that one. I vowed never to temp again, and to resist the white collar proletariat from there on out.

Of course, last week was a little exception to my nine-to-five rule, which I am happy to allow, just as once or twice a decade I break my rule of not hooking up with anyone with an address in the South End. We all need those occasional little reminders of why we've made the rules we live by.

And little is the operative word here. Because, really, it’s the little things, innit? On the days I worked nine-to-five this week I had to get to the post office for personal business. No biggie, right? Working from home, I can go mid-morning, after the first rush of the day, and I never have to wait. But this week, because I had to leave the house at a little after seven to be at work by eight, and then by the time I got out in the afternoon it was too late to go to the post office, I was forced to go to the post office instead of lunch.

Not during lunch; instead of lunch, bitches.

Let me tell you something. Anybody messes with my midday meal, I'm taking it personal. I find the way we stuff our faces while scurrying around repulsive. Someday they'll call our age The Acid Reflux Era. You'd think when half the population is throwing up in its mouth all the time people might stop and think there's something ever so slightly amiss, but whatever.

My feeling about it is, a people who eats on the run is a people living in fear. We're like small animals pursued by multiple predators all day long. Snarfing down a meal on the run activates our flight response. If we stop to enjoy our midday repast, we risk being trampled, battered, and eaten, ourselves. What can we do but eat and run? We can't even stop and take a minute to throw up properly.

I am working in the South End now, and the closest post office that I know of is at 31 St. James Ave., in that building with the great, long corridor lined with sub shops and burrito joints that starts on Berkeley and ends on Arlington. There used to be another post office in the neighborhood there, but they tore down the building last year, I think it was, to make room for a high rise.

I know it's futile to complain about bad service at the post office — it's like complaining about the stink in an outhouse — but this place is the pits. Two of the clerks there I've gotten to know over years of working in the neighborhood, and I like them both, but then there are a couple of them I've also encountered over the years that I can't stand. One whose job seems to be to saunter around whenever it's especially busy and backed-up, chuckling and making wisecracks to the others like "business is boomin', eh?" and "workin' hard?"

The place is always busy. There are, like, three post offices in all of Back Bay. And they've got two of six windows open during the lunch rush? And then, if someone comes with a passport application, that's a window that's essentially closed for the next forty-five minutes. When I was there Tuesday afternoon, there was one window open the whole time. There was a clerk dealing with a couple of passports, and another dealing with a customer with what looked like a routine package, but must have been shipping to Ursa Minor or something, via wormhole. I mean, how complicated can sending a freaking package be? And then, of course, there was that clerk whose job is to saunter around behind them, chuckling and pointing out that there must be fifty people waiting in line.

But at least they take debit and credit cards.

I had about five minutes to grab lunch after waiting for three quarters of an hour at the post office. I rarely carry cash, mainly because I never have it to begin with unless I go to an ATM to get it, and who wants to do that? I mean, the point of having plastic is so you don't have to. I don’t like needless complications in my life. If it’s plastic, it’s plastic. I don't care if it is the Mark of The Beast.  I don't care if I do pay unnecessary and exorbitant surcharges for using it. I don’t want to have to keep track of cash and a card. It's like having a land-line and a cell. I don't see the point. 

But a lot of these little mom and pop type lunch spots, even in this day and age, don't take plastic. It’s their loss. I just go elsewhere.  By now I have a pretty good handle on the sandwich shops that only take cash in Back Bay, and I just don't patronize them. I mean, even when I have cash, I've sort of blotted them out of my mind.  They're dead to me. 

But far, far worse than mom and pops that don't take plastic are those that do but treat you like a level three sex offender when you pay that way. The other day I went to one of the sandwich shops in the 31 St. James Ave. building — Park Street Cafe, I think it is — that advertises that they do take Visa and MasterCard.

I remember going there once before now, and I found them hostile to unfamiliars. That's what I attributed the hostility to, anyway.  The owner is from some old world tribal culture that was Sovietized half a century ago but  held on fiercely to its premodern mindset.  As patriarch it's up to him to decide when a customer is no longer considered The Infidel, and can be greeted without having to be ignored for five minutes first, and offered a "thank you" when paying for his order. Until he gives you the nod, you can patronize his sandwich shop all you want, but you're offered the hospitality of an invading Hun.

Like I said, I'd been there before, and was not too terribly impressed by the sandwich or the service, but it was on my way back to work, and I saw a sign in the window indicating they took plastic, so I popped in. It was after the lunch rush, and they acted from the beginning like I was impositioning them. There was no line and I was standing right in front of a tall, lanky kid where signs indicated I should place my order. He stood there without greeting me just long enough to let me know that he didn't have to, but not long enough for me walk out in disgust. It's a delicate dance.

The guy at the grill did the same. He waited a while before tossing my steak and cheese on the grill, although he wasn't doing anything else at the time. There was seriously nobody else in the place. It went on down the line like that. I thought, these people are crazy. It's a friggin sandwich shop. They make sandwiches. I want a sandwich. We were meant for each other. This is win-win.

My sandwich finally comes, and I hand over my card to the owner, who gives me the evil eye, snatches it away from me, runs it, and hands it back without looking at me or saying anything. He actually turns his back to me. So I'm standing there, waiting to sign something, or to be offered a receipt, to be told "thank you."  Something.  Anything.  I need some closure here.

He lets me stand there for a couple of minutes, knowing full well why I'm standing there, before turning and looking at me, like, "what are you still standing there for?"

"Can I help you?" He says.

Trying not to set off an international incident, I'm like, "do I have to, um, sign anything?" I make the international sign for signing something.

"No," he snaps, adding the ubiquitous: "you're all set."

He turns away resolutely, without offering a receipt. I fully expect this to be the most expensive steak-and-cheese sub I have ever eaten.  I'm thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of round-trip airfare to Kyrgyzstan and a weekend in the Chieftain Suite at the Bishkek Hilton.

I honestly didn't realize how personal using plastic is to merchants until I popped into Pemberton Farms on my way to work the following morning to buy my French round loaf (which went from $1.99 to $2.39 overnight, by the way), and handed over my card to pay for it.

"Oy!" groaned one of the more colorful clerks there, "you're killing us!"

"Oh," I said, a little surprised. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry??? That's like Lizzie Borden saying she's sorry to her parents after hackin' 'em to kibble! It's like Hitler apologizing to the Jews! You're sorry? SORRY????”

I was already late for work.  "Could you speed it up?" I asked him.

"SPEED IT UP???" He bellowed.  "What?  Is your getaway car waiting outside?  YOU'RE ROBBING US BLIND!"

"Look," I said, "would it help if I told you I'm having an acid reflux event right now?  I'm throwing up in my mouth here!"

You can see I built up a lot of stress over those two full days I worked that I am now having to purge and power yoga out of my system.  And I probably won't get it yoga'd out by Monday.  So it's a good thing I don't work on Mondays.  But if I did, I'd probably half to pop a Xanax and half a dozen Nexiums to get through the day. 

I'm just sayin.