Page 9 of A Daddy for Christmas 3: Nova
He nodded eagerly, that bright smile back again. “Many times.”
“Perfect, then you know not to touch.”
“Absolutely.”
“Can’t tell you how many tourists see the need to look with their hands,” I grumbled. “It would be like going into someone’s house and trying to redecorate the place.”
“No shit. Humans suck. I can’t figure out if it’s ignorance or obliviousness that makes them act the way they do, but humanity needs to get its shit together and do better before we wipe ourselves out.”
“I’d rather live in harmony with my environment than waste a lifetime trying to conquer it,” I said.
“That’s a great way to live. I thought I knew what I wanted my life to be like, but imagination and reality haven’t lined up so far,” he admitted, wistfulness having crept into his tone.
“How’d you see it going?”
“Weekends with friends, checking out pubs and microbreweries, wandering bookstore shelves for evening reading material. I truly believed that I’d have time to kick back in my easy chair after supper with the music on and my nose buried in a good book. If I do any reading at all these days, it’s a brief or upcoming presentation. Dinner is closer to bedtime, which means a lot of ordering in. Most nights I order it through the app while I’m on the light rail, so it isn’t as long of a wait after I get home. My friends are the same way, all super busy now that we’re part of the workforce. More like a bunch of worker ants mindlessly plodding back and forth each day until we’re completely worn out.”
“I don’t think we were put here to live like that.”
“I don’t think so either and I don’t see the point of an existence spent stuck in an endless loop. It’s only been four years, and I’m already struggling to find inspiration,” Novaexplained. “I feel like the parameters are so tight within the business community that it’s hard to create a campaign with any sort of wow factor. Our clients are all about trends; they’re either constantly trying to start them or hopping on them when they think it will suit them. We’re always shifting gears at the last moment and revamping the different models we put together for them. After a while it just gets old.”
“Sounds like you know what isn’t working for you. Have you thought about making a change?”
“I haven’t thought about much of anything besides flying out of there ahead of an incoming snowstorm. This is literally my first real vacation. For the past three years I just stayed in the city during our holiday shutdown, which did let me catch up with friends and hit a few of those pubs, but I wouldn’t say I felt very well rested or recharged by the time I needed to go back to work again.”
“Thus flying all the way out here for this year’s.”
“Exactly.”
“It was a brilliant plan.”
“You think so?”
“I do,” I admitted. “This is nice. I usually end the night alone, nibbling dinner on my back porch with the radio on.”
“I eat on my balcony as often as the weather will permit,” Nova admitted. “Otherwise, there’s a table for two in the kitchen that doubles as additional counter space. Not that I cook much, but a few times a year I’ll break out some of the recipes I’ve collected off social media, organize them into a menu, and have a dinner party. It usually ends in card games or a movie.”
“I’ve got several Pinterest boards devoted to recipes I’ve come across while surfing the web. The only problem with most of them is that they’re set up for four, so even halving them leaves me with too much food.”
“Now you see why I save them up for dinner parties,” he said. “There are rarely any leftovers, and if there are, I kill them off for lunch the following day. I tend to wash things when I finish using them, so there is never much cleanup at the end. Plus, it’s just fun. I miss having time to cut loose and enjoy myself without having to worry about the challenges of the upcoming week.”
“Sounds stressful.”
“More often than not, it is, especially the last two years,” he explained. “I thought getting promoted to division leader would let me implement changes to help us work smarter and cut down on a chunk of the overtime we’ve been forced to put in so we didn’t fall behind.”
“Sounds like it hasn’t worked out the way you wanted it to.”
“Every time we start working more efficiently, they redesign the scope of our division and add more to our plates. Now we’re doing more work than we were two years ago but still putting the same amount of time in. That’s a lot of hours to expect people to work without burning out. I’ve got an amazing division, minus one catastrophe management forced me to take on. I’d hate to lose a member of my team because the schedule got to be too much or they got overwhelmed with the last-minute additions we’re constantly having to make.”
“Or they quit because burnout hit.”
“Until I got here, I didn’t realize how close to that I already was,” Nova explained. “A year ago I’d have answered every message the moment they came in. I was so conditioned to reach for my phone the moment it chimed that I whipped it out in the middle of a date one night and immediately started walking my co-worker through the steps of solving the problem she was having. By the time I got it untangled for her, my date had gotten tired of waiting for me to pay attention to him, scrawled a note on a napkin, and walked away.”
“Ouch.”
“I deserved it,” Nova said. “It was shitty, dropping out of the conversation the way I did. Not to mention rude. After that, I started paying more attention to the way I reacted to the chimes. It literally didn’t matter what I was; I stopped everything and dealt with it. I’d become a part of the problem. I fed into management’s expectation of having unlimited access to their underlings and normalized immediate responses to things that should have waited until the office opened again. I started to wonder if one of the reasons I’d been promoted was because I never pushed back when management intruded on my personal time. To me, it was easier than starting behind in the morning. I hate that shit. There’s no saving that kind of morning. The whole day just drags after that and turns into one long, endless drain of energy.”
“I’m not a fan of starting the day with a to-do list as long as my arm,” I said. “It’s instantly overwhelming and automatically pisses me off, especially if there are no breaks slated. I have to have time each day where it’s just me and the water.”