Except for my 2 o’clock lunch. I ignore the one-line email (”Are you there?”) and slink out the office to the elevators. Thirty-one floors later, I’m through the lobby and standing at the lunch truck. A couple in their fifties are there, slinging hotdogs and hamburgers for a few bucks. They’re cheap, fast, and they’ve been there forever. He doesn’t say a word, and she’ll chat with you only as long as it takes to get you your burger– everyone calls her Mama.

A young man orders in front of me; he’s got his head on a swivel. Mama asks him whether he wants mustard and, looking the other direction, he replies, “My God, look at my _wife_.” I turn to look, expecting to see a woman waiting nearby, perhaps with a child. Instead, I only catch the glimpse of a woman in a skirt as she glides by — apparently he was speaking in the future tense. Mama summons him back to reality: “HEY, FOCUS. You want mustard?”

I order, take my lunch from Mama, and drink in the warm, blue sky. I decide with gravity that the day is too beautiful to waste inside of an office, and, with equal gravity, that I shouldn’t be gone for more than ten minutes. I grab a bench in the little park outside the austere office building we call “388″. Men in expensive suits stream in and out of the revolving doors, passing by Tribeca mommies (nannies?) pushing their strollers. Little kids are playing hopscotch across the stonework in the park. Working men in uniforms tell colorful stories in even-more-colorful language nearby.

Another day of “eating nuclear waste” to keep the business running. Nice thing about being busy is that, at the end of the day, you feel like you’re taking names and kicking arse — plus, it fights off the layoff jitters. I’m glad my manager gave me the opportunity to be the “key guy” on this project. I’m even more glad, though, that tomorrow is a holiday. I miss sleep.

Ten minutes come and go quickly, but are well spent. I grab what’s left of my lunch and head back into the fray.

Woke up just in time to drive Sarah to the train station and come home to shower. Only to realize that the hot water wasn’t working. Hemmed and hawed until I decided that a cold shower was better than no shower. Did the lather-rinse-repeat thing while uttering unvoluntarily at the shock of icy water. Called in the issue to the landlord’s English-speaking son on the way to work.

It’s been like this. No time for the important things because the urgent things crowd the mind. Work’s been insane. My manager is betting the farm on a pet project and speaks with the head honchos at corporate headquarters tomorrow — so he’s been out of play for weeks. My coworker’s father-in-law, who had been just hanging on after two successive heart attacks and quadruple-bypass surgery, finally passed away yesterday. A majorly disruptive project management system goes into production for our group of over 150 people on Monday, and I’m the only one left to support it. We’re officially in a contingency situation.

I went to a senior manager’s two-hour town hall today with some 300 other coworkers. He explained to us flatly that our technology division’s sole raison d’être is to MAKE THE BANKERS MORE MONEY. He spoke of “giving a shit” and “eating nuclear waste” (his words) to ensure we meet our commitments. He told anecdotes of working 70-hour weeks and weekend upon weekend to address production outages and deliver projects on time. So much for work-life balance.

The landlord discovered nothing was wrong with the water heater, so I looked at it again after I dragged myself back through the door at 8:00 PM. A quick test and a trip to the basement made me realize that the problem was in fact a PEBFAD (”problem exists between faucet and drain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEBKAC). We’ve been living in this apartment for almost three years and I had been turning the wrong knob for hot water.