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I work for a big corporation in a big office building in the suburbs of a big city. As a certified Geek, I don't like being around people. I have made my life somewhat tolerable by flexing my hours so that I show up at the office at around 4:30 am and go home at about 2:30 pm. This way I can avoid the worst of the rush hour traffic (although rush hour in this part of the country is almost 24/7 by now) and I get some time alone at the office. However, it can be a challenge to become fully functional when you get up at 3:00 am. My solution is every morning, shortly after I arrive at the office, I take a brisk walk in the building, taking a route that covers every corridor on the fourth floor (where my office is (4n-c22 if you happen to work in the same building and are curious)) at least once. I do five laps of this course. A lap takes about five minutes if I walk very fast. This walk can get rather boring, but it is refreshing. I imagine that if aliens from another planet were watching me (surely aliens have the necessary technology to see me from their spaceships) they would be saying something like "There he goes running the maze again. He must think there's food in there somewhere."

The problem is that at some point in the early morning hours, a security guard will come up here to turn the lights on. During the night, they only keep a few lights on to save electricity. If I happen to meet up with the security guard, the result is usually that both of us will be very startled. But at least he has an excuse for being here, he doesn't look very geekish, and he is not walking at a high speed. For a few weeks, things worked out well. He came up at about 5:00 every day, so I just waited until I saw the lights were on in the hall, and then I took my walk. But then there were a couple days when the lights came on at 6:30, and by then other people were arriving, so I couldn't walk in solitude. I adapted to this schedule and did my walk at 5:15 (avoiding 5:00 in case they returned to that schedule) but then today the lights came on at 5:30 in the middle of my walk. Fortunately I was a safe distance away from the light switches and I was able to duck into a lab for a few minutes until I was confident he was gone.

What's funny about all of this is how annoying it is. People are starving in various parts of the world, people are getting blown up by other people (usually in an effort to make God happy) and a lot of people are even dying because of cartoons. Yet I sit here feeling extremely irritated because a security guard comes upstairs to turn on the lights at unpredictable times and I can't walk in solitude. I wonder if we all have a certain amount of displeasure in us and it has to be meted out sooner or later, and if we don't have a good reason, we'll just settle on a bad reason. Maybe Orwell was onto something with Goldstein. Isn't it better to have a target for anger that can be controlled than to let the anger seek some totally innocent target that happens to be there at the wrong time? For those of us who are Republican leaning, the targets are well defined - Osama, gay marriage, abortion, liberals. For those of us who are not Republican leaning, the Republicans themselves are the target. I'm sure I would be much happier if I joined the mainstream and directed my anger at an approved target and got lots of support from the media assuring me I was right, rather than getting annoyed at a poor security guard who has to come up and turn on the lights in the middle of the night (and probably feels somewhat annoyed himself because I'm intruding on his solitude).