There were no station guards on duty to instruct commuters to stay behind the yellow lines. Dale did so regardless, conditioned to obey the paint; spread himself evenly along the platform; and to allow others to disembark before boarding. The rails below began to hum and the front engine of the train came into view as it rounded the not-too-distant bend.
'Train!' shrilled the voice of a young boy a few metres down the platform. 'Traaaain!'
Dale wished that just once he could share that enthusiasm for a trip to work.
Inside the carriage was an overwhelming amount of available seats, an unusual bounty for peak hour on a Monday. Dale gratefully sank into one and his eyelids closed involuntarily. Dale had spent so much of last night lying awake and thinking of the office that at one point in the early hours of the morning he was considering adding several hours of dreams to his timesheets.
'Choo choo!' the gleeful voice behind him cried as the train rumbled away from the platform.

The unease that Dale felt in his belly that morning was growing when he walked into the empty foyer of the office tower. Normally at this point in the morning there were crowds around the elevators doors, the mailboxes and the small coffee shop in front of the lobby. Today it was only Dale and the short, Irish lady who ran Brenda's Beans. The sun lit up the glassy lobby and the particles of dust in the empty air suddenly prompted Dale to think:
'Daylight savings! Did I forget it!?' he thought. 'Did I accidentally arrive to work an hour earlier than necessary? If that's the case I am definitely buying myself a donut for morning tea.'
Dale called the elevators with the control panel which illuminated momentarily before beeping at him and fading out. He tried a second time with the same result. The double doors did not open and Dale felt the eyes of Brenda watching him.
'Um,' he said, taking a step towards her counter. 'I think I'm too early?'
'You need a building pass for the lifts today.' She walked around from behind the bar and swiped an access card dangling from her hip against the controls. The doors opened.
'Now you can hop in and pick your floor.'
Dale thanked her and ascended.

It was the moment the lift doors reopened to reveal an empty office that Dale came to appreciate why the lifts did not work today.
'Mistake!' he squeaked, and tried to squeeze back into the closing lift door to no avail.
'Dale?' asked a stern voice. 'What are you doing here?'
Dale looked into the corner office where Karl sat, his tie slightly loosened but otherwise looking as sharp as he'd been on Friday afternoon.
'Going for an early start to the week?' Karl inquired. 'Or did you just forget it was a public holiday?'
'Early start,' Dale chose quickly.
'Good man! That's what I like to see. It might be a holiday here, but the markets will open in Japan in two hours, and when they close New York will be ready to resume.'
Under the richly brown desk Dale could see Karl's shoeless feet shift positions on the carpet. Now that he thought about it, the expensively dressed Karl may have been wearing exactly the same suit as Friday.
'It's fantastic to see you here, Dale.' Karl continued. 'I've had you pegged as bright, so it's encouraging to know you also don't mind putting in the extra hours. As you'd know, if you're not happy putting in the long hours now you're never going to be selected for upper management where long hours are mandatory.'
'Is it worth it?' asked Dale.
Karl laughed.
'I could retire tomorrow, if I wanted to. Now, start your work. I didn't allocate any time today for this much small talk.'
Dale strode to his cubicle enthusiastically, Karl style. He logged in and opened his email where there was one unread email from Friday afternoon. It was a companywide overview of the week's achievements and Dale read it line by line. At its conclusion he had no items to action. He pondered for a moment, and then read it again. Fifteen minutes later Dale realised that most of the work he did in the field of incident management was reactive and the only way he would get a head start on the week's work was by breaking something himself, or letting sweet unconsciousness recharge his brain.
It took another two hours, but eventually Dale heard Karl engaged in a phone call and used it as a diversion to escape. He offered a single-movement wave to a mid-sentence Karl and then the merciful lifts allowed him to re-enter so long as he only went to the ground floor. The steel doors closed to embrace him as the office disappeared.

Once Karl heard the lift doors close he opened a desk drawer and retrieved the half finished vodka glass. He took a thick sip before placing it back down on the oak surface, and then proceeded to type up more sales projections with an unbridled ferocity.

In the lobby again, Dale decided to order a coffee to help justify the morning's trip. Brenda handed him the takeaway cup and asked him if he needed to be let back into the lift.
'No, thanks.' said Dale. 'I'm going home. But, tell me, how come my access pass doesn't let me into my office but yours does?'
'I don't know,' Brenda thought about it. 'Maybe it's based on seniority?'
'Seniority? I mean, I'm only a contractor sure. But don't you just make coffees?'
'That's one way to look at it. The way I see it, yes, I make coffees. And I also manage the business where I make the coffees. So I'm a manager. In fact, I own this business and make all the decisions about it. So I guess that makes me the CEO. Maybe, when you're a CEO, you too will have a building pass?'
'That explains why you're working on a holiday, I guess. Thanks for the coffee. Please cancel the donut.'
Dale turned to start his walk back to the train station.

Dale.

Dale was unprepared for his end-of-probation evaluation, as the very definition of time had abandoned him many afligablaxibules ago.
I found him at his desk staring at a blank Word document. It had only a heading - "achievements" - that had been styled several different ways while Dale's mind stalled for time.

'Trying to list all your work accomplishments for your review?' I asked.
'Yes... Work.'
'What is this? Six months here consulting? Don't sweat too much; I remember when I was in your position. When I was younger I was recruited as a consultant for Dr. Pepper's Australian expansion. It was at the six month mark that I realised they were selling soda and not medicine. I had actually been calling the CEO "Doctor". They wanted to terminate me, but the only thing I'd done in those six months was overhaul their online access tools and I controlled all the passwords. They actually tried to extend my contract, before they went bankrupt.'

'No, see, that's my problem!' said Dale. 'You and every consultant I ever meet have these amazing, interesting stories about their time consulting. When I was in a permanent position I felt like nothing ever happened, and if anything did threaten to become interesting I was like a local cop forced to respect the jurisdiction of the FBI Agent Consultants who bustled in to solve everything. I feel fake being a consultant here. The only smart sounding insight I've been able to share with anyone in six months was my secret of using the hand dryer and paper towel at the same time. I want to experience something worth telling a story about.'
Miguel appeared, apparently having sensed Dale's Monday anguish.
'I was a contract worker at Apple when they were first developing the iPod.' He grinned at Dale. 'It was crazy; I didn't get home from work before midnight for months. Can I borrow your pen?'
'You stole my last pen yesterday to mix your coffee.'
'Listen,' I told Dale. 'Everyone's stories will always sound more exciting. Everything you're told will be exaggerated, the boring parts will be omitted, the details airbrushed. Miguel, weren't you a cleaner at Apple while you were at UCLA? Around the time of the first iPod, I believe.'
Miguel scowled and left.

'See?' I said. 'Everything's embellished. Plus you don't have any perspective because who sticks around to listen to the boring ones? You never hear a bad story, unless you end up bogged in small talk at an office party.'
Harold had sensed a conversation was occurring and saw this chance to join.
'We had the best office parties back when I was consulting for the CIA.' He said. 'They were splendid. I have so much I can share about them.'
'I'll save you the trouble' I told him. 'You actually worked on a shared services project for the whole of the US Federal Government. Your primary responsibility was to monitor an inbox for alerts and forward it to the appropriate team. You did this mainly from home.'
'National Security alerts?' asked Dale.
'Hardware alerts.' Harold said. 'Some agencies really needed to tune their databases. There are a few funny things about database tuning...'
'Wrong.' I interrupted. 'There's nothing funny about database tuning. Anything that occurred in relation to it would have been funny only in the context that it occurred. Face it: interesting stories in the IT industry are rare.'
'I was working IT in New York on September 11,' said Joe.
The bonfire-esque conversation was proving a beacon to Monday morning procrastinators.
'I was even supposed to be at a meeting in the World Trade Centre that morning, but there was a client demo in Jersey that my boss insisted I spend the day at.'
'That one is all true,' I admitted. 'The year was 1997.'
Joe blushed. I turned to Dale.

'You understand? None of these people have more exciting lives than you. Consultants don't either; it's just the separation and anonymity they enjoy because of their independence that gives them the freedom to exaggerate that little bit more.'
Dale nodded, taking the message to heart.
'Hey..' he asked: 'Does that mean Karl's story about how he worked 24 hour days on his nanotech start-up, and didn't sleep for nine days straight in order to finish a prototype to win venture capitalists before hostile rivals bought out his board, is also bullshit?'
'Actually,' I lowered my voice. 'Karl might be the exception to this rule. He generally needs to downplay his anecdotes just to make them sound plausible.'

Across the office Karl sat waiting in one of the smaller meeting rooms, he was reading through Dale's probation review checklist while his left hand absentmindedly moved to rub the scar above the shrapnel buried in his thigh.

Dale didn't know what time it was. Tiredness leaked like smoke from his eyeballs, their sockets felt wet and hot. A voice in his head spoke to him. It told him it was Monday again.
'I thought tomorrow is Sunday?' Dale thought. 'How can today be Monday?'
Dale squeezed his eyes back shut, trying to extinguish the fatigue and turn the unfocussed cloud of business suits, prim skirts and school uniforms into inky blankness.

Of course it was Monday. Dale was right, tomorrow was Sunday, but Dale lived a life of only Sundays and Mondays. He'd tried to tell Joe about it one Monday in the office, but it had been a conversation of mainly body language and assumptions. The kind of conversation where you realise you spoke incoherently and yet still receive a normal response.
It was at that point Dale realised the two were not actually talking, just making noises at each other to pass the time.
'Is anyone listening to me?' Dale asked the carriage curiously. The crowd was not responsive, most faced away. No ear was independent from an ear bud, tethers to smart phones. Absorbed by tiny entertainers and easily absorbed fluffs of internet. No one was listening.
'Do you ever have that feeling, where you can see through the flesh of the world?' Dale asked a small crowd of standing passengers nearby. 'I do. Only just for a brief second. I see the muscles and the nerves of everything exposed. I get a flash of how it all fits together. And I know.'
No response.
'Doors closing.' The speakers chimed.'
I see it clearly, but I can't grasp it. The motivations, no, the programming of everyone around me is listed like tooltips in the corner of my eye. I see it. I see the streams of money floating invisibly through the air like the blood in this planet's veins. I witness the way everyone behaves around cake, the way it makes parts of their brain throb, triggers the nervous systems to spasm and scream. I know when three storeys became the new two storeys. I see through the walls of those houses and I can see the layout of their foundations, the steel frames and the concrete but also the fear and the lust and manipulation and insecurity found in the blueprints.
'For every minute you spend in an Ikea showroom I see the hours that marketers and psychologists spent planning for the thoughts you're having right now. I see the trendy meeting rooms where they planned how to affect your feelings. I see the cubicles they sit in; I see the cake their HR department brings in on the first Friday of the month to celebrate everyone who had a birthday since the last cake. How many layers of management do you think you have to go up before you leave the sheep and join the wolves? Do you think it's a gradual thing, or do you just wake up down the rabbit hole? Do you go from bottling Coke to supervising the production line to sitting in the laboratory trying to perfect the recipe? Then you feel the tap on your shoulder and you're suddenly researching how to make everyone that drinks Coke think they are a bee in the world's stickiest, most gigantic flower?'
'How does it happen?' Dale asked. Silence.
The train doors opened and a flustered looking businesswoman rushed along the platform, dragging her wheeled luggage behind her like an uncooperative dog. The suitcase clipped a Chinese midget who was trying to bridge the gap between platform's edge and car. He tumbled in, landing in a heap at Dale's feet.
'That was a little rude,' Dale said to him. 'Do you need a hand?'
'Are you mocking me?' the dwarf snarled. He waved a stumped forearm dismissively at Dale's kneecap, then propped himself up with the amputated limb. Just as he found balance on his feet the train rocked sharply around a corner and he was sent sprawling again, the roof mounted hand-holds weren't even close enough to be ironic. He twisted himself into a sitting position using his tiny legs and scooted to the wall of the carriage where he sat.
'Go on.' He said to Dale eventually.
Dale responded with soundless question marks.
'Thought I'd offer a bit of perspective,' said the midget.
'It's different,' admitted Dale. 'I think it's making my neck hurt.'
'No, that's from the way you've wedged your head against the toilet roll holder.'
Dale blinked, adjusting to the fluorescent lights of the technology park's men's bathroom. He took a moment to calculate his alpha wave regeneration and to pull up his trousers. As he fastened the belt the midget squeezed his head underneath the stall door to look at him.
'Get out there, Dale.' He said. 'It's Monday.'

Both Dale and I watched a young man walk a little too briskly towards the main sliding doors of the technology park's office tower and heard the thunk he created when the slow reacting sensor above the door didn't open the doors for him with enough urgency.
We had both looked away to try and lessen his embarrassment when he saw me waiting across the foyer for a lift, and up he strode.
'No coming back from that.' I said. 'If that was me I'd be going home for the day.'
'Right,' he said. 'What brings you on site?'
'Some days I split my work between here and the office. I find if I schedule my changeover around the middle of the day, I can get away with having an early lunch in town and then a late lunch here without anyone noticing.'
Dale looked at me sadly.
'What's wrong?' I asked. 'Don't tell me you've turned into one of those clock punchers who won't charge a client for time spent taking a dump.'
'I'm jealous.' Dale admitted. 'Plus, I'm being tormented by Miguel. I...' He trailed off.
'Want to talk about it?' I sensed my friend needed some sympathy. 'I've just had two lunch breaks, but, we can go get a coffee?'

The technology park's cafeteria was uncrowded, bathed in the gold by the mid-afternoon sun. Dale clutched his coffee in his hands like a crime scene witness being helped by police.
'It seems like I'm doing all Miguel's work on top of my own.' He told me. 'That means I'm doing, like, a whole person's work. We have a team meeting twice a week and he manages to dish off all his tasks to me. He's like an evil John Stockton. Yesterday he somehow had all his testing tasks assigned to me. I don't have any testing experience on my CV; I don't know how he talked Karl into approving that.'
'Weren't you a tester for a while on the POTS project?' I asked. 'Did you learn anything from that?'
'I learnt it would be best to leave "Testing" off my CV.'
'Well, if you're desperate to escape testing you can always try the housework escape plan.'
'What's that?' asked Dale.
'Just something I learnt from my younger brother growing up. When he was old enough my parents started assigning him chores, but while he would begrudgingly vacuum and tidy he completely resented washing dishes and mopping. Every time our parents asked him to do the jobs he didn't like he would do the shittiest job possible. Moral? They quickly stopped asking him to mop and wash.'
'But if I'm bad at my job, won't I get fired?' Dale asked.
'You've been with this company for, what, five years now? You've passed your probation period, everyone knows your name and they're confident you're not a psychopath or a moron. They'll choose to live with it. Like, what were my parents going to do? Have another kid?
'The trick,' I continued. 'Is to be terrible from your first attempt. If they have nothing to compare it to they'll have to assume you're just incompetent at the one thing you don't like doing. And Miguel will never be able to pass you testing work again.'
'Wow, you seem to have this all figured out.' Dale said. 'Do you have a strategy to stop my co-workers from following me to the shops at lunch?'
'I might. Are you sure that happens?'

AT 5:55am every work day the train left its terminal at Beachport and began its first of many commutes to the city. It arrived in the CBD at 6:34am, looped the city circle once and then followed the tracks back to the terminal. It then repeated the process with only a couple of breaks until the end of the day.
Besides a forgettable period each evening, the train spent its entire life travelling from its home to the city, and then back again.

‘My life is a lot like this train’s...’ thought Dale. It was 8:38am and a bulky school bag in front of him was wedging him further into the armpit of a large Italian man, who stood gripping one of the handholds bolted into the roof of the carriage’s standing section. In Dale’s backpack was a Malcom Gladwell compendium that every morning he planned to read before losing the seat lottery. With only tired feet and no personal space as distractions Dale was forced to spend his commute philosophising with only his immediate context as stimulus.
‘My youth could be compared to speeding past a crowded platform...’ He mused.
After the next stop - where a litter of well-dressed children evacuated towards the closest private school – Dale was at least able to turn his head to view the filled rows of seats in the carriage main. He surveyed their capacity enviously. Every occupant sat at ease. Some watched TV shows on their tablets and phones. Several snoozed, their heads propped against headrests or swinging free to the gentle rocking of the train. Among the sea of faces he saw Karen, one of his many managers. Her book floated free on her lap and her dozing head was perched against the window. Dale initially felt jealous, but after the train arrived at the city and Karen still sat motionless while everyone disembarked he felt at least a little mirthful.
‘Back to the ocean,’ he muttered. ‘That’s where our bodies seem to instinctively take us.’
A small girl stood next to her mother, staring at him. Dale turned quickly and headed to the exit.

The morning lift to Dale’s level was as packed, but shorter in duration than the train ride. The crowd still pushed him into other people’s comfort zones and to his dismay he found himself being pressed closer to the back wall and into the shoulder of his new manager Karl. It took considerable core strength for Dale to keep his cheek from landing against Karl’s thick chest where his bold, red tie loomed like a forbidden pillow.
‘Good weekend? Good.’ said Karl once he’d recognised Dale as one of his subordinates. ‘Listen, Dale. I got an email some time last week saying you still haven’t completed this year’s ethics training. You need to do that in your first week. Please do it ASAP. Can you do that for me? Thanks.’
Karl returned to his blackberry as the lift reached their floor and Dale hustled to follow Karl’s strides towards the cubicles. By matching his pace Dale didn’t have to worry that Karl seemed to intentionally not hold the security door open for him as they entered.

When Joe arrived at the desk next to Dale he found his HR designated buddy buried deep in the Enterprise Portal website searching for his HR designated training courses.
‘Let me help you with that,’ he smiled. ‘Check under this unrelated sub-heading and then right click on this obscured part of that image map.’
‘Thanks.’ Begrudged Dale, grateful for the assistance but not the outcome.
‘No worries buddy!’
‘You seem cheery.’ Dale noted.
‘That’s because it’s Monday. I start every week by catching the later train in. It means I get extra sleep, plus there’s always a seat then. Looks like your course has loaded.’
Dale’s monitor showed a short video, and then presented him slide one of 93.
‘Ninety-three pages?’ Dale asked Joe, in case he’d pointed him towards some sadistic variation of the real ethics training.
‘That’s how much ethics there is to know, I guess,’ said Joe. ‘Whatever you do don’t fail the test at the end or you have to sit through it all again.’

Two hours into the morning Dale was a quarter of the way through earning himself a picture of a certificate that he could print with his name imposed on it. Karl appeared over the top of the divider.
‘Dale. Have you passed the ethics training yet? I need you to have that done before the planning session this morning.’
‘Not yet,’ said Dale. ‘And wasn’t that supposed to start an hour ago?’
‘We’re still waiting for Karen to arrive’ admitted Karl.
‘Oh, I saw her asleep on the train this morning’ said Joe. ‘She was drooling on herself a little. Maybe she missed the station?’
Karl shook his head in disgust.
‘Alright Dale, I need you in the meeting room in ten minutes to run this session. Can you finish the training by then.’
‘I can’t skim this whole thing in ten minutes and pass the exam at the end. It doesn’t let you save.’
‘Can you not read it and then cheat to pass the test?’ asked Karl. ‘Joe, wasn’t there some thing where you could view source and it told you the answers.’
‘You want me to cheat on the ethics test?' said Dale. 'I don’t... Wait. Karl, is this all part of the ethics test? Are you testing me right now? Is Karen going to walk out from behind a corner?’ Dale looked around for corners. Karl stared at Dale. Joe looked out the window.
‘Listen, Dale,’ started Karl. ‘There are leaders and followers in life. Do you want to make the rules, or follow them? If are going to succeed in this world it’s time to start cutting out the bullshit.’
The speech and the faint whiff of vodka on Karl’s breath convinced Dale that this wasn’t part of any ethics test.

The rest of the day left only blurry imprints in Dale’s memory. There was a training session, Karl wielded double entendre masterfully to enable himself to yell at someone in the conference room and someone on the phone simultaneously for completely unrelated problems. There was a lunch that might have been last week and a long period without food that sucked the colour from the afternoon. Dale stood on the platform, exhausted and waiting for the train to take him home. It arrived and he turned his body sideways to squeeze into the crowd. When the train reached his stop Dale joined a throng of relieved commuters who spread wide across the platform once free of the carriage, and then just as abruptly formed into a single file queue as the train slowly moving again, blocking their passage from the platform to the exit. Once the train had gone a slow shuffle commenced down the split-level ramps that led to the pedestrian crossing. While he waited for the crowd to gain momentum Dale caught movement from behind him and turned his head to watch two youths jump from the edge of the platform and onto the crossing, risking the three foot drop to bypass the slow moving impasse. Dale watched them walk carelessly across the car park as he shuffled past the tiny fence.
‘I should be a winner,’ thought Dale. ‘I should break the rules, jump the fence and beat the queue to leave the car-park.’
That wasn’t what he did, though. Instead he waited patiently, finally reaching the other side of the car park and then eventually joining the next slow moving line in his car, waiting to turn onto the suburban streets.
‘My life is a lot like my life.’ Thought Dale.

Meanwhile, at another station closer to the sea, a similar blob of slow moving people blocked another platform’s egress. From behind them all Karl took two quick steps and leaped the guard rail to the walkway below. His thick, red tie swung over his shoulder as he flew, and then fell back into place perfectly as he landed and then strode towards the exit.

Today I drove to work, facing Sydney's peak hour rush head on (almost). It wasn't actually that bad - probably because I started and finished work with a two and a half hours offset to most people. There is something powerful in the feeling of reaching the end of your trip after navigating Sydney's maze of roads and ramps at rush hour. Well, when you over-dramatise the mundane parts of your life there is. I was a hero twice today.

The main drawback of driving was that I didn't get to write a Mondale story on the train on my commute home. Fortunately I wrote one two weekends ago in case I ever needed an emergency Dale story. And SO:

Mondale VI
'What are you doing?' I queried.
Dale looked up from his screen, the sound of mouse clicks pausing.
'What time is it?' he asked in reply.
'10:30.'
'Good, I've still got time.'
'For comics?'
'Yeah,' said Dale as another set of panels floated by. 'We're still in that grey area between the weekend and work. No one is going to judge me harshly for starting slow on a Monday.'
'I don't think that grey area extends two hours into the morning.'
'Oh, no, it's ok.' Dale reassured me. 'I only just got in.'
There were more clicks, then a chuckle.
'What was funny?' an agitated voice asked through the cubicle wall. 'Was something funny? Forward it to me if it's something funny. You gotta.'
'Dilbert..' Dale muttered, only to himself.

For another ten minutes I watched as Dale drilled through the Dilbert.com archives, searching for some objective that he wouldn't share. He rarely laughed. I figured this was because there'd hardly be a Dilbert he hadn't seen before. It was impossible not to see them all; Dilberts were posted in every print room, in the kitchenette, the break room, even by the fire exits. Everyone had a Dilbert in their cubicle. Well, everyone except Dale.

'That's it!' he exclaimed. 'This one is the one.'
I stooped to speed read the strip.
'That one? It's not even funny.'
'It doesn't need to be good,' said Dale. 'I mean, seriously, how is reading about someone else's office job even supposed to be entertaining? This is just for identity management.'

He hit print and explained:

'You remember Sandra? After they made her the only developer on the SHOW system and she was forced to be on 24 hour support for four months straight? So, she stuck that Dilbert up in her cubicle about how Alice was always on call and was never going to see her family again. Everyone who sees it feels sorry for her. No one remembers that SHOW is only used during business hours - sparingly - and that not only does Sandra see her family every night but she's paid on call rates to do so.
'And there's Ralf,' he continued. 'Who has that series posted next to his desk about Asok's job being outsourced to Elbonia. Ralf is just a code monkey, so sure, that seems like a reasonable way to chuckle off the fear of losing your work to someone overseas. Remember though, that Ralf was born in Germany and studied in Munich and the company paid his moving costs to bring him here so they could replace Ravi when Ravi wanted that payrise. And Ralf was just as competent as Ravi, but cheaper and younger.'
'So this Dilbert thing is like some ironic flag that you wave at the ignorant to misdirect them from your flaws?'
'Yep, and now I have mine! Although I was hoping that reading Dilberts would help me procrastinate all the way 'til lunch.' He said, a little sadly.
Dale retrieved the comic from the printer, and solemnly pinned the strip above his terminal.
'Coffee time?' suggested Dale, closing the browser.
We stood and moved toward the lifts. Over our shoulder's Dale's cubicle walls grew smaller. On one of them now hung three panels, throughout which Dilbert delivered an irritated monologue about being the only one who bothers to arrive at work on time.