With more vigilance than you pay the time in the ten seconds leading up to January 1st, you watch the clock at work throughout most of the day, though certain intervals are more intense than others. When you arrive, you don’t pay too much attention, but when 11,11:30 rolls around, you’re practically jumping out of your seat to get to lunch.
When lunch is over, you try desperately to avoid looking at the clock at all costs for fear it might send you into a deep and unproductive depression. But you can only resist its pull for so long. After all, there’s a clock right there in the corner of your computer screen. How can you bear not to look? So you do. And then five minutes later, when you’ve felt like an hour has passed, you do it again. And so on and so forth, until you can’t make any more games out of it with yourself and you just flee the goddamn scene at 4:59 p.m.