There was a big fight at my workplace today. People were very upset. I had to pin one person's leg to the ground to keep her from ripping out her colleague's hair.
Throughout the day, I tried to convince people that they should do small, painless mental tasks while sitting in a roomful of their friends for hour-long intervals. Many refused to do this, preferring instead to cause their families intense emotional distress due to receiving phone calls home bearing news of their personal failings. Rather than leisurely working on various logic or word puzzles, a good number of people chose to lounge about aimlessly, complain of their boredom, curse loudly at one another, and spread malicious rumors leading to violence and misery in the community at large.
Many other things happened. Some people made great sport of publicly humiliating those weaker than they, whether mentally, physically, or socially; the timid and the simpleminded and the obese were mocked relentlessly and reminded of their personal demons. Others retreated further inside themselves and chalked up another day of quiet personal failure as proof positive of the hopelessness of their situations. Mostly, though, everyone just wanted the goddamn day to be over.
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