I am taking a break from work in the afternoon, and just intentionally sitting down, outside, enjoying the view and resisting the urge to look back at the small screen that I keep in my pocket. I win the battle about half the time and admire the scattered low clouds against a perfect blue sky. The trees in the foreground are vibrant. I wonder if anyone on the highway at the far end of the parking lot happens to glance over and see me, a generic person on a 4th floor tech office balcony. I don’t see the people in the cars, just the cars.

My phone wins for a couple of minutes and I check email, open YouTube and close it, scroll a little of the Bluesky infinity on the AI list until it annoys me and I wrestle control of my attention back to taking a break. The foreground trees are so vibrantly green. There are young trees in the parking lot far below, and some members of an older generation of tall pine trees, reaching higher than the balcony, and they are part of an urban forest that fills a visible plain extending into the background. I see my manager’s manager having a walk and talk 1:1 with another colleague down in the parking lot. They went down one aisle of cars, in the lane, and then back up another, doing circuits.

These emails I bothered to read are nothing, effectively junk mail that I signed up for at some point and I should cancel. I delete them. Another minute of my break spent looking at the screen. Time is almost over, so I put it away and sit back in the deck chair. A paper cup is rolling in the breeze on the ground, someone’s trash, I collect it and put it in my own now empty cup, and add the wrapper to my bar, folded and knotted so it won’t blow away. I’ve got another minute before the timer I set runs out. Without that I might break my break early, I might lose track of time and be out more than I intend, I might give up and start working, checking work emails or IMs while nominally breaking. When the timer does end I linger a bit longer looking out over the valley, enjoying the perfect temperature for a minute more.

In the end, I stop work about ten after 6.

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The power went out for a few hours yesterday afternoon.¹ The alerts said that a “third party” had caused damage to the equipment. I find it strange that a power outage isn’t an unwelcome interruption, it’s a moment of enforced respite from a relentless wfh grind. In our neighborhood the cell service is a poor substitute when the power goes out. I don’t know if this is a universal experience as everyone switches from their wifi to LTE or 5G. Another neighbor complained that their AT&T cell service was not helpful either. We have Verizon. It meant that from 2 pm to 5 pm both Ali and I couldn’t work. We sat on the porch to get a better signal and felt the first drops of rain from the promised storm and played mobile games while updating colleagues that we were out of commission for a while. When that was done, we read books printed on actual paper. The rain never really started, at least not until hours later. A few drops fell now and then as the clouds thickened and the light dimmed. It got harder to read. I moved to a chair by the window to see better. By 4:30, I had decided a nap would be a good use of my time. Just before 5 the power came back on, the dishwasher resumed from where it had left off, and the refrigerator began again to make its soothing whirring sounds.² This “third party” had given my wife and I a break from busy and stressful days. We were bored, read a book, and had a quick nap.

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