the lab.

I have coffee in the lab. I'm not supposed to, but I decided long ago that being the lab op gave me certain unalienable rights. The right to have food and beverages inside the lab. The right to play music over the speakers (quietly, I assure you, with nonoffensive content and only in the evenings). The right to download shareware games that cause popup ads and play them in my overwhelming amount of free time. The right to use the abandoned printer cards locked in the cash box to which I know the combination. The right to do anything in my power to keep from bashing my head in from boredom.

When I have an assignment to do, the lab is a godsend. It forces me to sit at a computer for hours at a time, and I have no choice but to be productive. Working in the lab introduced me to new feelings - having something done well before it's due and watching TV with no guilt about looming deadlines. But when I have no assignment, such as right at the beginning of the school year, such as right after midterms, such as now, the lab is hell at $6.00 an hour. I play Dope Wars until I'm sick of selling pretend cocaine and running from pretend policemen. I poke around the university file system. I clean out my bookbag. I count my freckles. I read bad online journals. I reread good ones. I write my own good and bad journal entries in an email to myself, in the chance that someone I know will come in and discover the web address where I write terrible things about them.

The lab is cold. No, the lab is freezing. The lab is never a proper temperature for me or for human existence in general. In the winter, it will be too hot, and I will peel off the layers I took great care to put on. I try to mess with the air conditioner, but there are no gauges or buttons, just a dial on a little metal box on the wall that I roll back and forth to see if it works. I'm not even sure if the box has anything to do with the temperature controls in the room. Somewhere in the building, there are probably lights being dimmed, and whoever is in that room tries to brighten them with their own little metal box on the wall but only ends up turning up my air conditioner. If it does control the rush of cold air in here, I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to leave it alone. When the box makes a little noise at my fiddling, I am scared, because I have caused something to happen. The world is now changed at my fingertips. So I wait until nothing that I can see explodes, and I do it again. I feel vaguely guilty every time I mess with it, and only turn that mystery dial when the lab is empty of anyone but me, the twenty computers that work, and the five that don't. The only reason I allow myself to mess with it at all is because I figure they'll never be able to pin it on me. It's okay. I brought a jacket and coffee for warmth. The jacket is allowed, though it doesn't match my outfit. The coffee is not allowed, but like the blue jeans of beverages, it goes with everything.

I've tried to figure out the warmest place in the room. I've examined the ventilation system, sure of the fact that since I must be sitting in the absolute coldest possible spot in the room, there must be an absolute warmest possible place too. I've walked around the room, looking at the ceiling, idly calculating cold air angles until I decided that even I was not that bored and went back to my pretend cocaine and my real caffeine.

I like to pretend. I like to pretend to sell cocaine, and I like to pretend that I don't drink coffee for the caffeine. I got the latter only from my mother, though I suppose it's possible if she ever tried to pretend selling cocaine, she would like it. I don't like to need things, so I pretend that the coffee acts as my breakfast, the most important meal of the day, and that it tastes really good. Usually it does those things too, but I know deep down that I could have gotten a glass of orange juice and a muffin to serve those purposes with better nutritional results. I like to say that coffee doesn't have a noticeable affect on me and that I just love to feel the warm goodness all the way down my throat. But we all know that I'll never drink decaf in the mornings. My mother will tell you that decaf doesn't taste as good. She's never tried it.

This morning, the coffee has a deeper meaning. By getting a double white mocha from Espresso News on the way in on my first morning opening the lab, I know I have started a ritual. Because I have done it on the first morning, it follows that I will do it every morning I have to break my slumber to come in and make sure no keyboards and monitors are taken from their homes. Maybe I won't always get a double white mocha. Maybe I won't even always go to Espresso News. But you can be assured that every Wednesday morning, I'll be sitting here at the computer by the door and that there will be a coffee cup sitting beside the tower, obscured from the view of those who pass in the hallway and glance into the lab, specifically the system administrator, who acts as my boss.

No food or drinks in the lab.