You know that guy with the khaki pants and blue button-down shirt with the rolled up sleeves? The clean-cut guy, youngish, and always moving quickly with a cell-phone glued to the side of his head and a half-drunk latte in his free hand? You always see him in his BMW, or in the lobby of office buildings, shaking hands with foreign investors and signing contracts. I�m sure you must know whom I�m talking about. Whenever you see him, you shake your head sadly and think to yourself how deluded he is, working so hard and so fast for so much money and so little life.

Today, I was that guy.

I started out my day with one long meeting, followed it by one fast lunch interrupted by phone calls, followed that by another long meeting, and another, and a telecon, and then went home to write e-mails and make phone calls and do more work and check responses to the first round of e-mails and make replies to those and before I knew it my entire day had gone by in a dizzying array of fake-talking and polite arguing and hurried appointments and coercive statements and buzzing PDA�s and ringing telephones and watering eyes and typing hands�and I never even made it into the office..

The best part, of course, will be tomorrow, when I finally do make it into work, and my fellow employees will give me their sideways smiles and say, �And where were you, yesterday?� That remark causing the bile of frustrated anger to rise into my throat before I even sit down, as I reply, �I was working all day.� To be met, of course with the inevitable, �suuuuuuure.�

I do take scant solace, though, in that instead of the Silicon Valley uniform, I wore cargos and a T-shirt; and instead of reveling in my over-working, I realize that there are better things in Life.