I'd been hired as a replacement for a cousin of mine who'd gone to stay with a family in the United States, so I was only there for three months, but even so I did my best to give people the impression that I was a bit of a fool. It's not that I'm particularly clever or anything, but I know that if you work too hard in a place like that, your workload just gets heavier and heavier and you end up losing a lot more than you gain. So I elected not to do very much. There's nothing as senseless as being harried at a simple do-what's-needed part-time job. So I worked in a sort of haze the whole time, keeping only about one third of my circuits open. As a result I'd show up late and make mistakes, enter data into the wrong columns, send out perfectly blank faxes, that kind of thing, and even though none of this was on purpose I still ended up doing each of these things about once every three days, so that soon people stopped asking me to do anything at all difficult and my work got a whole lot easier.

It happened one Sunday. The company had a vacation, but I'd gone in on my own to fix a mistake I'd made the day before. I was all alone in the spacious, silent office. I was typing in some data, taking my time, when all of a sudden I started feeling inexplicably uneasy.

I had this sense that at some point during my two months of acting the fool I'd actually become one—that it might not be possible for me to work any faster. It was a stupid thing to get worked up about, but at the time it seemed very serious. The longer I stared at the computer's green screen the more I worried. I'd thought I was only keeping my talents hidden, but in fact office work is probably one of those things that I just can't do. I struggled to keep myself from thinking about it, but I couldn't. And then—conscious all the while of how idiotic I was being—I found myself being lured on by an irresistible temptation to see what I could do. I'd seen that there was no one else in the office. And so the race began. Thinking back on that day now, I can see that I was still awfully young then. I started typing in all the data I had in front of me with a truly incredible vigor. For the first time in ages I relished the sensation of having my hands move with speed and accuracy, of knowing that I could do this if I tried, and I felt wonderfully contented. Before long I'd finished the corrections I'd been working on, and so—riding the crest of my energy—I decided to prepare a few of the forms that had started piling up. I began typing things into the word processor, humming as I worked. I felt like someone who'd just been granted permission to use her right hand again after being forced for ages and ages to use only her left. I guess a sort of stress must have been building up inside me all along, because I was truly thrilled with the gorgeous pages of text that emerged from the printer. Photocopying requires almost no time at all when you take it seriously. I lost myself in the work and ended up doing all kinds of little tasks that were meant to be done by others.