Strange case of charity

Office journal

Well, my day started with a weird dream. I say 'day' started with a dream because the dream continued vaguely even when I woke up and stared around my room. With mouth half open, I dozed sitting on my bed, aware of the noise of cupboard closing in my room and people running off the side of a building in my dream. Strange morning.
On the way to the office, I had my novel clasped between my hands, with the KitKat wrapper serving as the bookmark. Oh, how I craved for few minutes every hour to read a page or two more! My morning reading never started as my mom and I couldn't stop talking. With the songs and my mom wanting my attention, I sat there hoping I can tune out from reality and enter the world of mysterious symbols and ancient history.
Soon, I arrived in my office with my book in one hand and shoulder bag in the other. Another day at the office. Yesterday was 10 hours, I wondered what a day like today would turn out to be. Time flew by in the morning with e-mails and phone calls and updates. Can someone ever do work for charity? I wondered silently as I encountered, for the first time, a person who did not want due payment because she felt she contributed very little work. With people inclined towards money, I wondered how people like her managed to do what's morally strange yet different from the rest.
As I heard her out over the phone, I realized that workplace does not leave any place for emotions. Go home and deal with your personal life situations - if you don't deliver on time, you won't stick on even for a week.
As I told her this will be the last thing she will be working with us on, she took it in her stride and cut the phone on my face (yes, please sense the underlying sarcasm).
I felt like telling her to be happy, having dealt with few problems myself, but being in a position where there is a deadline looming near you, sympathy votes fly right out of the window.
With that chapter almost closed (tomorrow will be a new day with some drama I'm sure), I sat down to realize it's lunch time. The food I had gotten from home was over as usual, and my stomach suddenly made a funny noise, out loud. Thankfully, there weren't many people around to notice that. I keep my novel on my desk. Yesterday, it was lying open, waiting to be read. Today, it's shut with no hope of being read once in every two hours.
I removed my chocolate bookmark and started to read. 10 minutes seemed like 2, and lunch beckoned me upstairs. There was talk of breakfast meals and diwali crackers. Twenty minutes later, I returned to my desk, only to find another mail in my inbox. More calls and e-mails later, a colleague asked me 'have you turned to tele-calling?' I burst out laughing for the first time in my day, and explained him what I was doing.
A new thing apart from the telephonic conversation was black tea. Usually, tea is served normally in our office i.e. with milk and sugar. I asked for black tea and got that. Why is it called black tea? Any ideas? It should be brown tea, considering it looks brown, and not black. Black coffee, on the other hand, always looks black. Strong and dark. Tea looks like a sweeter, more gentle version of coffee.
With tea that was too hot, I became restless as it cooled down and realized I haven't written anything in a long time. In less than two minutes, I wrote a random poem which made no sense and yet I termed it as a 'poem' for the sake of consoling my creative self.
The day is inching closer to an end, or so I would like to believe. Let's see what the next two hours bring into my wonderfully lived moment-to-moment life.
Ciao!