Try to be a good employee and focus on your work

You're definitely caught up on your work for the week, but the more you think about it, the more it occurs to you that if you really focus on the job and take advantage of having the office to yourself, you could actually be ahead of the workload for next week and the rest of the month. Being ahead of the game is definitely not a bad thing, so you decide to buckle down and get some more work done. You close the office door to remove any other potential distractions, open the reports and databases you were working on, and get back to it.

Your next big project for the week is analyzing staff performance data for the Customer Support department. The thirty or so employees in that department are all divided into smaller teams, and your job is to look for trends in which teams are performing better than others, and look for any trends or conditions in which one team performs better or worse than its average. The best team typically gets a small bonus on their paycheque at the end of the month, and the lowest performers get some kind of extra coaching, supervision, disciplinary action, or whatever else management wants to do. You don't personally know anyone in the Support department, so you know there is no chance that you'll bias results.

So far the data looks fairly standard. Miller's response rate is up. Carlson's is down before lunch, but up again after lunch. Chopra worked a 12-hour day last Friday but obviously checked out mentally for the last couple hours of the day. Ramirez passed on a higher-than-average number of support calls to the inside sales team last week. McCutcheon had a great shift, then an average shift, then a poor shift, and then two sick days last week. Team 1 is rating high for customer satisfaction, but was the lowest in terms of up-sell conversions. Team 2 looked great for up-sales, but had really low customer satisfaction scores. The other teams were all fairly average.

A couple of hours of number-crunching and data modelling go by and your mind starts to wander. You lean back in your chair and start to mentally debate what color scheme to use for the graphs you'll ultimately use to report your data to management. As you evaluate the merits of a custom or standard color theme, you start to daydream. You don't fully fall asleep, but you are definitely not quite "all there".

Your mind drifts back to your dream from last night. What was it about those dreams of soaring above the beautiful, white city that they always stuck with you long after you returned to the waking world? And that voice that spoke to you at the end of the dream, that's never happened before in any of the dozens, if not hundreds, of times you have had that dream before.

You shake your head and end your waking reverie. I said I was going to get a lot done today, you think. And dammit, I meant it. Putting aside your daydreaming for now, you get back to work. You actually do manage to get quite a bit accomplished, and you're just about to log out for the day when you hear a loud knocking on your office door.