After Five O’clock

It’s a few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon, and step by step, a calm settles over the office. The people who’ve been running around the entire day, busy as little worker bees, drop off one by one. The drapes are pulled down over the windows, lights are turned off, and soon, the only sound that is heard is the quiet, distant hum from the ventilation and the computers left to work over the night.

I always enjoy the serene calm that settles at this time of day. There’s a kind of quiet pleasure reserved for those people who are left to enjoy it. No phones are ringing, no emails arrive in the inbox. A few friends on ICQ or MSN to chat with, and you might even drop off to McDonalds for a hamburger. And depending on what you do, you might code a few hours (if it’s something interesting you’re working on), or just toying around. A quiet time of undisturbed peace.

Walking through the empty office at night is a process of discovery. Instead of the glare of the day, there now appears a forest of little lights and hums – LEDs blinking away in the night, quiet little muffled sounds from hard disks working, computers never stopping to pause but faithfully working through the night at the various tasks assigned to them. It’s a workshop, left unattended by human eyes for a while, only watched over by some watchdog processes, checking the operations every minute with clockwork precision, always ready to alert a human if something goes wrong.

You notice different things, too, when walking through it at night. Little posts that stand out, casting eerie shadows over the floor… The server cabinets look more like huge, looming things better put at Stonehenge than in the warehouse; and the cubicle walls become little intricate mazes where gnomes lurk in the shadows. And if you look really hard, it’s almost like you can make out quiet, dim little ghosts rising from the floor. The software seems to come alive, and the processes appear in hazy ghosts with odd names like sWeb, pMainGateSMS and yaWatchdog. They sit there, looking at you in the night, carefully inspecting what you write; with silent stares, saying nothing … but always ready to comment on your work with sad, disapproving eyes, should you dare to take a shortcut somewhere in the code.

When daybreak comes, the ghosts vanish. Soon the place is filled anew with busy people busying themselves with business. But somewhere in those machines, the same ghosts are lurking… and just waiting to come out again, when the shadows fall.