By three o’clock on Friday afternoon, it seems like all the mundane, pointless little tasks he should have tackled all week long have accumulated and coalesced into one big unassailable mass of unfiled documents and unreturned, unreturnable phone messages, not so neatly stacked in his inbox, half of them screaming out for immediate response, and the other half just as insistently demanding to be ignored until Monday, their subject matter either too urgent or too unimportant to warrant risking his peace of mind before he could slip blissfully into the weekend.

Because he had not slept the night before, it was all he could do to keep his glazed eyes open, even as he kept checking the clock, wishing that his frequent attentions would hurry its hands.

Foolishly, he’d rescheduled a meeting from Wednesday morning until today at five in order to accommodate one of his more psychotic clients, but now he wondered if either of them would be able to muster enough wit or stamina to forge any kind of positive outcome.

He called the client around 4:15 to make sure he had a ride to the office, hoping he could finagle him into postponing until Monday, but the client beat him to the punch, mumbling something about not wanting to go out because there were lurkers at the bus stop and the landlord’s dog was barking in the hallway.

He told the client everything was fine, that under the circumstances he probably should stay home, take his meds, try to get some sleep, and think about coming to see him on Monday morning.

When he hung up the phone he thought about how, if he went home now, there would be barkers and lurkers everywhere, so he picked up the first item from his inbox and got down to business, knowing it was going to be a very long weekend.