Your co-workers are your fellow prisoners and inmates. You are bound together from different fates and sentenced to endure time together with each daily shift counting towards time served.

Because your task is endurance, your decency compels you to make it easy on others who face the same hard demands.

Empathy calls for you to be decent even to the indecent misfits who are mindlessly trapped at jobs with you.

Talk to them with fake interest in the stupid shows, movies, video games, and sporting events they enjoy. Entertainment is the drug of choice for bored people who care about doing nothing with the short lifespan of infinite possibility their consciousness has in the universe.

Gently steer them to wise actions over impulsive ones. Give them structure when they are in danger of falling apart and conceding to chaos. Suggest good choices over the terrible routines of mediocrity they prefer. Let them see beauty over ugliness and eternal truth over popular sayings cooked up by media talking heads.

Sometimes tell them that the small sufferings aren’t lasting and the pointless bickering they get caught up in is just someone’s emotional outburst of no real consequence. The bigger purpose always matters more than the black hole of social babble.

We can be forced to work, but we can do our best to forget this misery and ease the suffering of innocents who are condemned to log eight hours a day at jobs that have at most an hour of real work.