Swimming in circles?

A typical day--

Drove to work, checked the network, did paperwork, managed emails, phone messages, listened to Y as she vented about a family situation, did more paperwork, skimmed the local and national news, answered the phone and gave out helpful (I hope) information and phone numbers of various organizations to various callers, went to lunch with a friend, went to the other agency location to check that the backup I’d set up was working properly, fixed and adjusted a few problems on the server, fixed a minor problem on a staff computer, drove back to my office, searched for the file of a particular brochure because they need 330 by tomorrow morning and they hadn’t yet been printed, started printing the first 100 and realized I didn’t send it to the duplexer, cursed, corrected that mistake, cleared a paper jam, sorted through the first mistake to salvage paper, continued printing the brochures, turned on another computer so to speed the process only to find that the other computer didn’t have the right fonts loaded for the brochure and it was trying to send a fax for an unknown reason, tried to figure out why it was trying to send a fax but found no obvious reasons, continued printing the brochures and hoping I wouldn’t have to stay too long after 5 p.m., shut the other computer down, finished printing brochures, searched for a box to carry the brochures in, checked email one last time, shut down the computer and the office for the day, drove back home while some insipid Byrds clone band got their 15 minutes of fame on the radio, and arrived home to greet C, our cat, and talk about what happened during our day…

And ducks have their day, too, a list of their own: hunt for food, swim, rest on a platform, preen, search for food, preen, swim, fly across the pond to another location, hunt for food, hide from people coming down the path, fly to a safer location, rest on a platform, preen, nap…

And then evening comes. And some of us rest, some of us party, some of us work. Some of us nestle together and sleep. And as we drift off, the nocturnal ones arise, take up where we diurnal creatures left off…