Mounted above copiers and break rooms across the country, the office wall clock keeps its hour and minute hands in dignified, near motionless composure while its second hand does the actual visible labor of proving that time has not, in fact, ceased. It ticks, or more often now sweeps, in a thin red or black needle circling relentlessly while everything else on the clock face pretends to be above such urgency.
Watch it long enough and the tick becomes hypnotic, then oppressive, then finally invisible, the way a refrigerator hum disappears until the power goes out. Employees waiting for meetings to end have been known to stare at it exclusively, tracking its lap around the numerals as a unit of endurance more honest than minutes, which lie by comparison, gliding so slowly they seem stationary. The second hand has no such luxury. It cannot coast. Every rotation is identical, sixty small increments of nothing happening, repeated with total conviction, hour after hour, meeting after meeting, until someone finally changes the battery, at which point it simply stops mid sweep, frozen at some arbitrary second, as if it had simply given up between one moment and the next, having done its duty and found the duty, in the end, indistinguishable from any other second it had already spent.