9 am sharp, I clock in, like every other time. I go to my desk, do my work in peace and no one screams at me to move faster. I don’t know how I got so lucky to work at this Health Centre, and not only that, to have such flexibility with my working hours? Heaven.

After I finish my first task, I walk towards the cafeteria.

“Kento! You do look tired. Denise didn’t lie, hahaha! Let’s grab coffee!”

“You and mom need to stop gossiping about me. Bond some other way!” I laughed at him.

“I didn’t sleep much either. She kept me on the phone until you got home.” Alex said and blushed, looking away.

My God, these love birds! When I was in university, Alex would coordinate our laboratory praxis for the first two years. On the last day, my mom and Cynthia spontaneously came to pick me up. I was talking to Alex about my research when he spotted my mom. He was smitten with her. He gave her his card and asked her to contact him. They started dating soon after that.

Alex has a complicated past too. His son died early in a car crash. His wife was driving. He never gave me the impression she was at fault, but she couldn’t manage. She initiated divorce and both moved on as best as they could. I think this influenced him a lot to act fatherly towards me. I was grateful for the feeling and care I received from him, sadly he had to experience loss for me to receive such kindness and father like sentiments. For the past two years, Alex fulfilled the lover role in my mom’s life and the one of father in mine.

“Are you not busy?” I asked.

“No, I’m waiting on my Illumina sequencing, it will take some more time.”

“Hi guys!”

Oh, Romina. I heard her voice from behind and turned around. Romina went to the same university as me. We met during lab-work and clicked instantly. We have been best friends since. She is very reliable and someone with dry humor. She has carried me during one of my darkest times and with her my life has always had color and a fresh breath.

“Going for a cup of coffee? Mind if I join?” she asked, winked and leaned in.

“We wouldn’t even dream of going without you!” Alex rolled his eyes dramatically and playfully.

Both knew I was the coffee lover of the group. I loved to try different textures and tastes, like mixing orange peels and cardamom into the coffee before pressing the espresso and adding a drop of salt. Nothing out of the ordinary if you think about it, nothing special, but it is a way to make me happy.

We ordered our coffee and sat next to the big window. Alex was respected in the company, so most people knew that table for reserved for him, and by extension, Romina and me. We enjoyed our coffee, talked, joked, 30 minutes flew by. Alex excused himself, as he got called into lab 9 to fix a mistake. It was just me and Romina now.

“Are you working tomorrow?”

“Yes, although I think we’ll close before 12 am. Why?”

“Would you like to accompany me to a birthday party?”

“Whose birthday party?”

“She’s a friend of mine but doesn’t have many friends. She told me as a birthday present, she wishes to be introduced to my best friend. Just be there around 10 pm at this address tomorrow.”

“Yes! I cannot wait to crash this girl’s birthday party! Does she like chocolate?”

“Yes, buy her the ones with almonds inside.”

After some more banter, we had to go back to work. As much as Romina loved doing working time fraud, the analysis couldn’t do itself. We parted ways and both went to our respective offices. Most of my day is spent in front of a computer. I'll have a few terminals open, maybe some graphs on another monitor, and a spreadsheet or two that I'm pretending I'll organize properly later. No one screams down my neck to work faster, and sometimes my deadline for a project might be 2 weeks. I work rather fast, especially when I’m concentrating and in flow. If I finish too fast, I don’t let my supervisor know immediately. I don’t want them to expect my other coworkers to work as fast as me, and sometimes even I cannot keep this pace.

It's not a very dramatic job. Nobody's running through the halls with emergencies. Most of the time it's me, my headphones, a lot of biological data, and the occasional frustration of realizing a script stopped working because I missed a comma somewhere three hours ago.