There is a certain hour of the morning - about 4.30 am - when the scales drop from your eyes and you can see the world of men for what it is. The cares and woes that distract us from happiness appear as silhouettes, and we breathe a sigh of relief that, for just a moment, none of it is our problem.

One monkey wearing face paint parades in front of cameras that blast her image through the retinas of a hundred million other monkeys, all of whom react with the same self loathing that their faces are not as well painted, nor as symmetrically lit, not perhaps configuring to quite the combination of curves as the monkey on parade. Who goes home, puts her feet up, turns on the retinal stimulator and does the same.

A jaundiced businessman swelters in his business suit, preparing reports about the behaviours of his underlings, each of whom prepares a similar report, all using the same programs, square boxes inside square boxes. Carefully honing their presentations until each looks like the other, says much the same things, and pretends to represent plans and aggregates that everyone agrees are the best possible guesses.

The reports about the reports will be reported to the board of directors, none of whom are very interested in reading reports, but all of whom regard the reports as a necessary sop to the shareholders. None of whom will read the reports either, but all of whom will be outraged if there are no reports, late reports, or if the reports have smaller numbers than the previous reports, or other reports you can find about other places you could hold shares.

Apart from all that nonsense, somewhere out in the bay, there are dirty hairy lumpy guys hauling garbage and similar indelicacies from the spot ya pick up to da spot ya drop off. They're happy to be in work and off the streets. Maybe at the end of the day there's some ethanol to wash down the meat of a thousand cows and the preservatives of greatly extended shelf life. If only they'd studied in school they could live the easy life too. But no they gotta take that junk from da spot ya pick up to da spot ya drop off, over and over and over and ...

In the quiet before dawn a sleepless hack pretends he's working, but really he's just wasting his time on wiki.

''Been reading BookOfEcclesiastes too, recently?'' (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201:2;&version=9;)

See also SleeplessNightWiki.