A hand on a keyboard and a screen with nothing on it.
The whole panel is lit by that screen. There is no other source. It is a flat pale blue rectangle and it is doing the work that a window does in a Dutch interior, which is to say it is the reason anything in this picture can be seen at all, and it is giving out a colour that no window has ever given out.
The screen is blank. Not loading, not asking for anything, not displaying a form. Blank. It is the first minute of the shift and the system has not come up yet, and the machine has done the one thing it does immediately on being switched on, which is to start producing light.
The hand is mine and it is resting, not typing. That was the state I found myself in most mornings and it took me a while to be willing to paint it. There is nothing to do yet. There is nothing to do for another four minutes. The correct posture during those four minutes is to sit in the chair, at the desk, facing the screen, with your hand on the keyboard, ready, because that is what being at work looks like and the difference between being at work and looking like it had stopped mattering to me by the second week.
To the left, the headset is coiled on the desk in the dark. It is barely lit. I have kept it that way on purpose across the first four panels of this series. The equipment stays in shadow until the moment it is picked up, and it goes back into shadow the moment it is put down, and for most of its life it is an object that nobody is looking at.
The desk is composite board with a worn edge and there is a ring on it near the front that I have painted very faintly here and will paint again more clearly four times before this series is over.
I came in at ten past five for eleven weeks. Winter, so it was dark going in and dark on the floor and the sun would arrive somewhere around the second break, on the far side of a wall, and be reported to us by whoever had gone out for a cigarette.