After seven years, my coworkers finally fixed the arcade cabinet one of us designed back in 2017. The computer powering it got bricked in 2018 for reasons still unknown but one of our out-of-town coworkers was in town for a week and decided he’d spend his spare time fixing it up. Now it’s working again and my team has slowly begun to gravitate back towards it. It’s currently running a different version of Galaga than we all used to play, but the few interactions with it have quickly resurrected the ol’ competitive spirit of some of my coworkers in a way that I find mildly frustrating but ultimately not worth my emotional effort. I’ve got much better reasons to be frustrated with them these days and it’s not like I’ve got the time for Galaga anymore. Back when we were all playing it, there were four testers on my team. Now there’s only three and we’re doing more work than ever, so taking even half an hour out of my day to do something simple and fun like play a round or two of Galaga isn’t really something I can afford to do most days. I might have a bit more time on Fridays, given that I’m usually less productive then anyway, but I don’t think I can pursue my old records as much as I used to. I’m not even sure I want to, to be honest. Not just because of my difficulties with my coworkers, but because I’m doing a lot of learning things these days and am very aware that I have a limit. I can only learn so much on any given day–and that’s a lot less than I’d like thanks to how draining work often is–and I’ve got more important stuff to remember than enemy appearance and attack patterns in a game older than I am.