Typical Day
Polly O'Grapher starts her day at precisely 5:55AM, when she wakes up five minutes before her alarm goes off. She showers, gets dressed in a navy blue skirt, white blouse, and jacket and adjusts her thick, black plastic-framed glasses so that they sit perfectly straight on the bridge of her nose.
Polly then heads to the kitchen where she feeds her black and white cat, Tru, and fixes a sensible breakfast of eggs, toast, and fruit for herself.
Polly downs her one vice, a cup of strong, black coffee, grabs her ID badge and her purse, and is out the door at precisely 7:00AM.
At 7:56AM, Polly enters the George Bush Center for Intelligence, a.k.a. Langley, and shows her security badge to the guard at the gate.
She has her badge scanned, undergoes a retinal and finger scan, and is let through. She doesn't say hello to anyone. She doesn't like to get too attached, considering her job this month is to examine the center's employees for their annual polygraph to see if they're giving away state secrets.
Before Polly gets comfortable in her office, she grabs a water from the break room and deposits her lunch in the employee refrigerator. (It has her name written on it in black Sharpie—there's been a series of lunch thefts from the fridge recently, and she hopes that by putting her stamp on it, people will steer clear.) She takes her water with her and heads back to her office to set up her polygraph machine and monitoring equipment.
At 8:25AM, her first scan of the day walks in, ready to go. It's George Murphy. George has been a senior analyst at the CIA for twenty years and knows the drill. He is nonchalant and perfectly calm as Polly goes through the formality of explaining the test. She then does a baseline read—a practice test—asking George questions she already knows the answers to. She monitors George's heart rate, breathing, and sweat output.
When she is done, she administers the actual polygraph test. Everything is as expected. No surprises and nothing at all controversial to report. The entire test is extremely thorough; it takes about three hours.
When Polly is finished, it's 11:30AM and she is famished. She decides to have an early lunch before the next scan of the day, which isn't scheduled until 1:00PM.
Polly goes into the break room and takes her salad out of the refrigerator. (It's still there, thankfully.) Mitch, a lower level agent who is fairly new at Langley, says hello to her. He is eating a tuna sandwich and it is extremely pungent. Polly smells pickles. She hates pickles. Even the smell makes her want to gag.
Polly responds with a polite "Hello" back to Mitch but doesn't make eye contact. Polly hasn't given Mitch his exam yet and she doesn't like to fraternize with staff before she conducts their test. Not that she enjoys talking with staff after their test either; she's just not a chatty sort of person.
Mitch, however, is. He tries to engage Polly in conversation, all while his pickle and tuna breath threaten to take her appetite away.
Polly smiles politely and then leaves the break room, heading back to her office with the rest of her salad. She finishes her lunch alone at her desk while she scans her email and reads the Washington Post online.
At 12:45PM, she cleans up after herself, putting everything away and getting ready for her next victim, err, exam.
Joyce Harbinger walks in at 1:00PM, loud, brash, and a bit nervous. She makes jokes. Polly hates jokes. She also hates how loud and anxious Joyce seems to be. This might give her a false read. Polly is careful to conduct the beginning interview a bit more thoroughly than her last exam. Joyce has never had a polygraph before, and she launches into a whole song-and-dance about how she's heard that polygraphs aren't reliable. This irks Polly to no end.
Still, Polly is a professional and she tries not to let Joyce's opinions color her read of her. Joyce's polygraph takes four hours. There were a few questions that garnered questionable answers that Polly will have to talk to her supervisor about, but overall she doesn't think Joyce will lose her job. Probably not, thinks Polly, but you can never be certain.
When Polly is finished with the exam, it is 5:00PM. Two down, two hundred more to go, Polly thinks as she gathers her things and locks her office door.
On her way home, Polly hits horrible traffic on the freeway (as usual). She doesn't get home until 6:47PM, and she is spent.
Poor Tru mews at his bowl. Polly gives him a pet and fills up his food and water.
She then heats up a frozen dinner for herself and sits in front of the TV to eat. She watches Scandal, which she's DVR'd from the night before. She marvels at Olivia Pope and her savviness, wondering if she could beat one of her polygraph tests.
After dinner, Polly changes into her pajamas, snuggles in bed with a good book, and reads as Tru snuggles next to her.
She turns out the light at exactly 10:00PM and goes to sleep.