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In an adjacent building are an another group of people. The job of these people is to remind the rest of society of how vital the work happening in your building is to the functioning of society. It’s to inspire younger people to go work in your building. These people suffer many of the same problems the workers in your building do; they’ve only very recently learnt about “the right” to disconnect but in reality it’s simply not practical. Their deadlines are immovable and the amount of paperwork generated to prove they’re meeting them increases each cycle. So they pretend they’re disconnecting when instead they have learned to use the “schedule to send later” function in their emails. Governing bodies are happy; perception is reality. Within this building there are some workers, maybe on your floor, maybe on others, that are passionate and care deeply sometimes to their own detriment. Like many workers in your building, some in this one are in the building before the sun rises and don’t leave until after it sets. They have few friends not in the building. Those that aren’t in the building have almost always worked there previously. In fact it’s do all-consuming that they marry other people from the building. Like your building, this building’s administration often has little to no experience in what the workers do although, like you, they are “passionate” about the “vital” work being done. Like your building it doesn’t translate into better conditions or higher pay. On some floors the work is downright dangerous, but not all floors so it apparently balances out. The workers in this second building could not be prouder of or more excited by what happens in that first building, despite rarely being acknowledged by those workers; indeed sometimes they’re outright mocked. But sometimes someone comes along whose passion and desire to enter the closed system of the first building is so overwhelming that they are prepared to bang on the front door until they’re let in. And when they are, it’s enough—just enough—to keep the second building ticking over. They are the arts educators.

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