Nina: I’ve decided your neighbour is the most annoying person alive.
Leo: Really? You haven’t even met him.
Nina: I’ve seen his photos. New car, new barbecue, new swimming pool. Yesterday he posted a picture of his breakfast beside a mountain view. Some people wake up with birds. He wakes up with a photographer.
Leo: At least your boss only makes you work late. Mine sends emails at six in the morning with the subject line “Quick thought.” There is no such thing as a quick thought from a man who owns three watches and still arrives late.
Nina: What does he do at six in the morning?
Leo: He asks me to improve a report he hasn’t read. Then he replies to my work with “Interesting approach,” which means I’ll be doing it again.
Nina: That sounds awful. My boss brought homemade biscuits to the office last week.
Leo: There it is. You’re jealous of biscuits now?
Nina: Not the biscuits. The fact that she has time to bake them. She runs a department, has two children, and somehow remembers everyone’s birthday. I once forgot my own dentist appointment while looking at my calendar.
Leo: Fair point. My neighbour has a gardener, a cleaner, and a car that probably apologises when it parks. But he still spends Sundays washing the car himself. I think he wants the street to know he’s the kind of man who washes his own car.
Nina: So your neighbour works hard to look relaxed, and my boss works hard to look effortless.
Leo: Exactly. We’re jealous of people who make their lives look easy.
Nina: Speak for yourself. I’m mainly jealous of anyone who can bake biscuits without burning the kitchen.
Leo: That’s why I buy mine.
Fiction note: Nina, Leo, their workplaces, their neighbours, and all events in this dialogue are fictional.