For some reason, Irving Feldman dreaded getting up in the morning. The first two hours of any given day were the absolute worst for him, but usually when he had to get up to go to work. Having long given up any hope of being an off-Broadway director, Irving sighed as he headed off to work every morning. His parents, seeing his incredible proficiency playing video games when he was younger, decided that computer engineering was the best path for him in life. While metaphorically flailing his arms, kicking and screaming, and generally raising all kinds of unholy terror (in the confines of his own mind), Irving struggled through four years of computer engineering at college, and countless hours sitting in front of a blank computer screen trying to put together yet another asinine computer application which had no function whatsoever outside of the world of abstract computer terms.
After four years of kicking himself and a constant feeling of self-loathing for choosing a field of study that would be profitable over one that he would actually be passionate about and put his entire soul into, Irving graduated with a 3.87 grade point average, which was fairly respectable, except of course to his parents. They constantly barraged him with the same stories: how they had suffered under a communist regime, were harassed by anti-Semitic remarks on a regular basis even from their professors, and yet got straight A's. His mother's often-told story of how she rewarded herself for good scholastic achievements by reading a good Tolstoy novel inspired him so much that he usually immediately went over to the television to see if there were any good movies with the Marx Brothers.
So now he was a computer programmer, though not exactly a great one. Computer programming, though not presenting too much of a cerebral challenge to Irving, usually nauseated him to the extent that Andrew Lloyd Webber plays did, and to make matters worse, he couldn't leave during intermission.
This wasn't why Irving Feldman dreaded getting up in the morning, however.