Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Baer

A perfectly calibrated office joke: insomnia, a condition associated with private misery, gets flipped into a public indictment of work culture. Baer’s line doesn’t just exaggerate; it changes the rules of the complaint. The insomnia is “so bad” it invades the one place where, by stereotype, sleeping is easiest. That’s the gag’s hidden blade: it assumes everyone recognizes the unofficial truth that “office hours” can be dead time, performative time, time spent looking busy rather than being busy.

The sentence works because it’s built like a medical description but lands like a workplace insult. “His insomnia” sets up sympathy; “couldn’t sleep during office hours” withdraws it, replacing concern with a smirk. The subject is both victim and culprit. Either he’s so exhausted he can’t even manage his usual coping mechanism (dozing at his desk), or he’s so trapped in the machinery of a job he hates that even rebellion-by-nap has been taken away. The humor comes from that ambiguity: we laugh, then realize we’re laughing at a system that makes burnout legible as productivity theater.

Context matters: this is the kind of mid-century gag-line economy where one sentence carries an entire sociology of the workplace. Baer compresses a critique of bureaucratic inertia, white-collar alienation, and the small, petty “freedoms” employees carve out. The punchline doesn’t celebrate laziness; it exposes how normalized boredom and exhaustion have become when sleeping at work is plausible enough to serve as a baseline.