This might be off-topic, but it's a story from a while ago.
A friend of mine became the manager of a restaurant. I kept telling myself I wanted to go visit his place, but things kept coming up, and I finally made it there just as a month had passed since their grand opening.
He was working busily, but somehow he managed to carve out some time to come over to my table. However, when I saw his face up close, I was shocked. His complexion was ashen—unnervingly pale and completely devoid of life.
When I asked him about it, he told me he hadn’t had a single day off in nearly two months, even before the place opened. On top of that, he was waking up at 7:00 AM and wouldn't get home until 3:00 AM. His job involved standing all day, and he was handling all the administrative chores entirely by himself. He was a hired manager, but his assistant was still inexperienced and couldn't be trusted with the work, which was why he was stuck with such a brutal workload.
With a face that looked like he was about to cry, my friend kept muttering over and over that his shoulders hurt, his back hurt, his neck hurt, his head hurt, and his feet hurt. When I told him he should ask for time off, he shook his head and said, "With how busy things are right now, there's no one to replace me, so it's impossible." Smiling feebly, he said, "We have a really important reservation tomorrow, so even if I collapsed from overwork right now, I couldn't take a break." Seeing him like that truly broke my heart.
When I got home that night, I cursed my own uselessness—wanting to help him in some way, but being unable to do a single thing—and I couldn't fall asleep for hours.
When I woke up the next day, my entire body was struck by a pain unlike anything I had ever experienced before. From the top of my head to the tips of my toes, everything hurt so much that it brought me to tears. I had no strength in my body, and I couldn't muster the energy to do anything at all. In the end, figuring I must have just caught a cold, I spent the whole day quietly staying in bed.
That night, my friend called me. For some reason, he said, all the exhaustion up until yesterday was completely gone, and he felt miraculously energetic. He said his shoulders, back, neck, head, and feet didn't hurt at all, and for the first time in forever, his complexion was good. His voice was cheerful as he told me, "Thanks to that, we got through that big reservation safely just now."
At that moment, I felt like I understood the reason for the pain I had suffered through all day.
When I woke up the following morning, the pain from the day before was gone as if it had never been.
Sometime after that, my friend finally got a decent working environment. Nowadays, he's gone independent, opened his own restaurant, and is running a reasonably successful and popular business.
I have never told my friend about what happened that day, and I never plan to.
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