okay, suddenly realized that that hourglass is just there as you're walking around the office forever. a bit unnerving. pausing the game also pauses the hourglass, which is even weirder.
cubicle computer menu seems to work, at least, altho I didn't really mess with it. don't remember enough to be sure whether its UI has changed.
finally got to the elevator and tried loading into a level.
I clicked the button to start the level at 12:03.
at 12:10, I gave up and hit Alt-F4. (and then a couple minutes later hit ctrl-alt-del, and was still staring at a frozen loading screen for a few minutes after that, but thankfully this isn't the third itch.io game to make me resort to holding down the power button)
load times didn't get better. they got worse. (also NEW bugs showed up)