employablog

(First, a disclaimer. I am not really a vegetarian. I eat fish and fish-like products. I eat dairy (we do, after all, come from the state that annually carves its beauty queens into 90lb blocks of butter). And if someone’s Mom offers me a homemade bowl of corn chowder, I’m not going to make a stink because it happened to have been made with chicken stock. In a pinch, I’ll even pick around the overzealous bacon bits in my side veggies, beans or salad.)

“I know this great place you won’t find in any tour guide,” the client told us as he wheeled the rental SUV across one of Dallas’ many eight lane roads. “They have the best barbecue in Texas.”

There might be worse times to mention that you are a vegetarian, but if so I haven’t found them yet. My coworker on the trip gave me a look, as if to say “It could be worse - you could be a gay Arabic observant Jew and a vegetarian in Dallas.” Point taken, even if he didn’t actually say or think that.

So yes, it could be worse. But these kinds of situations are coming up more and more often, and always there is a small sense of dread when someone, noticing for the first time that I never order the chicken, asks if I am a vegetarian.

I really have no good answer for this. “No,” I start to explain, “I eat fish, but…” There is nowhere good the conversation can go from here. No one in an office wants to hear about your eating habits, any more than you want to talk about them. Yet, an explanation is owed.

Vegetarianism, like politics, is something best not mentioned in the workplace. It’s like dropping a bomb except instead of exploding it just makes people feel awkward, you know, like ‘What is a bomb doing in our conference room? That doesn’t belong here.’ But when it comes up there isn’t much I can do except smile and explain and try to look nonchalant as I munch on my veggie burrito.

Last Wednesday, my team delivered the project we’ve been working on for the past eight weeks to the client. The next day I was on a plane back to Minnesota. Today I head back to Boston for a short stint on the Beach.

The Beach is like a vacation consultants sometimes get to take without leaving the office: instead of spending thirteen hours a day working on spreadsheets and slideshows and charts, you spend eight hours a day cleaning your desk and working on pet projects and catching up with ESPN.com.

Time on the Beach is usually brutally short because our firm is small enough and our projects short enough that there is almost always some project on the horizon that requires immediate attention. I’m told by some co-workers that this brevity is a good thing. Apparently, the Internet has an end, and when you reach that end at 1:30 in the afternoon with two-and-a-half hours to go before a salaried employee can honorably duck out early, the result is mind-numbing boredom.

Still, I’m hoping for a nice long stay on the Beach. My last project had some tough hours in its final weeks and it will be nice to get home before the gym closes and the first edition of Sportscenter roles. My dream may come true: most of the directors and project managers are out on vacation and I haven’t heard of any new things on the horizon.

I’ll believe in the end of the Internet when I see it. And if I do happen upon it, I can always create some more here at employablog…

P.S. If anyone has any suggestions on corners of the Internet I may not have seen, feel free to post them in the comments. It could be a long couple of days.

“Beer at four,” popped up on my computer screen. It was an instant message. Like many offices, mine communicates via IM with people sitting literally next to you. Sometimes, I do it the ‘old fashioned’ way, and shout.

Then a second IM clarified. The beer was free, the beer was in the office, and we would be getting paid while we drank it. There would also be a popcorn machine.

But why, and to what purpose? I was doing content and copyediting today, and had a lot to do, so the beer would have to be drank whilst I edited in my little pod. But free beer, that’s just something, something that you can’t buy. So, I copy-edited under the influence. And it was good.

But still, back to the main idea, why was the stuff free? Well, my coworker said, today is dumpster day.

“Dumpster day?”

“Yeah,” and he gestured to the big dumpster facing his cubicle.

Dumpster day happens twice a year, we purge dated books and paper and trash. It’s a pogrom of paper products. But still, why the tub of free beer? Why the carnival popcorn — the dumpster made sense. But I can clean without beer, in fact, one could make the case that I even clean better without.

“Well, we have the beer because it’s dumpster day.”

Circular.

And it was the same sad clown story from everyone I pestered, save a few lost souls like me, beer in hand throwing caution to the wind holding on to a stupid grin, out of the can, into the man — on dumpster day.

While in college, I accomplished very little work during the daylight hours. Instead, readings, papers and the occasional interactive media installation were accomplished mostly in the wee hours of the morning, accompanied by copious amounts of Diet Coke and dining hall conversation. In the working world, things are a little different. I show up at the office around nine o’clock, sit down in front of my computer, and am expected to be productive for roughly 9-14 hours. After this, I’m free to go home and do whatever I’d like until the next weekday morning at nine.

Though it took some getting used to, there are some advantages to this arrangement. First, I no longer require multiple liters of Diet Coke followed by consecutive nights awake followed by consecutive days in bed in order to accomplish something. At least as importantly, I almost never have homework. Since productivity is basically forced on me during the day, my nights can be used for ‘me time.’ You know, things like… I don’t know, reading I guess. Or balancing my checkbook? Or whatever. The point is, I own my nights.

Except now my brain is reverting to its old ways.

For the past several days, I’ve been dreaming of spreadsheets. Not in a fantastical way either. Instead, my brain logically sorts through whatever problem I spent the previous day working on, and I wake up with a list of what to do when I start again. I don’t know what to make of this, except that I’m pretty sure this is something like double jeopardy and it should be illegal in this, and every country.

As I carreened toward ‘professional’ life, my

a) ammount of piercings
b) garishness of said piercings
dropped off at an alarming rate.

Pirate earrings toned down to mere studs. Three studs dwindled to one with two said empty holes in my ears. Cartilage ring was long gone. Eyebrow stud is just a blurry memory, a tiny scar in my grey matter … and eyebrow.

But I liked those piercings. And though, Employee One insists that our dichotomy is done, a memory still lingers, and a mission still carries. First, I am very, very new at this office thing, and never saw it coming. After week one, I realized that I did not have enough clothes to carry me through the work week unless I wanted my co-workers to realize that I was one a very, very regular four-day schedule. So I went out shopping, and happened upon a small pair of silver skull earrings. Naturally I had to buy them.

And, back to the integuments of the argument at hand, now I have a real domain email, and an actual title. I like my job, my office, etc. but it feels like an office vacation, I know that I’ll be starting school next fall to begin a lifetime of cutting out of people what happens to be bothering them (usually tumors, sometimes black stuff, but I’m no doctor yet.

And on Monday morning, when I looked in the mirror in the office bathroom I noticed that I had forgotten to take out my new, favorite skull earrings.

I just received an email from Too, and the part after his @ definitely sounded pretty corporate. According to theory, this raises some significant philosophical issues regarding the dichotomous nature of this blog.

At the very least, I think we need to change Employee Too’s description on the site, as I am pretty sure he’s no longer doing several interviews a week.

In fact, now I’m the one doing several interviews a week, except I’m on the other side of the table. Of all the things about this job that make me feel like a grownup (health care, taxes and paychecks are pretty high on the list), having a 22-year-old ask me earnestly about my industry experience and management style has got to be the most surreal. But more on this later.

Hey Too@work.com, how’s it feel to be one of us now?

I just started my second week of my first real job, and beyond all the things I expected with being vaulted into the upper-lower-class-white-grey-collar society, one of the most pervasive is my changed poop schedule.

From working 40 hours a week, balancing a Sunday restaurant shift and trying to eke my money’s worth out of a gym membership (I’m a little too svelte), I am gone a lot.  And between all the coffee I drink, and my bizzarre and obsessive eating habits and my bizzarre and obsessive working-out habits, pooing away from the home is a necessity.  Factor in me never really being home except directly before and after sleep, and additionally factor in my dashing regularity and I’m pooing in foreign territory so often that I almost consider not making a toilet-pater seat caddy each time.

Though crazy thoughts like that never last more than mere nanoseconds, same with crazy thoughts like using my hand instead of a the tip of my shoe to flush and / or lower the seat.  But now, I am fully into and accepting of pooing in nearly anything that flushes.  But I’ve also crafted an alarming Howard Hughesesque ritual that surrounds each of these trips, and they go, hand-in-trembling-hand throuhout each day.