employablog

I bring my lunch.  I resolved recently to do this every day when I realized I had dysentery, only with money and not poop.  That’s what trying to buy lunch in Times Square is, and it’s also crowded.  But this coincided with one more thing too, tv-links.co.uk.  If you haven’t seen it, do it now, and, especially if you don’t own a television, you will be able to just watch your free time whittle away.

Now I had a lunch mission, and if I brang lunch there was enough time to watch an hour-long show (House M.D., Heros, Studio 60, etc) multiple cartoons (Bucky O’Hare, Ed Edd and Eddie, Captain N the Gamemaster) some combinations and still have about 10 or 15 minutes of putzing around *cough* bathroom time.

But bringing lunch was the hardpart.  Making it before work was folly, and never happened.  Packing lunch in the morning means ordering sushi at lunch.  I needed structure.  Like a true Catholic, I needed ritual.  So I made one, and it stuck, like a true Catholic.

There is a science.  I work out, and have hollow legs *man:Kevin Bacon*, so I eat a lot.  If it’s a sandwich day, there need to be two, one larger than the other and some sort of fruit item, bananas are a safe bet.  For instance, something with turkey, tomato, honey mustard, cheese and lettuce would be a good main sandwich and hummus and tomato would be a good sidekick.  I assemble them and send them home, in their neet little bags, pressing the bag shut, turning yellow and blue into something special, green.

My eyes are green, and when the sandwich is done, it’s back to blue and yellow again, but that marriage of green comes again for the next day.  I also discovered Edame (shortly after the Japanese).  It’s like chips, but more fun, and cheaper.  It gives me something to do, and fulfills my appetite for both soy and destruction.  Soup is also pretty rad, and lets me in on my office’s microwave ritual, a line of hungry people trying to save money and unfreeze things with aplomb.  It even has its own rules, eg. a soup takes priority over a Lean Cuisine, since a soup just needs a quick blast of atoms while Lean Cuisine needs more of a Chernobyl of microwaves.

All of this will be worth it when I finally saved enough money to travel, and can live off nothing more than soy beans.

I had been looking forward to this day for some time. In a time when a great dearth of interesting workplace happenings has plagued my existence, I saw today as sure-fire material. I mean, is there anything more likely to produce an interesting topic than a mandatory firm-wide sexual harassment (and discrimination!) training?

Our company, as a small and quickly growing firm, has been making baby steps towards full-fledged corporatism. First there was the new office with fancy perks like functioning heat and multiple elevators. Then came the new logo and associated paraphernalia, followed by a new website. But with growth comes responsibility. Or rather, liability. Hence, the firm-wide sexual harassment (and discrimination!) training.

Unfortunately (fortunately?), the training wasn’t quite the comedic gold mine I expected.

I think I was imagining something akin to 8th-grade health class, where we learned that “no means no” and snickered through role-plays about appropriate ways to handle inappropriate situations. In retrospect, it was probably silly to expect that a firm full of overwhelmingly reasonable people would have anything but an overwhelmingly reasonable sexual harassment training.

We learned the history of the federal and state harassment (and discrimination!) case law, and discussed areas where case law is still emerging. We learned that it it is not illegal to age discriminate against someone if they are under age 40. We learned that it IS illegal to ask a disabled person to drive you around in order to receive a better parking spot.

I even found a reason to care about the training. I mean, I’m pretty confident that I’m not going to harass anyone, but I realized this training is important anyways: if the firm gets sued for thousands of dollars, guess who doesn’t get bonuses that year? Everyone.

In conclusion, sexual harassment (and discrimination!) training was not as absurd as I had hoped, and I think that is a good thing.

Hello, work? Are you out there?

It’s me, Ryan. I’m bored. I’m trying to find something to do. I know, we both thought it would never come to this, but short story longer, it has.

It turns out that doing nothing at work is much more difficult than doing something, and infinitely more difficult than doing nothing at home.

Work ebbs and flows, and sometimes its ten-feet thick with floatsom and jetsam, and other times it’s fished out. And while this week is a calm before a storm, it’s a frustrating calm that lasts from 10 AM to 6 PM each day, guaranteed since I am paid hourly.

So while I’ve developed coping mechanisms, they are somewhat maladaptive. I drink water constantly so I can urinate as many times as possible. Same with coffee, only for twosies. I check my email infinitely, and have sparked long-lost, new-lost, new-fangled and spangled conversations on instant messenger. And I’ve been playing with travel websites so much that it’s even a little vulgar.

But now it’s Friday. On my way out the Russian maid will say in a heavy bolshevik accent,

“Thank God It Fridayed,”

And I’ll agree, wish her a happy weekend, and pray that tech spits me something by Monday.

Doing nothing at work is not relaxing, it’s actually high stress. My boss gives me my work, but I’m in direct observation by my boss’ boss. While he is also my supervisor, he does not give me work, nor does he have work to dole. He’s a nice guy, and for that, I do not want to make too apparent, the great stack of nothing, that I am working on.

I’ve even been asking for work, tagging along to irrelevant meetings and being more proactive than pimple wash (oo, that’s a good one).

Thank God It Fridayed.

Every time I fire up iTunes, I am presented with a concrete reminder of the new life in the real world. Where there used to be dozens of shared music libraries with cute names like “mikes hott tunz” or “inda club” or “Untitled Music Library,” now there’s just one: my roommate’s.

Last week, her computer broke down, and there are no longer any shared music libraries in my iTunes. MyTunes are iLonely.

Last Sunday it was nearly 70 degrees. People ran around wearing tee shirts in January, and ladies wore head-turning outfits. And it was not right.

On Monday every desk had a two-page green memo paperweighted by a new mug.

“Presents!” I shouted, sticking my apple sticker on my mug and going to the coffee machine.  The mugs replaced the waxy paper coffee cups, and are part of the greening of our office.  The memos were on our new recycling initiative, and my heart warmed, this time not from the greenhouse gases.

I mean, I’m from Minnesota, our biggest attractions center around lakes.  The North Shore, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, these are treasures.  But now they compete, and lose, to Minnesota’s other big tourist attraction, a mall that you can see from outer space.  So, any environmental step is good in my book.  But this step had weak footing.

First, it’s January and my office still has heat issues, namely, there is too much.  Which we combat with AC.  Yeah, it’s not right.

And moreover, we got our memos to recycle, on … paper.  Email, I mean, this is the 20th .. wait, even, the 21st century these days.  Or perhaps it was our first test, to see how we held up to the new recycling initiative and the thought police were already on us with their green cardstock memos.

Nonetheless, a few days later we asked the Russian office cleaner why she threw the recycling in with the trash.

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said, “the building doesn’t recycle.  You’re floor just says that they do, but no one pays me to take out the trash twice.”

Very Interesting.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said, “I don’t want to have trouble.”

If you’ve ever watched a show like the West Wing, ER, 24 … or really any television drama, you are familiar with the moment in the story when a group of characters is gathered around for a moment of repose when someone’s cell phone draws them out of the conversation. We don’t notice much, until a second character’s pager starts beeping. Soon, the others are frantically reaching for their phones as some ominous low strings signal the impending notification of disaster.

Cut to commercial.

This moment has been replicated in my working life twice since I began this job. The first time, I was in a project meeting when one of my coworker’s Blackberry pulsed. He looked down, stifled a gasp and smiled. Suddenly, a flurry of IM’s popped across the project manager’s computer. On the speakerphone, the client’s phone rang and he began to sound distracted. Google had bought YouTube for $1.65B in stock.

When I walked out of the meeting the office was abuzz, as everyone simultaneously rushed to incorporate the deal’s implications into what they were working on even as they debated how close the terms were to what they had privately been guessing.

Yesterday, a similar thing happened. Apple’s iPhone was announced with fanfare, and the office was acting as if dispatch had just called in a multi-car-pileup-due-to-cattle-car-derailment, with multiple casualties inbound! IM was abandoned for shouting over cube walls: “It’s GSM! No 3G!” … “RIM stocks are tanking!” … “It’s multi-year exclusive” … “Get an image in that deck!”

During the YouTube acquisition, I was just an observer. Not this time. This time I was furiously hitting re-fresh on the tech blogs, researching obscure equipment manufacturers, trademarks and patents all while reworking an assumptions page for our project. It felt exciting, it felt important. It felt real.

Two hours later it felt underwhelming. There was no exciting music, there were no life-changing decisions, and, most importantly, rather than being well into the triviality of the Late Show we were still at the office working on presentations.

Either I need a more exciting career or I need to stop forming life expectations from hour-long television dramas.

So … my job has an interesting designation for me, I am an hourly part-time employee, five days a week and 7 hours a day.  If you’re a sharp one, you’ll know this comes out to 35 hours a week.  Beyond that, I am expected to sit in the office from 10 to 6, each day, which comes out to 8 hours .. so how does this California math work out?

Well, lunch is unpaid.  So, lunch then, should take an hour.  Usually this isn’t a problem, now, it’s about to be a big one.  I decided to start packing 4/5 of all lunches, because I’m going to save up money from this job, and travel, and that doesn’t happen as easily when I’m leaking change all over 42nd street on the way to a bougie deli full of tourists and neo-cons.

But bringing a lunch suddenly gives me a ton of time.  There is no time expense.  I open my desk drawer and like that, lunch is prepared.  I’ve been watching TV online during lunch for the past lunches, I guess I could go into our lunchroom, but for the same reasons that a high school lunchroom is a harrowing experience, so is my company’s.  I could do the chill table by myself thing, but not today.  Today I am sick, and when I am sick, I look a little too much like the unabomber.

I could just do work, but that seems foolish.  I feel like a douche reporting “and fifteen minutes” on my time sheet, and would feel even worse doing work for free (unheard of!).  Volunteerism should go to the children, to the bums, and to the mentally deficient.  But not to companies planted firmly in the black.  So I putzed around, I urinated twice, I bought coffee, and then I wrote a blog.

Today I ended the strange three-month experiment where, for some reason or limp force of nature, I was a waiter. I went in without any experience or desire to be a waiter. I just figured, I’m OK-looking, I should be a waiter, it seems easy.

It isn’t. I spent nearly nine hours writing explanations to calculus problems one day at work, and being a waiter is a lot harder than that. You have to placate people, you have to be impossibly nice, and you have to balance a lot of liquids, often hot liquids, and I am proud to say that I only spilled someone’s drink all over them once.

But that period is done. Today was my last brunch shift, I am no longer a waiter, but I am forever someone who has put their time into the service industry. I kept one shift because I liked the people at my restaurant. But working six days a week was too much, especially considering the ritual sacrifice of my Sunday afternoons, not to mention the enforced moderation on my Saturday nights, because waiting hungover is hell. Hell on ice.

But this place got me on my feet, fed me, and took me with no experience or reason while I looked for a ‘for real’ job, and that allegiance kept me trudging in there, Sunday after bloody Sunday.

But finally I woke up today. The thoughts of Sunday afternoons had been tugging at me for a while, gently blowing in my ear, tempting. I saw that my manager had goofed on the schedule, leaving off my shift, and giving me the perfect out, he wouldn’t even need to correct the error.

And like that, I was free.

I have to fly sometimes, and others, like this place’s co-author, fly quite a bit.  Until recently I’d reached an uneasy truce with flying.  I’d watch something on my laptop and order a drink, usually wine or a bloody mary.  It’s weak, but, if I go down in flames, flailing at an oxygen mask, I’d like to have one last drink first.

I’ve been doing a bit of jet-setting, nothing like Employee One, but still more than I’m used to.  And on my last flight I almost died.

I thought NWA had been had.  I collected a $300 voucher, stayed with my parents and extra night and flew back to Brooklyn the next day.  But about half an hour into the flight we hit a bump.

A bump?

Air is supposed to be smooth, it doesn’t have bumps.

Ah, turbulence.  But not matter, we’ve alll been through it before.  But then we hit another, larger invisible bump, the place lurched down at an angle, only to be buffeted right back from where it came, and then started tilting and swaying left and ride.  Another bump knoced it up, just before something hit it down to the diagnol.

This was it.  I put down the stack of papers my palms had sweat through, clutched my armrests and started talking to my neighbor while saying “Hail Mary’s” in my head.  The pilot announced that we would seek a higher altitude.

Terrifying minutes later, the plane ricocheting, heads snapping around on necks like palm trees in Katrina, the pilot grunted,

“We can’t go any higher.”

And that was that.  We just rode it out.  I checked to see the wings were still there, we were lurching up and down.  I watched one women hold her daughter’s head in her lap and listened to the carts in the plane colliding and tipping into each other and the galley.

Then after 10 or 15 minutes lasting eternity, it stopped.

And I didn’t die before 2007.