employablog

So, being in an office means, a lot of the time, being bored.

Being bored is a two-edged mistress, it heightens and dulls the senses all at once. So while you may drift in and out of conversation or miss an end parentheses here and there, you also get a knack for noting the most minute minutia.

One thing that I particularly notice is people’s bathroom schedules, and not just that, but their habits. I’m not snooping around like Ramona Quimby, this is just what happens when my method for not falling asleep at my desk is to go take a walk. And because aimlessly wandering through a bunch of semi-cubicles is, well, pathetic, I force a trip to the bathroom.

Here’s how my ‘ol office goes to the bathroom:

CEO guy has the same pee schedule as me, so does Janitor guy. Neither are afraid to talk to you in the bathroom.

Eccentric math guy only uses the handicapped stall (larger, more luxurious) for all his business, and washes his hands in each sink at least once before leaving. There are five sinks total, but the fifth sink is actually in the handicapped stall, and has no soap. The handicapped stall’s sink then is like a preliminary rinse before moving through the main four sinks. The last two sinks are push handles rather than turn handles, so they give shorter bursts of water. These are how he finishes when he has his druthers.

Youth-marketing guy has chronic diarrhea, and is a grunter.

Foreign-market guy continues hallway conversations into the adjacent urinal. He is as foreign as the markets he reaches.

Flamboyant HR guy doesn’t understand that his office spot is in-between my desk and urination, and holds long painful conversations, and I hold painfully contain sweet release, wishing that I hadn’t downed two Nalgenes with the specific goal of leaving my desk for the bathroom.

Executive-who-looks-like-an-absentee-father-from-an-’80s-Disney-movie Guy has poor Kidney — ureter communication. It takes him a while to get going.

This is just the beginning of the taste of the fruits of 6 months of office labor.

Human Resources gave us nametags for our cubicles. It helps people navigate the fluorescent-lit maze of grey fabric walls with some purpose, but it also brings visitors.
This wouldn’t be a problem, except that I go to work to do work, and if I blow past someone in the hallway, whatever conversation I would have been stuck in automatically gets shunted to my cubicle, where I am even more trapped. Really—this problem has deeper roots, roots that reach down to the fact that when I walk around, I’m going somewhere, and it always to fulfill a basic need.

I don’t want to talk now, I have to urinate.

I don’t want to talk now, I have to poo.

I don’t want to talk now, I’m thirsty.

I don’t want to talk now, I’m hungry.

And as the fates would have it, whenever I’m walking back from satisfying one of the four drives that makes me walk to different places in the office, I never run into people. I like talking, but drives take priority. It’s why you teach children not to pester the dog while he’s eating. And it’s led me to increasingly awkward comments out of panic when someone traps me.

The last time it happened ended with me panicking and improvising.

“What are you up to?”

“Going to the bathroom,” I said, “that time of the week again.”

And I scurried off.

I do not hate Mondays.

I’ve also seen Office Space and refuse to become a parody of myself.

And beyond all that, hating 1/7 of all days starting at age 23, well, that gives me a long wretched span ahead of me, and I am NOT going that route. So when I go into work and get nudged into small talk while I’m washing my mug and hear it revolve around short weekends or “Monday again, you know how that goes,” I feel a pang inside.

Did she just say that? Will that be me some day?

I don’t try to be mean, but Monday-bashing smalltalk is worse than public masturbation, it’s just sad. Say what you want about Paul Reubens, but at least he went out and did something. Whining about Monday is just satirizing yourself and suddenly your life has been reduced to a sad cliché, a Dilbert cell, and there is never a good time to start doing that.

I was on the subway today with someone I respect, someone much smarter than me—one of my roommates. He actually made it in the journalism world.  He had a job, he even had an intern that would do his beckoning.  Then, get this, while at the job, the job that gave him a minion (a girl minion at that!) another job called him, and plucked him away, a few blocks south and one avenue block over. This job gave him even more money and less responsibility.

The bottom line is, this guy is smart and he’s not a douche.  We eat together and talk about stuff and love and laugh and live. It isn’t gay, it’s just pleasant.

So, we were on the L train, rubbing up on every other 20-something being whisked from the tip of Brooklyn to some office somewhere in Manhattan to sit at a computer inside some building and do something that on its own doesn’t shake the earth very much, but if you sum it all, still doesn’t shake very much.

I told him that I felt high, I had a cold and had just taken some sudafed to trade my cold symptoms for sudafed symptoms, which are both fun and harrowing in a carpeted mid-morning cubicle.

“Thank God it’s Friday,” he said. And he meant it. Other people said that today at work, people I also respect and enjoy. They say it, and they mean it, not noticing what they’re really saying. T.G.I.F. is only appropriate if referring to the blockbuster lineup of Full House, Step by Step, Family Matters and Boy Meets World. Other than that, strictly prohibited, it goes hand-in-paw with douchebaggery and being a big ‘ol toolbox. But something happens after enough 9 - 5 I think where people forget, they get tired, and in a quiet moment of desperate relief, it slips out with a pathetic little splash into the cosmos.

Thank God it’s Friday.

It’s ruined the same way you can’t say “Can you hear me now?” trying to get bars on your cell phone because of that assclown with the thickframed glasses who shows up everywhere. Instead you flip the syntax, claw for synonyms. “Now you hear me?” “Your hearing of my, it is better?” “Improved sounds go to you?” Those bastards, they took the easiest one and pooped on its face.

But back to TGIF, this phrase is both ruined by certain chain restaurants and a history of desperate smalltalk at the coffee pot, water cooler, what have you. It means that you suffer five days to live two, that isn’t me.

And it’s a cliché, and you know what they say about those don’t you?

They’re bad.

I’m learning how to be an office worker, and it’s hard. I’ve worked from 9 - 5 before, or at least some incarnation of a job that occupies the best hours of the day and seems to start a little too early to be fun. But up until now they are jobs of brute force, not blue collar — no collar, hell, sometimes no shirt. But, even on hangover days I never felt the crushing weight of all the world’s pent-up slumber like I do in my cubical (though my office terms them, pods.

This isn’t an attack on officeland, or my job. I like my job. But something about sitting for eight hours each day is not natural, it’s not right. I’ll take it any day over landscaping or waiting tables (my last two 9 - 5s) but it is not something that my body likes doing. But I slip into these trances. They aren’t sleep, let me be clear, they are trances.

I am awake, my eyes are open — I’m not slouched over like some dry-mouth geek. I’m even doing work during these trances, of (validated by outside sources) decent quality. I try to stay away from trances, but on a sleepy morning, the gray columns of copy and equations zonk my conscious out and I turn into editing robot, somnambulically marking pages and verifying changes.

But I’ll still be my conscious is a better editor than my subconscious.

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.

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.

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.

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.