employablog

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.

(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.