I started my first day of work this morning. I had an hour long orientation and then a quick tour around the office maze, and now I'm sitting here in an abandoned cubicle feeling like a little kid on her first day at a new school. The girl that I'll be working with for the next couple of weeks showed me around and then dropped me off at this cubicle and left. I read through the packet of new employee information I'm supposed to understand and fill out and now I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I feel a little like someone pulled a Freaky Friday on me and my dad and I've stepped into his world of business casual and gray fabric cubicles. I slink around the makeshift halls hoping no one looks up from their computer and recognizes me as a fraud, or will ask me a question and expect a smart, professional response. I don't know what I'm doing here. Literally or metaphorically. I don't know what my job will consist of and I don't know why I suddenly have an office job. It sort of scares me. Maybe it's the thought that this means I'm one step closer to really growing up. I know I'm supposed to have a real job and yet all I'm doing is sitting in this office, hidden away from everyone and wondering why I wanted to enter the real world of employment anyway.
It's sort of everything I imagined a real job to be-lonely, boring and confusing but not what I actually thought I'd have. Thank god I don't plan to be here forever. It would be soul crushing. Or at least, I think it would be, based on my first day. Maybe after a few weeks I won't feel like the new kid no one wants to play with at recess. But will I ever feel comfortable here? I hope for that, just to make things easier, and at the same time remaining in a cubicle, not doing anything that FEELS worthwhile for the rest of my life is one of my biggest fears. I've never thought I was cut out for the corporate world and I don't really see that changing. I've always wanted a job that I loved, that I felt meant something. A job like this might actually mean something to someone, but it doesn't to me. I've never wanted a job where I work 9-5 and come home and wash off the 'dust from the walls of institutions,/Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,/Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,/Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,/Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.'
(Theodore Roethke, Dolor)
That poem has always summed up what I think of the corporate world, and I know there are great jobs out there and great people who do them in office cubicles but I really don't think they're for me. Office Space, despite its hilarity, also terrified me because I didn't want that to be my reality, and now I find myself counting down the minutes of the clock and hoping not to be seen by anyone in authority because I'm afraid they'll ask what I did all day and I'll have to tell them. "I read sweet juniper all day. "
It's sort of everything I imagined a real job to be-lonely, boring and confusing but not what I actually thought I'd have. Thank god I don't plan to be here forever. It would be soul crushing. Or at least, I think it would be, based on my first day. Maybe after a few weeks I won't feel like the new kid no one wants to play with at recess. But will I ever feel comfortable here? I hope for that, just to make things easier, and at the same time remaining in a cubicle, not doing anything that FEELS worthwhile for the rest of my life is one of my biggest fears. I've never thought I was cut out for the corporate world and I don't really see that changing. I've always wanted a job that I loved, that I felt meant something. A job like this might actually mean something to someone, but it doesn't to me. I've never wanted a job where I work 9-5 and come home and wash off the 'dust from the walls of institutions,/Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,/Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,/Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,/Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.'
(Theodore Roethke, Dolor)
That poem has always summed up what I think of the corporate world, and I know there are great jobs out there and great people who do them in office cubicles but I really don't think they're for me. Office Space, despite its hilarity, also terrified me because I didn't want that to be my reality, and now I find myself counting down the minutes of the clock and hoping not to be seen by anyone in authority because I'm afraid they'll ask what I did all day and I'll have to tell them. "I read sweet juniper all day. "
1 comment:
Don't forget to use the new covers for your TPS reports!
Sorry, that first day on the REAL job wasn't so exciting. In about a month you will seem a veteran, but it's hell getting to that point.
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