the newbie

It began as an ordinary enough day. Someone had left the shredder bag full, thus making it impossible for the next person to use it without emptying it first. There was also a sink full of dirty dishes that had been piling up since Monday. Today was now Thursday. You get the picture.

Somewhere along the timeline of a relatively ordinary put-me-out-of-my-misery-where-are-the-zombies-when-you-need-them day, someone did something to reach an entirely new level of ridiculous. That particular bar is fairly high in the world of a government office. Ridiculous goes on everyday, all day, all the time. But this was special.

I was sitting at my desk, scanning through a binder full of accounting codes in search of the one combination that would be appropriate for the item I needed to, well, account for. To give a visual representation of the type of hell I was in, let me put it this way: imagine a yourself in a large room filled with filing cabinets. Your task is:

Step one: find the right cabinet.
Step two: find the right drawer.
Step three: find the right file within that right drawer, which is within the right cabinet.
Step four: make sure you found the right cabinet.

And so, I was sitting at my desk, pouring over the various combinations of accounting codes that could represent this one invoice I needed to process. The binder is a three-inch, three-ring job that has seen better days. And it's full. Of accounting codes. Yep.

While hunched over the desk with terrible posture, I heard a cell phone ring. Our office has what are called 'pooled' cell phones; that is, no one person gets her or his own, but takes one with them if needed upon leaving the office on work-related business. Personal cell phones are rare with this lot of employees, so the sound of one generally means that it's a work phone ringing.

The soft-porn ring tone (who chooses these things?) interrupted me in my daze of numbers. I looked up to see one of our new, fresh out of university employees. She stood in front of me, held the phone out as if for me to take it, and she said the most astounding thing.

"It's ringing. What should I do?"

Ladies and gentlemen, I promise you that I'm not making this up.

I bent my head back down over my binder and replied to her in my most serious voice.

"I don't know. Maybe you should answer it?"

"Do you think so?", she asked.

"I'm not sure", I replied. "I honestly don't use those for my job."

Somewhere inside of me, a little bit of niceness wanted to lay down and die at that very moment. It was briefly taken over by a cynical, bitter old thought that wanted desperately to plant itself in the fertile soil of my generally optimistic mind.

Later that evening, I shoved the bitter thought aside and rejuvenated the optimism with a glass of wine. I thought about that young employee and what she was experiencing in this, her first professional job. At the tender age of 26. Yes. Her first actual job. How she must be so intimidated by all the trappings of office life: the copier, the fax machine...and those complicated cell phones.

I tried not to think of how I, at the age of 26, had been living on my own for eight years. I had been manager of a large retail centre with over a dozen employees. I had paid my own rent, phone and electric bills. I had cooked and cleaned for myself, with no one to do the dishes I left in the sink at night. No one but me.

Yes, it may be difficult to enter the strange world of professional work in one's late twenties. But it's also difficult for the rest of us to put up with their belated growing pains as we wait to vacate our desks in pursuit of what we truly want to do.

Somehow, we have to find a happy neutral place to work in the meantime. Perhaps the young ones, first time at the job, could do a bit more research on what it means to be a professional in an office.

I, on the other hand, will spend more time drinking wine and reviving the optimist in me. It's going to be tough, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.


~ Paige