Working for the man - Part 1

I have had a ‘real’ job for about 10 years now. However, it has taken me almost 10 years to become fully used to the idea of working 9-5. In fact, I’d say that this whole desk job situation hasn’t become fully realized until the past two years or so. For some reason, I always felt like working an adult job would be a temporary phase – like going to college. I waited patiently for the time when something would happen and I’d wake up and be on to my next thing, whatever that was. Unfortunately, we all know that unless one is already wealthy, money has to be made somehow. Sadly, that’s where the 9-5 job comes in.

When I finished college and got my first corporate job, I was actually working right down the street from where I am working now in South Boston. I tend to think of that time a lot, since I can still see the building I worked at on my way to my current office in the World Trade Center. It’s a big, brown, depressing building that houses a few different businesses. The Harpoon Brewery is there in addition to some fish packing place. BTE, Inc. (or whatever it’s called now since they were bought out some time ago) is sandwiched right between. That’s where I worked.

This was a time when, like most early 20-somethings, I tended to thrive on late nights out and no sleep. How I actually pulled myself out of bed in the morning and got myself in the office is a big mystery to me now. For the first two or three months that I worked there, I didn’t have a place to live, so I couch surfed at my friend’s place, waiting for one of the extra rooms to open up. No one had a regular day job in the house, so I had to deal with people up at all hours and no privacy. I actually kept my clothes in an old boarded up fireplace since I didn’t have any closet space to call my own. People would come in while I was asleep on an air mattress on the floor and watch movies sometimes. Obviously, this wasn’t a good situation for a working professional – but I made the best of it.

Thankfully, my job at BTE was a relatively brainless administrative type job, so I didn’t really have to think that much and I could coast through the day. It was insanely boring there, and I rarely had anything to do. I pretty much sat in a back room, surfing the internet and trying to make myself look busy. I worked for the Director of Marketing. He mostly gave me reports and business proposals that I had to type up. The rough drafts would be coddled together from old proposal clippings and marked up with highlighters and red pens. They were very infantile looking, like some kindergartener had made me a story that I was supposed to decode and put into adult language. That’s pretty much all I did, maybe three times a week.

Since typing up proposals took me about an hour or so each, I was left with lots of free time on my hands. I became very adept at escaping the office unnoticed and I often took long walks around the pier. There are some strange buildings out here and lots of weird abandoned fish shacks, which I always promised myself I would photograph one day. One time, I illegally gained entry into the design center (a huge factory type building that contains interior design showcases for licensed buyers.) Walking around inside was like being part of another world. “Look at all the people who actually have cool jobs” I would say to myself as I looked at all the eccentric designers dashing about. It made me pretty depressed.

I’m not sure what my real hours were supposed to be, but I never worked more than 4 hours a day. After a two hour lunch, I’d go back to my cubicle and stare at the monitor. Maybe type up a story or email or letter or something. At around 4:30 – maybe 4 – I’d escape again, running across the parking lot and down the long street that I would have to walk in order to catch the shuttle bus from the WTC to South Station. I’d run like crazy, although most people at my office probably never noticed when I left. The walk was about 10 minutes to the shuttle and then the shuttle would take 10 minutes to South Station where I would run down to the T. The T ride took 15-20 minutes from South Station to Central Square, where I lived.

All in all, it wasn’t an awful gig, especially since I had a ton of free time and pretty much did whatever I wanted. However, I was sad a lot. I wondered how I would get used to having to work Monday through Friday, 5 days a week. I wondered how people seemed to do it so effortlessly. Do they actually like working? It wasn’t that I was particularly lazy or anything, it was just that I was expected to play a part of society that I didn’t necessarily agree with. I was in a corporate environment, with people spewing business talk all day and being around that seemed to deeply affect my soul. I always felt like I was playing some huge part in a play. Look at me, I totally agree with you about status reports and marketing and customers and products. Yeah, I do…really.

Going from being a full-time college student to a full-time professional was tough. My loss of freedom during the weekdays really got to me in a big way. I’d look at all the students in Boston and long to be a part of their world again. I toyed with the idea of graduate school and taking outlandish international jobs so I wouldn’t have to type or take dictation or pretend to care about meetings and business proposals anymore. Wouldn’t it be great if I went to art school? Or, how about the Peace Corps? I dwelled on all of these questions and inwardly, I started to fall apart. I had no idea how I would be able to handle real life. I did know, however, that I needed to work and I needed to make money. Eventually, I thought, I’d figure out how to make money and not work. I still think that will happen sometimes.

As the year dragged on, it was apparent that BTE was going to be acquired by another company. I didn’t know much about how these things progressed, so I didn’t really care. I did start to care, though when there was talk about changing the office décor and putting all the Admins in the front of the office so we could greet clients. This really set me off. If I was moved to the front of the office, that would mean no more cubicle walls, no more privacy – people would see me constantly and I wouldn’t be able to sneak out. Worse yet, I’d have to talk to people and be cheery and accountable and answer phones.

I was complacent about finding a new job up until this point, but now it was urgent that I find something else. Luckily for me, it was the ‘dot-com boom’ and jobs were plentiful. Even higher paying technology jobs were open to people who didn’t have the background (me.) So, I hit up Monster.com during work hours, applied to one Marketing Coordinator job at a software company, got called into an interview and got the job all within a week. That’s how this French/Anthropology major ended up in technology..where I still am today. I’ll write part two soon.