July 31, 2000
on the first day
I walked into building 420 and was completely baffled. All the buildings look alike, see, but I could've sworn it wasn't the same building I had my interview in. Everything was backwards. The reception desk was on the left hand side. It was on the right hand side, before. And then there was the kitchen area, which had mysteriously moved to the right hand side, where it was on the left hand side before.
Thing was, the receptionist was exactly the same.
I stared at her. She grinned.
"This isn't right," I announced. "What is this, the Twilight Zone? How'd you do that?"
"I remember you," she informed me, and waved. "So you got that job?"
"Yup. Weird, isn't it? Go figure. Why is everything backwards? Or am I just spatially dyslexic?"
She waved at the glass doors and the identical building across the short courtyard. "You're in the wrong building. I go all over the place. You want 430."
I thanked her and wandered over to the other building to investigate. Thankfully, everything was exactly where they should be. My new manager came padding out after being paged, and greeted me by name. Always a good sign, when your manager knows your name.
Orientation, which started at nine, lasted over three hours.
"My last job was a start-up," the woman behind me told someone during our halfway-break. "Orientation was, like, 'here's your desk, here's your computer, go to it.'"
Today I started my new job as an International Project Coordinator at excite@HOME. In many respects, it's my dream job. At least, I think it might be my dream job. It's difficult to tell because, despite the fact that I was there for 9 hours today, I didn't actually do any work. No, that's not quite accurate, either. I cleaned the copy room. That's work, isn't it? I scheduled three meetings for tomorrow. I met the admin assistant, the Project Coordinator for Deployment, several techs, and made friends with one of the Engineers in my group.
I also unpacked my cubicle.
Here's the thing. For some reason, the person in charge of the groups forgot that I was going to start work on Monday until last Friday, at which point she hastily informed the admin for the group and filed a requisition request for a computer and telephone for me. A perfectly understandable thing to have happen if one is really busy. C'est la vie.
Facilities, who has been deluged by new hires, snorted. According to the admin, their general sentiment was along the lines of: "When pigs fly." The admin came to check out what I needed in my cubicle on Friday afternoon, and discovered to her horror that there was literally nothing in there. No furniture, no chair, no computer, no filing cabines --- nothing.
She spent Saturday at the office with her kids, stealing furniture from empty cubicles and stuffing it into mine so I would at least have a chair to sit on. Above and beyond the call of duty, that is. I blubbered my gratitude to her.
In the meantime, I don't have a computer or a telephone or an email. Those will come along eventually. My first day at this very high-tech firm was spent being almost aggressively low-tech. I scribbled little notes to myself on stickies and pasted them to the walls of my cubicle. I poked through a textbook I can't make heads or tails of. I drank a lot of tea.
I went to the bathroom a lot. I drank more tea.
Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow I have meetings. Today was laid back, casual, and relaxing. Not a bad first day of work.
My manager walked me past the reception desk. "I've been out for two weeks," he told me, "and I just got back in today. You'll be sitting here--" He guided me through a magnetically sealed door, steered me to a cubicle, and stared at the empty desk. There was nothing on it except for a cardboard box labeled "Office in a Box," put out by Staples. We peered into it and discovered office supplies.
"Well," he said, weakly. "At least you have a stapler."
July 30, 2000
flamenco shoes
I told my friend "Jazz" that I'd always wanted to learn flamenco dancing.
The quotation marks suggest that the name Jazz isn't the real one, and this would be a perfectly reasonable assessment. The reason I picked the name "Jazz" for her is that she happens to be a jazz dancer, among other things. It was one of her nicks in college. Knowing that, I should have known better than to mention to her that I'd always wanted to learn flamenco dancing.
"Someday," I was careful to explain to her. "I always thought that I might want to learn flamenco dancing someday." As in 'not right now.'
"There's a dance place down on Sutter Street," Jazz enthused, ignoring all words besides the ones that were most favorable to her ear: 'I' 'want' 'to' 'learn' 'flamenco' 'dancing'. "Let's go take a look."
Once we found the store, Jazz made it quite evident that she was bound and determined for me to take up flamenco dancing, immediately. "Here," she said, and positioned me in front of a wall plastered with brochures and advertisements. She got a business card from the cashier's desk and started scribbling web sites and phone numbers on its back. "I'll write them down for you," she informed me, "but you'll have to contact them yourself." She shoved the card in my hand. I put it in my pocket.
Then she dragged me across the store to look at shoes. "You need shoes. And--hey, skirts. You need a skirt if you're going to learn flamenco."
At which, to my complete horror, a salesgirl popped up. "Did I hear you say you were interested in learning flamenco?"
"Actually, my friend here---"
It was downhill from there. "She'll need to get shoes," Jazz said to the salesgirl, who had suddenly become a fast friend. She had apparently taken flamenco before -- the salesgirl, that is, not Jazz -- and had a recommendation for a teacher that Jazz ordered me to write down. Feeling somewhat like I'd been picked up and carried along by a tidal wave, I meekly tried on several shoes before the salesgirl and Jazz were satisfied.
"I don't have any money," I protested feebly as a last-ditch attempt.
"It'll be my birthday present to you," Jazz announced, and pulled out the credit card. "Now you'll have to take classes or you'll feel guilty."
I bowed my head to the inevitable. Yesterday, I called the San Francisco Dance Center for a brochure.
earlier...
On Monday, July 24, out of some hitherto unfulfilled sense of masochism that hadn't found any satisfying outlet in Seattle, one of my best friends, Jazz, came down to the Bay Area in order to take the California State Bar Exam.
Jazz is someone that I don't talk about much in my journals, for the simple reason that she doesn't really enter my life all that often. She floats in and then floats out; or, to be more accurate, wanders in and then wanders out. Usually I'm the one that does the wandering, either up to the Seattle area and then onto the phone to hook up with her. Emails don't tend to generate a great deal of response; neither do phone calls and messages left on her machine. I've been accused of much the same thing, so I'm hardly in any position to complain about it.
As I say, she came down to the Bay Area to take the Bar Exam, and on Friday night, she left. In that interval, we had dinner with "Tara" and Jazz's sister at a place called Ti Couz in the Mission District. 16th and Valencia, in case anybody is wondering; it was very crowded and we waited an hour, but the food -- French crepes, dinner and dessert types both -- was really good. I had a ham and cheese and onion crepe; Tara and Jazz's sister had smoked salmon, carmelized onion, and creme fraiche crepes; Jazz had a sausage crepe that, sadly for Jazz, wasn't as good as the others.
Jazz had been having a bad day. Someone stole her purse while she was at the bar exam. She didn't lose much, but the purse -- a gift from me -- was valuable, being a Coach purse. (Least anybody misunderstand: I tend to forget birthdays, major holidays, and hallmark events in my friends' lives. I make up for this by hoarding up my gift-giving into one spectacular gift, given at a completely irrelevent moment. This erases any guilt I might be feeling with one fell swoop, leaving me free to ignore future holidays or birthdays for at least as long as I did the last time.)
"The California State Bar exam has the most screwed up set of rules," she told us bitterly in the car. "You can't take anything into the testing room unless it's in a clear plastic bag, so there was this huge stack of purses and wallets outside."
...so someone walked off with her Coach purse, which I gave her for her un-Birthday.
"Can she sue the California Bar Association?" my sister wanted to know.