The First Week

Starting a new job is miserable. Not as miserable as the panicked desperation of unemployment, but, it is distinguishably awful in its own right. The awkward unfamiliarity of a new job creates a unique brand of misery not found anywhere else. For starters, you are all but worthless, as you require some degree of hand holding with every task. Secondly, your initial tasks are nearly all scattered and random, because despite their full awareness, it always feels as though no one was fully prepared for your arrival. You are too new to be trusted with anything important so you are haphazardly given assignments from off the top of your manager’s head, all of which amount to some form of busy work. However, you won’t understand the randomness of these assignments until months later, when you realize how little they had to do with your actual job. In between these specific, yet meaningless tasks, you are typically directed to “browse the systems” and “familiarize yourself with old deals” all while being asked on an hourly basis if you are getting “settled in”. Essentially, everyone around you is praying you will slide into the fold as quickly as possible, so that finding things for you to do is no longer a chore they have to worry about each day.

The irony is that although everything you are doing is relatively pointless, you are actually working your ass off. If fact, that first week is probably the hardest you will work in your entire tenure. Whereas you don’t know how to operate the copier or coffee machine, you also don’t yet know how to slack off. You are literally working eight full hours each day, and it’s exhausting. You always start a new job with a slight degree of trepidation and worry that unlike every other job you’ve ever had or heard about, maybe people don’t slack off here. Thus, for the first few weeks, you are always fearful of this concern and therefore no personal emails are checked and the internet goes unbrowsed. Every temptation is squashed by the idea that you cannot be seen doing anything but working. This fear can remain for several weeks, or until you realize your current workplace is about the same as every other office in the America and the employees do, in fact, dick around.

Because you are new, every interaction and experience is one of a kind and you have to stay sharp. At your old job, you knew everything about every co-worker, had entertained every conversation and had dealt with every issue more times than you could count. This allowed your senses to go on autopilot and required very little emotional energy. Now, you are starting with a clean slate. Each trip to the restroom can result in a new conversation with a new person and your psyche must be prepared at all times. You just want to take a piss, but for now that involves learning a new name, pretending to care, faking a smile and listening to yet another office monkey generically explain how busy your new group will keep you. Coupling these interactions with your inability to do anything but work, you extend a great deal of mental and emotional energy, which completely drains you by day’s end. Come Friday afternoon of your first week, you feel as though you’ve run a marathon. Every dufus stops by your desk and sarcastically proclaims, “well, you survived the first week”, before asking you about your weekend plans. You can’t tell them that you plan to get shitfaced, so you revert to the standby response of having no plans, to which they reply, “those are sometimes the best kinds”. Eventually you leave on Friday afternoon and go get shitfaced.