So, I’ve got an office job now. Well, in the sense that it’s a job for which I go to an office. It’s not an IBM cube-farm situation where I have to wear pantyhose and sit around a conference table propping my eyelids open with pen caps or anything; I wear jeans to work, and it’s just a short-term gig. But it’s still in an office, a real one like grown-ups go to, with industrial carpeting and an office supply closet and all that good stuff, and despite the fact that we spent most of Friday either complaining about the rain, helping JB build a fort out of computer boxes (in which he took a nap), or seeing who could do the best rendition of “talking with a poorly fitted retainer,” it’s still more formal than where I usually work.

I usually work in my living room, or my bedroom. So, yeah. Shoes as a requirement for going to work is already kind of an adjustment, but then there’s all this other stuff about working outside the home that I had totally forgotten about, because I haven’t “commuted” farther than the other side of a one-bedroom since we had a Democrat in the White House. Hallway interactions, for example. In my hallway at home, it’s just me (and the occasional cat that has inexplicably decided to bathe directly in front of the bathroom door). But at work, the hallway contains other people, and it’s a pretty long hallway, so if I see someone coming towards me from the other end, it’s a whole thing with waiting for him or her to get close enough and then doing the nod/smile “how ya doin'” combo, unless it’s someone I actually know, in which case the two of us have to fit in a “Hey, how’s it going?”/”Good, you?”/”Oh, you know” in the three seconds it takes us to pass each other, and then of course we’ve probably recognized each other way before that, but The Second Law Of Hallway Dynamics states that we have to wait to acknowledge each other until we’re within twenty feet of one another, so outside of that radius, each of us has to act like we haven’t seen the other one…it’s absurd, and yet everyone does it, and I remembered exactly how to do it like I’d just left my last office job the day before. The brisk nod, coupled with the warm but not-showing-teeth smile? The not-quite-out-loud, not-quite-whispered-either “hey”? Like breathing. Kind of scary how easily it came back, really.

The elevator chat is still just as awkward, because as you know, you’ve got to time the elevator chat so that it fills exactly the time of the ride. The office is on the third floor, which is tricky, and if the elevator chat is between me and a co-worker who is also going to the third floor, I have to time it for the length of the ride plus all the way down the hall, around the corner, and into our “area,” but with an escape hatch in case the co-worker peels off at the kitchen to put away his or her lunch in the fridge. The weather is a good subject for elevator chat, especially last week, during which it did not stop raining for more than three minutes in a row at any point; I could get a whole hallway and a half’s worth of complaining out of that, but I could also wrap it up quickly with an “anyway, see you” if my chat-mate made a stop at the ladies’.

Another excellent topic: the weekend. “Good weekend?” “Almost the weekend!” “Still feeling last weekend.” “Come onnnnn, weekend.” “Big plans this weekend?” “Have a good weekend!” If you don’t know what to say to the people you work with, nothing does the trick like reminiscing about, or looking forward to, times when you don’t have to hang out with them. Heh.

“Nobody really thinks about this stuff that much.” Oh, I know. Nobody thinks about it at all, really; the only reason I think about it is that I had to get used to it all over again. For most people who work in a proper office, it’s probably instinctual, but I’m the like the home-schooled kid who’s trying to mainstream and has to have the concept of recess explained to her. Like, it’s re-cess. You know, with the…playing? After lunch?

Here, lunch is recess. Food gets fetishized at work, possibly because communal breaking of bread is one of human society’s strongest signifiers of acceptance and unity, but probably because everyone is kind of bored. I know that’s how it worked at my last office job before this one. A discussion of the comparative merits of yellow candy corn versus brown would have lasted two seconds in a workplace where the employees actually had enough to do. We, however, belonged to a union, so obviously the debate lasted for an hour, and someone actually went out and bought a bag of each in order to settle it.

We spend a lot of time thinking about food here, too — where to get lunch, what to get, what time to get it, whether to order it in or go out for it, do we want Mexican, does anyone else want Mexican, no thanks I got a sandwich already, what kind of sandwich, ham and cheddar on rye toast with champagne mustard, ooh where’d ya get that, deli on the corner, hmm maybe I’ll get that instead except I’m not hungry yet, what are you getting, nothing I just had a scone, on and on it goes all day. Either someone is eating, someone is fantasizing out loud about eating, or someone is admiring something someone else is eating. Or we’re filling the time we don’t spend eating by going out for coffee, rationing ourselves a snack, buying gum, refilling our water bottles, biting our nails, and otherwise just trying to get to the part of the day where we go home and start dinner.

I’d also forgotten about that — the straining to pass the time when it’s slow. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, but when it is, it really is (thus the fort). We’ve all found ourselves trying to stretch fairly small tasks out, hunting assiduously for a particular office supply which isn’t strictly necessary to the job at hand, but which will waste a good twenty minutes while we try in vain to locate it. “What if we used Post-It flags?” “I don’t think we have any.” “Sweet. …I mean, ‘crap.’ I’ll go look for some.” Silly forwards, online boot shopping, “polishing” my nails with a highlighter — you do what you have to do.

Unless what you have to do is go to the bathroom, because the work bathroom is just such an insane, hilarious minefield of neuroses and etiquette mistakes that it’s a wonder everyone in a given office doesn’t wear adult diapers to work or try to hold it in until they get home. At least, the women’s work bathroom is like that. I don’t know if men have the same unspoken agreement about pretending that the bathroom is not actually a bathroom that women do, but keep in mind, I come from an “office” in which I don’t even close the door when I go. Nor do I have any compunction about marching in there with a couple of magazines, because who cares? But at work, we all have to act like we don’t eliminate waste — in a room designed to amplify the sounds of waste elimination times a hundred. So everyone’s all, “Dum dee dum, just here to wash my hands, la la,” and then the telltale “ker-plip” of a poo hitting the water echoes through the bathroom, or the “fffrrrrrppppt” of an air biscuit ricochets off the walls, and if it’s you who committed one of these sins, you sit in your stall, mortified, and then you try to play it off like the toilet paper roll is rattling more than once because you have to blow your nose, yeah, that’s it, and then you come out and race through washing your hands, blushing furiously, looking at no one, and fling yourself out of the ladies’ without even bothering with the paper towels. (Or you just stay in the stall until the bathroom empties. This could take twenty minutes. Or so I’ve heard.) If it’s someone else, you have to try not to laugh, which is hard, because you might not even think it’s all that funny, but if you think about maybe thinking it’s funny, then you’ll just get the church giggles and spend another five minutes in your own stall, trying to compose yourself before going out to the sinks because what if the anonymous plopper or pooter is out there and you start guffawing and she’s embarrassed and you look like an immature jackass? Which you totally are? But hee, farts?

It’s very important, therefore, to respect The Poo Stall at work. The Poo Stall is the stall farthest from the door, and if you do not have to poo, you really should leave The Poo Stall vacant unless there isn’t another stall available. This is really the only stall-selection rule I feel even a little bit strongly about; at the end of the day, it’s a bathroom and we should all just get over it. But you should hear the gears grinding when it’s time to pick a stall. It’s crazy. The bathroom has four stalls, so if you walk in and it’s empty, which stall do you pick? The second one from the door — you can’t pick The Poo Stall, and you want to leave a buffer stall, but you don’t want the first stall either, so, second stall. But then what if someone already took the second stall? Because taking The Poo Stall if you just have to pee isn’t kosher, but taking one of the other stalls doesn’t respect the buffer concept either. And if it’s The Poo Stall that’s taken, do you take the one nearest the door to maximize the buffer? Or do you take the second stall, which is your preference? And can you make these decisions in a split second? Good, because you’ll have to. You’ll also have to splash as much water around on the sink bar as possible while washing your hands. I don’t do that at home, but evidently it’s the thing at work to spray water around all crazily. Or maybe it’s because the paper-towel dispenser is retardedly placed and everyone is having to drip all over everywhere and reach across each other. Shut up, work bathroom.

You too, work air conditioning. I never in my life thought I would complain about AC I didn’t have to pay for, but I am wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt, pants, boots, and a sweatshirt…and a bathrobe. I look like Rodney Dangerfield in Natural Born Killers. And yet, it’s still kind of not okay for me to snap my gum or blow giant bubbles (and what’s the point of gum if you can’t do those things); to guzzle Diet Coke and then enjoy a paint-peeling belch; to stink up the office with microwave kettle corn and then eat the entire bag; or to blast my music. And I don’t really need to belch, per se, but now that I really shouldn’t? I kind of look forward to doing it when I get home.

It’s a good job; I like the people. I also like that the people aren’t cats, so for a change I don’t have to yell at my co-workers to get the hell off my desk before I give them away to mean families, and I like that when I mutter something threatening at my computer, I get a sympathetic response instead of blinking. I like that, when there’s a paper jam, it’s not always me who has to sort it out, and the delis in this neighborhood make way better cheese sandwiches than the delis in my own neck of the woods. You can’t do a sock slide in the hallway here (it’s carpeted) or make your own salad (no decent knives in the kitchen), but I appreciate weekends in a new way, and hey, free paper clips. But I do have to get out of here before we get too close to Halloween, because when we start collectively obsessing over candy corn, it’s going to get ugly.

October 17, 2005

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