Saturday, March 3, 2007

My very own office space...

I've never worked in the corporate world before. Well, technically that's not true. When I first moved to L.A. I was a temp for four months at a large company. Basically I sat in a little cubicle for eight hours a day listening to my head phones and performing the world's most mundane data entry as fast as I could. It required very little brain power, and thus I had very little responsibility or investment. But other than that my main jobs throughout life have been in churches and photography studios.

However, all that has changed recently. I'm now the very proud occupant of my own cubicle space at my new job in Charlotte! And yes, it's already brought with it several little adventures of its own.

For the first several weeks, I slowly became less and less able to tune out the daily rantings of the man who sat across from me. While I couldn't see his face due to the cubicle partitions, I spent my days hearing about all the food he ate at the lunch buffet, stories of his ex-wife's fake dummy that allowed her to drive in the car pool lane, and nagging juicy cough he just couldn't get rid of, and which he often demonstrated directly into the phone receiver and into a potential client's ear.

Then there's the "funsies" - the group that adopted me into their weekly lunches and like to e-mail pictures of David Hasselhoff to select staff members, forward messages about being the winner of a new Ford Explorer directly into voicemail boxes (one day I won 6!) and send out mass e-mails repeating every office-wide intercom announcement. They definitely live up to their nickname.

And of course, there are the funny things that happen in a large office that are out of our control. Like the day that the mysterious controller of the bathroom music (kind of like the Wizard of Oz of our office building, I think) decided to blast miscellaneous international kid music in the restrooms. I relieved myself to the instrumental theme song from "Monsters, Inc." and "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" in what I think was Jamaican. My friend reported peeing to the "Mickey Mouse" song in Spanish. Or there was the morning after daylight savings hit when everyone's access cards were deactivated and a group of us ended up stuck in the lobby, unable to actually get to our desks to work.

I definitely work for a great company though - one that bought everyone mini iPods for Christmas last year and allows us to celebrate our impending name change by cutting out of work early for games and drinks at Jillian's. And my job is a blast. I often laugh at the end of the day when I think about the variety of tasks I worked on that day. For example, so far this week, I've spent time on official construction contracts, communicating with subcontractors regarding MWDBE usage, composing memos to CEOs, organizing an event for 100 business executives and top city officials, while at the same time, I've also worked on ordering personalized M&M's, searching for hunting apparel online that can be stitched with our new logo along the safety orange patches, booking an RV for a hunting trip, and coordinating spa treatments during the Master's golf tournament for the wives of some of our business partners. So, yes, my job definitely keeps me busy but it's also a lot of fun!

I'm loving my cubicle life thus far. Stay tuned for more stories from the cube...but don't even think about touching my stapler!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You are so silly! This sounds just like Cornerstone (minus the juicy-cough guy)! By the way, what the heck is MWDBE?