Working 9 to 5, Tryna Make a Good Impression

Today I entered my first conference call, which of course meant I was bathed in nervous sweat for a good 15 minutes previous because phone calls with strangers catapult me into a state of near paralysis. I blame this on my older siblings, who used a combination of their superior strength and a perverse interpretation of in loco parentis to force me to call West Coast Video or Italian Delight every time they wanted to rent a movie or order a pizza. I don’t think today’s youngest children fully appreciate the amount of trauma that Netflix and Domino’s Pizza Tracker saves them on a daily basis. Added to this Pavlovian fear is my natural awkward nature – I am the kind of person who chooses a seat in church based upon how many people will be within handshaking distance during the Sign of Peace (the greater the distance the better).

Take the terror of talking to one stranger, multiply it by ten people, and you have a conference call. The one thing that saved me from full breakdown was the belief that I would not have to talk.

Bee-da-leep.

“Sounds like a couple people have entered the conversation. Please introduce yourself.”

My heart froze. How had I not anticipated this? I spend at least five minutes every morning practicing my greeting to the security guard, and yet I was fully unprepared to say hello on a phone call. I panicked.

“I am Emily.”

I am Emily?? Ye gods. Was I going for Thomas Wolfe? Why didn’t I just say “Me Jane” or “Call me Ishmael” and have it over?

No one had felt the need to walk me through the protocol for conference calls, probably because they assumed, considering my years, that I had worked in an office before.

This assumption is false. Up to this point in my life I have specialized in education, child care, janitorial maintenance, sandwich making, and alcohol. So I am essentially qualified to be a housewife.

This is my first office job and it is just about as bad as I had always imagined it would be, plus it doesn’t provide nearly the same amount of entertaining stories as cocktail waitressing. Since I have been here, not one person has asked me if they can substitute french-fries for parsley, and I have had a distinct lack of mid-western men sending back craft beers for something that comes in a “Man’s” glass (ie, Miller High Life).

I never see the sun and thanks to the patriarchy it’s as cold as Antarctica in my cubicle, and the atmosphere is slowly eating away at the core of my soul. There’s also unlimited coffee in the break room, which is more quickly eating away at the lining of my stomach.

https://i2.wp.com/cdn.someecards.com/someecards/filestorage/l8EzW3coffin-cubicle-new-office-job-workplace-ecards-someecards.png

I do get to do a lot of writing. And listen to rock and roll and classical music all day, occasionally speculating on how “Mozart’s Greatest Hits” came to accumulate 29,923 dislikes on Youtube. You’d kind of expect that someone listening to Mozart knows what they’re getting into. It’s not like he’s some underground Indie artist. My personal opinion is that Philip Glass is staging a coup.

Occasionally I have to attend an intern development meeting and lunch, during which we learn about the company and provide a free focus group for the internship program:

“We’ve actually been reinventing our internship program to embrace a more diverse range of ages. Like in The Intern. YOU know,” Ms. HR looked pointedly at me.

I looked behind and confirmed that this look was directed at me. Really, lady? Robert DeNiro is seventy in that movie. I’m hardly on the same level. This is a perfectly normal age to be breaking into the business world.

During lunch afterward, Alice turned to me, “Did you hear? That intern Rachel is turning 21 next week! Perfect excuse for a company happy hour.” She chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds and swallowed. “When do you turn 21?”

…...

Ok, maybe I'm a little old.

No More Kings, or Why We Need to Bring Back Schoolhouse Rock.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

I read the words behind the glass case in the National Archives and felt a surge of pride. I tried to imagine the founders conceiving the document (which is the maximum amount of political engagement I've indulged in the past 4 or 5 years), but a voice broke through my daydream. Apparently the gentleman to my left was doing his own imagining.

“I can just picture Jefferson in that hot room in Philadelphia, writing this out. Excellent hand writing,” he added in an aside to his companion.

His imagination must have been pretty active, because every time I tried to picture that, I only saw James Madison.

To be fair, in the pictures it is hard to distinguish between one powdered wig and the next. And when you pound out a blockbuster like the Declaration of Independence, it is likely that some unmerited credit may find its way to you.

It had likewise been a long time since this gentleman saw middle age, let alone middle school, which is when most students learn Revolutionary history.

Presumably.

.............

I sat in the teacher lounge grading student work. It was generally a pleasant place to be during the first half of the year, but was unfortunately located directly across from the boys' cloakroom, making it a toxic wasteland mid-year during that interminable period between puberty hitting 7th grade boys, and some concerned citizen introducing them to deodorant.

Maribeth was flipping through the pages of Johnny Tremain, a historical fiction novel set in revolutionary Boston.

“This book is so boring. I cannot believe seventh graders are required to read this. I can hardly get through it myself.”

“Hmmm…” I heard her with half an ear as I puzzled over a student’s heavily interpretive Latin translation, mentally noting that I had read the same book in fourth grade. I sighed at the lowered standards of our present day as if I was decades older than my twenty-some years. Back when I was in school…

“I'm trying to get them interested so I told the students we could have a tea party to discuss the novel.”

“That's one way to do it,” still with divided attention. “What are you going to serve?”

“Um, tea. It’s a tea party.”

I put the translation down in defeat and gave my full attention to her.

“Is that supposed to be ironic?”

“No. It’s supposed to be historic. Haven’t you heard of the Boston Tea Party?”

“Yes. Haven’t you heard of the Boston Tea Party? You do know that they didn’t actually drink tea, right? Have you not gotten to that part yet?

I tried to impress upon her the offense to the memory of the Sons of Liberty that she was about to commit. This was almost as bad as the student who thought that the Gettysburg address was written by Steven Spielberg for the movie Lincoln, except she was a teacher with a masters in education and he thought that Quakers were people who grew oatmeal.

“You can’t serve tea at your party. Stick to apple juice. Also, spoiler alert for future lessons, the Civil War was decidedly uncivil, and the Battle of the Bulge was not a reality weight loss show.

Eventually she yielded, but with regret.

“The kids will be so disappointed.”

Not as disappointed as Paul Revere would be.

..................

Come to think of it, maybe this gentleman can't be blamed for thinking that Jefferson wrote the Constitution.

**If you or someone you know is suffering from Insufficient Patriotism Syndrome (IPS), I recommend a summer road trip with my father (bring a parka because the man has ice in his veins and does not understand temperature control). Failing that, try learning the good old fashioned way:

PS: If you weren't aware that Pavement covered this song, you are now. Do the right thing with this information.