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.

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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.