Tag Archives: work

Going Up…But Not That Far

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There are certain things that become less socially acceptable after you graduate from college. Sleeping late. Going out on Thursday nights. Going to The Kells on any night (especially Wednesday). But, I’ve recently discovered, one of the biggest college taboos somehow becomes more acceptable once you enter the working world.

When did it become okay to take the elevator to the second floor?

Now, obviously I’m not talking about the elderly, people with disabilities, or people carrying something heavy. But 99% of the time, those are not the people taking the elevator to the second floor. Those people have absolutely no excuse other than laziness.

The thing is, in college, if you took the elevator to the second floor, you would not be able to talk to anyone else in that elevator ever again. If looks could kill, you’d be mutilated by the eyes of every person going to a higher floor. People might even make some snide comment if they were having a particularly bad day.

And it wasn’t just the second floor that was off-limits. So was the third floor, and my friend who lived on the fourth floor of an eight-story building used to fret about whether it was okay for her to take the elevator. You couldn’t take the elevator from, say, the third floor to the fifth floor, either. It was a terrible breach of etiquette, not much different from stealing someone’s parking spot or dumping their laundry on the floor. We were college students, and we may have procrastinated on homework, gone to Mary Ann’s instead of studying, and decided sleep was unnecessary, but we were going to get back to our dorm rooms fast, dammit, and no lazy person was going to stand in our way!

But the people in my office who need to get to the second floor don’t seem to remember that.

This morning, I got into the elevator with another woman, and after I pushed the button for the fifth floor, I watched in dismay as she pushed the button closest to 1. She let out a yawn, then looked at me and said, “I’m sorry…still tired.”

Yeah. Because your yawning is the worst thing you just subjected me to.

Read This In Five Years

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Last week I went on business trip #2, this time to Philadelphia, and on the plane back, I had the most awesome seatmate. Our flight was delayed, and when we finally got to board the plane, I took my seat in the plane’s back row. Not long after, a blonde woman in her mid-thirties took her seat next to me. She was clearly drunk, and although the label on the cup she had said Pepsi, that wasn’t what was in it.

Before we took off, the stewardess came to us and, despite the woman’s protests, took the drink away. “I’m sorry,” she said in this really prim-and-proper voice, like she wanted to stay pleasant but still tell my seatmate off, “but you’re not even allowed to take this out of the bar, let alone on the plane!”

It turned out my seatmate (whose name was Melissa, but we didn’t actually do names until we landed in Boston) was also in Philadelphia for work, and she’d gotten to the airport early. Once she found out the flight was delayed, she was annoyed and just kept drinking. “So what do you do?” she asked me.

“I work in textbook publishing.”

“That’s really interesting!” she said, very enthusiastically. Now, that alone makes her pretty awesome, because no one ever says that. Someone once asked me what I did, and after I told him, he responded, “What do you want to do?” So Melissa asked me what my job was, and I told her about how I hire people to write supplements for textbooks.

“Oh!” she said. “So you have power!”

She kept cracking me up for the rest of the flight. Being the proverbial three sheets to the wind didn’t stop her from asking the stewardess, when she brought the drink cart around, if she could have light beer. (No alcohol on this flight.) And when the plane was landing and we were supposed to have our seatbelts on, Melissa wondered out loud if she could sneak into the bathroom and avoid pissing off the stewardess more. (Incidentally, the stewardess did notice and said loudly, “You have got to be kidding me!”)

She asked me what I was doing over the weekend, and I said that the next day, I was going to see Sex and the City and go out with some friends. “That’s it?” she said, as if I’d said I was going to stay home and clean my room. “You’re young! You’re in your twenties! Go out! Do some shots! Meet some guys for me, okay?”

My favorite thing she said, though, was after I’d talked about how expensive housing is around here and how I don’t think I’ll ever be able to buy a house (which is a subject for another entry). Melissa looked at me. “Five years,” she said. “In five years, you’ll have everything together and everything will all work out.”

Now, a drunk woman on a plane is most likely not a prophet, but that kind of gave me hope nonetheless.

Five years. A lot can happen in five years. In five years, I may have moved up the ladder at work. I may have moved somewhere else. I may have published a book. I may be in a relationship. Hell, I may be married. And maybe, somehow, I’ll have found the money to buy a house.

Who knows if all that will happen to me, in five years or ever? But the bottom line is that it could.

I think when you’re in your twenties, it’s easy to feel like you need to get everything done right now, or that you’re behind everyone else. While you’re in school, the rules are clear: you go to school, work hard, get good grades. But once you graduate from college, the rules disappear, and you try to figure out what they are by watching other people, and there’s always something to make you feel like you’re doing things wrong. You work in retail while your friends have full-time jobs. You still live at home while your friends have their own apartments. You can’t even get that guy at the bar to notice you while your friends are getting engaged. And even when you get what you think you want, it turns out not to be so perfect. You hate your job and wish you’d decided on something else, or things don’t work out with your significant other, and meanwhile, you have no money. You wonder why people younger than you are getting promotions, or how it is you missed out on meeting the love of your life in college.

But things can change pretty quickly. I know I’m light years happier now than I was just a year ago, so when I think about everything that’s happened to me in the last couple of years, it’s not unfathomable to think that things could be much different in five.

Wow. I’d intended for this entry to be just a quick, funny story about a plane ride, and I ended up musing on the entire nature of existence as a struggling single twenty-something. All because of a drunk woman on a plane.

Five years. Thanks, Melissa.

Business and Pleasure

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I’m twenty-three, single, have no kids, and haven’t done much traveling. I am, therefore, in probably the only point of my life where I’ll be this excited about a business trip.

My first one was last week. I went to San Francisco for a conference, where I worked a booth talking to professors and trying to get them to fill out forms so we could send them books and hope they’d want to use them. I’d never been to San Francisco before, and I discovered that it’s a really nice city. Small and easy to walk like Boston, but a lot hillier. I went on one of those cable cars, had dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf, did some shopping (well, didn’t really buy anything, but I went in a lot of stores), went to a bar, and just walked around and enjoyed seeing things.

The thing is, though, I think I would have enjoyed the trip even if I never saw the outside of the hotel. As I’ve mentioned before, I never travel, so just taking a trip on a plane and staying in a hotel are events for me. I bought myself books specifically for the plane ride, which I’ll probably do another post about soon. Also, this was the first time I’d ever had a hotel room to myself. I was excited about sleeping in this king-sized bed with a million pillows and actually getting to take a bath—I love baths, but the water pressure in my apartment is too low for me to take them.

I feel like such a dork for getting so excited over this trip, but I’m a bit comforted in knowing that my feelings were pretty similar to those of some of my college friends, whose facebook statuses have demonstrated their own excitement at getting the opportunity to travel for work. One friend from college went to Houston, where she’d never been before, and she was telling me, “People were wearing cowboy hats! I thought that was a stereotype!”

Work is a big part of my life, but I don’t talk about it much here except in very general terms. You hear all these horror stories about people being fired for blogging about work, and I’m a bit paranoid. But I don’t have anything bad or revealing to say, so here goes. I am, for those of you who don’t know, an Assistant Editor for political science at a large textbook publishing company. When I tell people this, they usually think I’m either a copy editor (I’m not; we have freelancers who copyedit) or some kind of political science expert (I’ve actually never taken poli sci in my life). Basically what I do is manage the supplements for political science books—things like test banks, instructor’s manuals, study guides, companion websites, etc. I hire people to write them, make sure they’re of high quality, and put them into production. I also do random other things like make grids comparing us to the competition and sometimes helping the sales reps.

The thing with it is, it doesn’t sound very interesting, and a lot of people discover that it’s not for them, but for some reason, it’s interesting for me. I had originally planned on working in trade book publishing, so that I could learn a bit about it since I want to publish novels, but in the end, I liked educational publishing. There was a time when I considered teaching, but I don’t think I could handle it—I have so much respect for my friends, like Christina and Erin, who teach, because there are so many headaches that go along with it. So I kind of see my job as a way to be involved in education without teaching—it’s a different way of helping people learn. Of course, it’s a business, so it’s all about the bottom line, but it’s a business full of English majors instead of finance majors, so it works for me. Plus, I have a great boss and awesome co-workers, so at this point in my life, I don’t think I could ask for more.

I’m lucky that I got to this point. My first year out of college was extremely difficult and full of a lot of ups and downs, but despite some disappointments, what I got out of it was the knowledge that I did want to stay in publishing, specifically educational publishing. I mean, if I had my choice of doing anything for the rest of my life, I’d be able to make a living as a novelist, but that’s not exactly a stable career path. So while I’ll continue to pursue that dream, I think I could be happy making textbooks until I retire, as strange as that may sound. Maybe someday I’ll even get to the point where I’m sick of business trips.

But for now, it’s fun traveling for work, and it’s hard to imagine being used to it, let alone sick of it. On the plane last week, I’d see people on their laptops and think, “Huh, I wonder if they’re traveling on business.” Then I’d think, “Wait. So am I.”

Do I Get a Sticker, Too?

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So at work today, I sent this flyer to the Kinko’s at my boss’s hotel so that they could make 100 color copies of it. I just emailed them the file with the information about what to do with it.

About half an hour later, the Kinko’s guy calls me and says that the copies are all set, and adds, very enthusiastically, “Great job sending the information!”

Um…thank you? I feel like I’m in kindergarten. Sending an email is apparently a very impressive feat. Is it equally impressive that I knew how to pick up the phone?

Random Items on My To-Do List

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It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Christina, who got a teaching job in Southern MA, moved out. Two days later, my new rooomate Stephanie moved in. And a day after that, I started a new job at a different publishing company.

So there are only four months left in the year. And there are a lot of things I want to do in those four months. I have writing goals, but a lot of other random ones, too. Among them:

-Get a passport
-Make fudge
-Organize all the stuff under my bed (I have all these folders full of old stuff I don’t need anymore. I am a ridiculous pack rat.)
-Go to New York to see a show
-Go to a Red Sox game (this might not be so much a goal as a wish, but still)
-Buy some TV shows on DVD (I’m thinking The O.C., Sex and the City, Season 4 of Gilmore Girls, maybe certain seasons of The X-Files)
-Get a better haircut
-Go to the dentist
-Go skating at Frog Pond
-Do more movie/game nights with friends

It’s weird that it’s almost September. Even though I’m not in school and haven’t been for over a year, September still feels like I’m about to start something new, like a good time to make goals. Or re-dedicate myself to old goals. No matter how random they are.

You Don’t Know Me, But Here’s What I Know About You

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D just got back from a skiing trip to France. Earlier this year, her grandmother died. When she went skiing with her cousins, she collided with her little cousin’s ski boot and ended up with a huge red mark on her face that took awhile to disappear. She has a sister, and she talks to her dad a lot. Someone keeps calling her to ask about a position that hasn’t yet been filled. And she’s buying a condo in Maine.

I know all this about her. And yet D and I have never spoken a word to each other.

No, I’m not a stalker. I just work in an office.

D and I work for the same company, but not on the same projects. Her cube is near mine, and while she seems like a very nice person, she is incredibly loud on the phone. And she makes and receives a lot of personal calls during work.

Everyone, I guess, has to make personal calls sometimes. If you’re at work, chances are, if you need someone to do a job for you, they’re at work when you are. Some people give out their work phone numbers, but most people get calls on their cells. And at this point, I can identify everyone’s cell phone ring. There was one woman, who has since left the company, who had this cool, Egyptian-esque ring, and I’d hear it every day at 3:00 when her son called her to tell her that he’d gotten home from school. The guy who took her place has the Mission: Impossible theme as his ringtone. D keeps hers on vibrate, so every day I hear this buzz buzz buzz, buzz buzz buzz.

I don’t get too many calls during work, and I step outside if I have to make one. But I do wonder what my coworkers have learned about me the few times I have gotten calls during work. Mostly, I’m just fighting with my dermatologist’s office, trying to figure out why they’re having so many issues with my insurance. Or I’m getting random calls like this one:

Me: (seeing from the caller ID that it’s Christina) Hey, what’s up?

Christina: Hey, what was that restaurant we ate at before we saw Phantom of the Opera?

Me: Uh, Bennigan’s. Why?

Christina: Because I couldn’t remember and it was pissing me off!

And there was that one time my mom called me to tell me about the Great Cartoon Bombing of Boston. But for the most part, the only calls I get are from sales reps and my boss, when she’s traveling.

D and I sometimes give each other a smile of acknowledgment when we pass each other around the office, but like I said, we’ve never spoken. I wonder if she realizes that I could tell her the story of her life. Maybe before she moves to Maine, from where she’ll telecommute, I’ll go up to her and say, “Hope you enjoy Portland!”

Ramblings of a Work Dork

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I was talking to my friend the other night, and we were saying that now, when we’re on the phone with our parents and they ask us what’s new, we probably sound like we’re being evasive, but we’re not– we just have nothing to talk about anymore. When we were in college, we had four to five classes, extracurriculars, part-time jobs, roommates, friends we saw pretty much every day, campus events, weekends in Boston…there was a lot to talk about.

Now? I go to work, I go home. No more classes, no more activities, and still no love life to speak of. I still have roommates, but only two, and they go to work/class and come home every day, too. I see my friends sometimes, but not nearly as much as I used to, and half the time I just come home on Fridays and collapse into bed–I’m twenty-two and already I’m turning into my dad.

So what’s left to talk about? Well…work, and you don’t really want to hear about that. I could tell you all about what makes our math books special and which schools have adopted them and why we’re better than our competitors, and I’m sure that would absolutely fascinate you. I could tell you about office politics. Or about lunchtime in the wintergarden at my office, with my fellow broke twenty-somethings, where, last Thursday, we literally spent five minutes talking about pickles. And thoroughly enjoyed it.

There was an episode of Gilmore Girls earlier this season where Rory calls her recently-graduated boyfriend a “work dork.” I think I kind of like that term better than “workaholic” (which I’m completely turning into– I stay late at work even when I don’t really have to).

My name is Katie, and I am a work dork.

How YOU Doin’?

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At my gym, I saw a sign today saying that there’s a new massage therapist named Matt LeBlanc.

Hmm. A massage from Joey Tribbiani. Maybe Phoebe gave him lessons.

In other news, I am getting New York magazine sent to me at my parents’ house. I have absolutely no idea why. I mean, I’m not complaining, but I seriously have no clue what mailing list I could have gotten on that would send me it.

Also, one of my company’s textbooks was on The Daily Show. It was in this segment about arming teachers with guns, and then it went into this part about using textbooks as weapons. A bunch of us went into a room to watch it.

An Apple a Day…

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So last week at work I ate an apple core.

We have this intern who eats them all the time, and she was challenging the rest of us to eat one. So this other guy did, and then I did. Seeds and all. It’s really not that bad if you just start from the bottom and work your way around. You don’t even think about it.

Of course, after I’d already eaten the whole thing, she informed me that apple seeds have arsenic in them.

Further research by one of my fellow editorial assistants showed that only the organic form of arsenic is in apple seeds. And according to the intern, in an email she sent all of us later, “Excluding the peel and core of apples from the diet almost halves the amounts of Vitamin C and dietary fibre available in the whole fruit, but makes very little difference to the sugar content.” She also found this poem by Liberty Hyde Bailey:

“How to Eat an Apple”

Hold it, note its size and shape.
See the blush on its shoulder, inhale its fragrance.
Hold it to your cheek, bite it.
Feel its break and cool crisp flesh.
Know the flow of its sprightly juice
and the aroma that lies in its core.
Only then will you have eaten an apple.

So all these years I’ve been throwing out apple cores for nothing. Who’d’ve thunk?

Get we-ell, Get Well Soon

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There’s a Seinfeld episode where Elaine gets cake at the office every day because it’s a big office and it’s always someone’s birthday. So she takes a sick day to get away from the cake, and when she comes back her co-workers have a cake for her and are singing, “Get we-ell, get well soon.” That’s my office, at least lately. I’ve been to four goodbye parties within a week, all with cake. One of many perks of working in a large office.