Training Day

Like a last-second field goal attempt, us younguns have been kicked toward the uprights into the cross breeze. Lifted from the hard ground with such flippant disregard for comfort has never felt so good though. Yesterday, after a morning of application downloads onto the laptop, I returned to my desk to learn about our CEO’s vision of the future. On a top-secret internal company link, I watched in awe as the man at the helm showed me the crack in the glacier that we plan to slip through. And not just him, but we. They might have to stow me away below decks if the storm picks up, but I can at least take notes on how happy we all were when the ship started to sink. All kidding aside, I was convinced, in short order, that I am working for a company that is going to be successful. Just in case, though, I taped a life jacket up under my desk.

This is a picture of my workstation. I am allotted one monitor, which brings my personal monitor count to two. It is a well known fact that the success of a company depends mostly on monitors per capita.

After branding the company logo onto several patches of my skin, I joined a nice young fellow Greg in the corner, to observe him “working the phones.” It was a thing of beauty. As he assured the customer on the phone that he was paying attention with the occasional “yes, that sounds right” and “that’s horrible, I’ll see what I can do about that,” his fingers flew across the keyboard, dragging text this way and that, pulling up windows and filling out a case report all the while. It was quite an impressive display. It looks fairly complicated and will involve an ingenious amount of quick-thinking, but there happens to be a solution to all problems, and my brain is full of logic, if nothing else. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Enough with the rice cakes, let’s get to the pudding. I didn’t feel the quality of mind necessary to complete a posting last night because, for the first time since arrival, I felt a dollop of melancholy. I haven’t been quick to make grace or friends since Kindergarten, and this poses quite a challenge as I have an entire life full of ?????????????? stretched out before me. Stretch marks, if you will. I have always been fiercely loyal to those I care for, but I am no hospice worker, and I can only handle a small case load. Straightly put, I miss my worries. What’s my worry now? Nothing, and it feels like a problem. Tip o’ the hat to giant leaps, wag o’ the finger to human kind.

After a long walk, where I allowed my mind to wander perhaps a little farther off its leash than I usually do, I tore apart my room looking for my social security card or birth certificate. Without one of the two, I was likely to be fired, at least according to a document from the department of Homeland Security. I finally found both in the same place, stuffed in an envelope hiding beneath a picture I made for Greg last summer of a frog playing the banjo and singing about AlGoreRythems. I proved my citizenship with the documents this morning, so now if I get fired, it will be no one’s fault but Janet Reno’s (for those of you who don’t know, my brother was conceived in Waco, Texas, during some kind of hostage tea party.)

Today, we took an entire day to learn about proper e-mail etiquette, professional networking, collaboration, our organizational culture, and how to make a mountain out of a molehill. This last is a patented secret, how do you think we make so much scratch. During the networking portion, our speaker asked “How would Wesley feel if he knew that I was just sitting by him at lunch because I was expecting to use him for something down the road?” She looked at me for a response, and I offered up “I would be blessed to be in your presence.” She laughed, along with everyone else, and told me this was a great answer and that I was wearing a very attractive pink shirt… and then she sat by me at lunch. What a tangled web Wes weaves.

I am on the cusp of gaining a few friends, I think. I will keep you updated on that front. I am not yet ready to discuss them yet, because I haven’t assigned them all aliases. In this virtual world, I have to be mindful of corporate espionage. Speaking of stolen commodities, everything on this site is copyrighted and trademarked to the most powerful of chess pieces; me, the Rook-ie.