In the Loop. Stupid.

Dear Internet,


Yesterday was the first step towards being a real eating, breathing and working human being. By first step I mean I got out of bed, put on dress pants and a nice sweater, heels (believe it or not) and lugged two (yes, two bags) to an office in the loop for my first day of work at a new company. The first few days at a new job are really a trial. And by trial I mean a court case. You are presented, as, presumably, a juror for the first several days and weeks, with never before seen evidence into a situation that you had no a priori knowledge.

During the interview phases one learns minimal details into a company: what you will be working on, who you will be reporting to, if the company is public or private (and therefore revenues depending on that information), goals, and, hopefully, what is really expected of the position. Whether they want to or not, interviewers are often unable or incapable of truthfully expressing some critical components of the role, the company, how they relate, and of course the politics of a company. We all know this, or at the very least, should know that.

Gaining more truthful, or even downright illicit, information is difficult, if not impossible. Which is exactly why during the first few weeks of employment within a new organization new hires are total, bumbling, and at times, idiotic weirdos.

So with that, I take all new corporate challenges within the first weeks very simply. Learn the industry, figure out who is important and who is not, learn who will help you and who won't, and last, but certainly not least, worry about the most important things. What, mind you, are the most important things? I will tell you. Hold your horses.

1. Attempt not to fall and bust your ass on ice.

Since you will be wearing dress pants, a suit, and/or a skirt, walk cautiously at all times as you may fall for no apparent reason, particularly if you are accustomed to wearing sweatpants (Pajama Jeans if you're lucky), tank tops, and slippers, which are much easier to move about in. Not to mention, more comfortable than gabardine or wool. Heels particularly are dangerous the first week back in the real world as you have likely experienced serious calf muscle atrophy.

2. Determine how to get home at various times of the day, factoring in limited service times and CTA service cuts and layoffs.

In the event that you go stark raving mad in the first hours of your first day and realize that you made a horrible decision, be sure that you can escape and get home within 45 minutes of leaving so that you can find a bar to go to in your neighborhood that has a good happy hour special, since in the near future you will be out of a job.

3. If you do not go insane in the first five hours of your first day, find out what, if any, chat applications your company allows you to install.

This is really important. So important that it should probably be number 1. The sheer boredom you will face your first week of work (at least three days) will drive you to all sorts of desperate measures. If you do not have the rights to access websites with downloads for chat, find a work around. As a last resort, contact the Infrastructure Manager from your previous company and ask him to hack into your computer and install Trillian or Digsby.

4. Sit at your desk all day long. Get a bucket to pee in as necessary.

As much as it pains me to recommend this, do not succumb to the temptation to leave the building, wander around the streets, go to Urban Outfitters, find a hot dog cart at 10:00 AM, or chain smoke cigarettes on or near the loading dock. It's really the wrong thing to do, even though it would help pass eight hours way better. Options besides sneaking out: find unbanned and awesome websites like The Oatmeal, some nonsense celebrity blog like Radar Online or Perez Hilton (BTW, can you believe this whole Sammie and Ronnie saga? Both their names end in i-e. I thought they were made for each other!)

5. When you are being finger-printed do not tell the man squishing your digits onto pieces of paper, "I know how to do this."

This will almost certainly throw up red flags to the SEC and FIMRA, but it will also make you look more like a criminal than you already feel. If, by chance, you are wearing a ski mask and for some reason holding up the finger printing store, then by all means tell the proprietor that you know what you are doing. But if you are a regular office drone, or returning office drone, please keep your understanding and knowledge of finger printing to yourself.

6. When finally boarding the bus after 5:00 PM, make sure you are first in line.

You have worked terribly hard this week so far. Especially if you factor in that you haven't left your home during business hours in five and a half months, wore actual real-person clothes, shoes made of leather, and carried not one, but two bags. Therefore, no matter how tired or poor these huddled masses may appear, you are worse off for deciding that going to an office , rather than sitting on your sofa with a computer on your lap, was the way to be.

Tata for now. I am too tired to continue on to number ten.
Shelly

PS -- no good pics either. I'll have to remember to take pictures of the finger print entry machine.

Good-bye House! Hello World!

Dear Internet,

Over the past five and a half months I've had the luck of rolling out of bed, traveling down the hall half awake, filling my Seagull coffee mug, AKA Remnants of Long Island, with fresh brewed Colombian coffee, wandering outside for a cigarette, and then navigating myself back down the hall to work a full day (well, close enough) from my home office. Next Tuesday dawns a new day for Shelly: I will be venturing off to an office for real, live, honest to goodness work.

Holy Shit!!!! Only now am I realizing the true ramifications of this endeavor. Now I will need to rise, presumably, when the sun is doing the same thing. The cats are already prepared to pounce on me at 5:30 AM, and will certainly be excited in the coming weeks and months because they will be dining on Friskies at 6:30 AM instead of 7:30. This is going to be huge for them. And by huge I mean they're kitty screams will be of joy instead of panic that I'm dead and they won't get Mixed Grill or Salmon Dinner.

I'll need to wear socially acceptable clothes and shoes. Probably even business casual. I'll need to ride the bus, and perhaps a subway. Buy lunch. Talk to people. Do work. What on Earth was I thinking?

Now that I really think about it, working from home is a fantastic concept. Even the words have a nice ring: work from home. Home. It's sort of like saying, "Look like an asshole, drink at your desk, do whatever, as long as you just get the job done." I prefer "work from home" tremendously to Working Remotely. That is a buzzword if I ever heard one. And kudos to the maniac who came up with the whole idea. S/he should really be awarded with some sort of prize for being awesomely lazy and manipulative.

Working from home, aside from allowing me to maintain a paycheck after moving and adjusting to Chicago, has also offered me some fun stuff. First off, I can, if I feel like it, just roll out of bed. I can work in front of a TV to stay on top of the comings and goings of the variety of hosts on The View or check out Giada De Laurentiis' latest creation on Food Network. I can wear retarded outfits. Actually, I'll be honest, they're not outfits. It's just crap slapped together. Crap from seventh grade. And, I can start drinking really early in the day if I feel like it. Working from home, it's a wonderful thing.

But like anything awesome -- like cats, babies, narcotics -- there are some downsides. So when considering working from home as an everyday gig, please consider the following:

1. You will get bored. Often. There's no one to talk to or not do work with. I've taken to talking to myself more than I did originally. I bitch and moan about how everyone is a jerk and needs to get a life, learn how to function, etc. I also live in an alternative universe where I'm really important and relevant.

2. Your cats will sit in front of your monitors at the worst possible moment and make it nearly impossible to check your Jack White RSS feed or watch the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County on Bravo.com.

(I realize that Jack White, The White Stripes, The Dead Weather, so forth and so on into eternity, and The Real Housewives of Orange County do not really mesh, probably shouldn't be uttered in the same sentence, and that I have committed a mortal sin. I also don't care.)

3. It takes nearly all of your energy not to crack open a beer or have a Bloody Mary before 2:00 PM.

4. There's really no excuse for not making your bed or washing the dishes. You have no where to go.

5. Everyone thinks you're still working, even on vacation days, simply because you work from home.

Having said all that, it is important to clarify that there are, obvs, some major up sides to working from home:

1. If there's no one to talk to you can just chat on IM all day. You also can wear whatever the hell you want -- including t-shirts with holes in them, flip flops, no make up, and sweatpants. (I really wish I had bought a pair of Pajama Jeans before the end of this whole work from home thing.)

2. You can do your favorite things: hang out with your cats and obsess over when The White Stripes are going to put out a new album, when The Dead Weather are going to come to Chicago, if you should become a Platinum Member of The Vault and get special records even if you don't have a record player, and watch and learn endless things (I call it research) online. In the past few months I have really learned a lot about Heidi Montag, Kim Kardashian,and some other nonsense. Today for example, I read John Mayer's interview in Playboy.

3. You can crack open beers at 4:00 PM because it's 5:00 PM in New York. Which usually results in something like this around 7:00 PM.


4. You don't have to make your bed, because you can work in it. I can't do anything about washing the dishes. You should really do that anyway.

5. You technically work later because you're in a different time zone, so you can send nasty-grams at 6:00 PM Central and the jerks on the East Coast have to start working again. Suckers.

In the end, basically what I'm saying is that working from home kicks ass. But it's also boring. Working in an office is awful, but gives you great material. At least if you have worked in the Dunder Mifflin of software. Or anywhere remotely dysfunctional. I'm sad to see my days spent in front of a computer in an apartment on the South Side of Chicago go. I'm sad about losing free flights back to New York. A company paying for my Internet. Friends and family back home. But I'm also excited to get outside, pick up a hot dog at lunch, meet some new people, and generally feel like I'm part of the world again. At least right now. I'll let you know how re-joining the real world is next week.

Shelly