I'm gainfully employed! After working alone for four years and at home for two, and sweated through unemployment for the last three months, I have now re-entered the world of the working dead. I no longer fear that I have become that most heinous of adjectives in a capitalist society--unmanageable--for I am quite clearly manageable. I have successfully worked 4 days and only gone to work with a hangover twice, and only gone to work without showering once.
The first morning I arrived at work with my tidy satchel and lunch bag. 'Training' took all of 35 minutes, and I was 'let loose' ostensibly to let my creative juices and my decision making lather flow. After about 15 minutes on the job I nearly fell off my chair at the wrist-slittingly boring task that was before me.
You know how you go to a major library, and they have a huge wall of magazines--weeklies, dailies, monthlies, quarterlies, etc.? Well
somebody--some very important person--has to handle each magazine, place colorful, coded stickers on the cover (it is no accident that critical information is covered by those library and mailing stickers), and enter highly critical information like volume, number, month, date, year and simple codes to into a highly sophisticated, fully customizable cataloging system, and if one happened to mess up, and send the wrong magazine to the wrong branch library, well, it isn't pretty, they won't say exactly what happens, these eager librarians just chuckle and look me like "Well, that won't happen, now, will it Missy?" They've hinted at a sub-basement, and a mysterious floor accessible only by the freight elevator, so I have my suspicions.
The other realization that I had after 25 minutes was a strange sense of
deja vous, a repetition that was oddly familiar, both in the muscle memory of my hands, arms, and ass, and a nagging voice that rose to a high whine: I've done this before. Oh yes, the archive accessioning work that I spent the last two years plodding through, hating every moment, counting down the days until I was through, was
exactly what I was doing now!!!!!!! Only now, I was not at home with a tidy window box in front of me that hummingbirds and butterflies visited, I was not in my underwear sitting cross-legged on the floor, my cats and dogs could not visit and poke a cool wet nose in the curve of my back, I could not chat up the garbage men or mailman or wander up to the convenient store to get a Polar pop, a snickers, and gossip with the clerks, but most importantly, I could not flip around and read blogs when I felt suicidal (
here are my recollections of those halcyon days, oh what I did not know I had). I still work in solitude, only now my blessed silence is broken by ratchety coughs, stifled sneezes, beeps, and distant murmurs, I sit with my back to a main thoroughfare, and my guilty conscience cringes at even the thought of blog-checking. I've taken to listening to audiobooks, and I'm sure my red face gave away the salacious nature of the current epic I'm listening to.
**I concluded this post w/ a self-pitying rant that in retrospect (ok, 12 hours and less vodka in my system) was pretty damn pathetic. It's not that bad, and I am quickly getting schooled in the top issues of all sorts of niche groups**
