Source: this essay, which looks hella interesting!
Having an office job is weird. And I’m only like a week and a half in!
“But Ian, haven’t you worked in an office before?”
Not really. If you go over my extensive (and vaguely entertaining) employment history, none of my previous jobs qualify. Dance teacher, sandwich maker, dishwasher, and construction laborer are all pretty obvious. When I worked as a server technician person, I did get pretty office-y a couple times. Once when training in San Francisco (a trip that is up there moderately high on my ‘weirdly depressing trips’ list). The second time when I ended up working out of a coworking space for the last stretch of it, providing developer tools support. But co-working spaces are somewhat their own beast, in that everyone’s working for completely different employers/contractors/etc.
But now I’m in an office, with everyone working for the same company, and I’m going to be here for a while. Observations so far:
- I’m currently staying late and sitting in a, uh, sitting area. With seats! Trying to see how leaving an hour later affects traffic. Having to commute on an actual (roughly) 9-5 schedule and hit rush hour is WEIRD.
- This place has lots of tech-company-esque perks. What you think of when you think of working at, like, Google. Ping pong, popcorn machine, fancy coffee machine, there’s a fucking hoverboard in the corner. And I’m sitting here being like “but what if not these, and instead paid more?” Especially because no one really seems to use them (drink/coffee machines excepted).
- There’s an automated mini-mart thing in the main kitchens, where you can buy snacks. These are provided a third party and have cameras pointed everywhere so you can’t, ah, “borrow” anything. But more importantly it just keeps making me think “ew, company store.” Even if the pringles I bought to supplement my too-small lunch were decent.
- Corporate pride makes me want to barf. Even if the people expressing it are nice.
- There’s a lot of the company trying to look egalitarian while still not being. I think they do a better job than most of not being jerks to the low-wage workers, but the wage gaps between different departments at least feel stark. I haven’t figured out the pay for a lot of groups, but as a weird proxy, they did a food donation drive that was measured in pounds, and the departments you’re pretty sure get paid more? Yeah, they donated way more. I’m guessing because they could actually afford it.
- I’ve spent a lot of my days having the thought “but what if…UNION” bouncing around in the back of my head. I look forward to giving it a shot in a few months, getting caught out too early in the process, and getting fired.
- The internet here is mostly good but does some wonky stuff. Boo hiss. At a guess based on at least one error message I’ve gotten, I think they’re doing router-level filtering/security stuff. Which makes sense and doesn’t really affect my ability to do my job, it just leads to some strange errors sometimes.
- I can see how office jobs would sink into people’s brains and get things twisted. It’s a lot easier to convince yourself you need to do “just one more thing” when the barrier to doing that one more thing is very low and the thing itself isn’t physically demanding. Unlike, say, “I’ll go unload another 15 sheets of drywall.” Ugh, drywall. Almost as bad as plywood. XD
- I keep wanting to fix things. Big things (see: union). Small things (see: training materials that aren’t accessibly to visually impaired folks). All the things!
That’s it so far! Also I should probably look into driving home, so wrapping it up it is!
How have you all experienced office jobs? Please tell me I’m not the only one who finds the experience of them odd.
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