Work

Work

I have a job now. A job is like being a student except that you get paid and sometimes a big American man called Cliff makes you appear to have the mental capacity of a toddler in a meeting in front of some people that you don’t know very well and some that you don’t know at all*.

In my office there are at least five different companies at work. They are all run by a group of guys which is smaller than the number of companies. Thus, you will deduce that some of them are involved in more than one of the companies. If you imagine that there are six pies you are confusing matters by the introduction of baked goods. That was entirely unnecessary. Anyhow, this means that the hierarchy, rather than following the traditional pyramid structure, looks more like a spider web woven by a badger.

Despite this, everything seems to function rather well and it means that I get to do all sorts of different things with all sorts of different people and businesses. At the moment, I am principally working for a recruiting firm placing people in permanent roles mainly in finance. Nate (whose hair continues its retreat) also works with me on this. We also work with Alex, Christian, Marcos and Gianmarco who are in South America. We talk to these guys on Skype, sending them emoticons and links to videos of an agoraphobic cat. The boss man (not related to my vacuum) is Mike, who begins answers to all questions with ‘good question’, I like to think that I ask him silly questions to make him say it’s a good question but I don’t, because that would be silly.

Recruiting for me, centres around looking at peoples resumes (which in the US does not mean begins again but CV) and then calling them and asking them all sorts of challenging questions. This is actually quite fun and I enjoy talking to people. I also ask people at the end of our discussions if I could have done anything to make the interview better. They always say nice things because they want to be my friend, lover or get a job.

I have also been placed in charge of setting up a tutoring business in the northern New York Metro area using Yale postgraduate students. This is brainchild of David, who of all people, is at the top of Leonard’s (I forgot to mention the Badger is called Leondard) web. This is really cool because I essentially get to try starting up a business from scratch with someone else’s money. If it works out, it will look pretty pimpin’ on my CV/resume and if it doesn’t I will blame the market and it will look mildly pimpin’.

So all in all, the office life is actually pretty grand. Me and Nate often throw stuff at each other and no one really complains. Everyone is very relaxed about working hours which means that I often take work home with me. And whilst I have not fully acclimatized, I am growing increasingly used to fist bumping, being ‘super pumped’ about new clients and using exclamation marks in emails to make me look excited about stuff.

*The incident I am referring to occurred during a meeting on my first on site visit to our biggest client. I said something that was in fairness a little silly, fell into the old ‘just answer the question so someone in the room says something’ trap, and he responded as follows (I can’t remember his exact words but I shall attempt to give the overall impression):

‘Hey, stupid face! Yer, you, the one with the jacket. Why are you wearing a jacket? No one else in the room is wearing a jacket except for Kerry and she’s a girl. Are you a girl piss for balls? I thought not, because you’re a cretin. You have that dank towel smell that cretins have. Also the thing you said was really stupid’

But then he saw the bright red lining of my jacket and now we are BFFs.