Tag: Work

First Job, First Day depicts my first day at my first real job. I was excited and my expectations were high, but the company did not reciprocate. Once again, no exaggerations here at all. This company was very successful, but they treated their employees like kindergartners. Most people quit in under two years. I stayed for six.

Ideal Employee depicts the rough transition a lot of people experience when moving from school to work. I definitely struggled with this. These days, they call it the quarter-life crisis. You have to shift all of your habits and essentially learn to be a new person. Enjoy staying out all night drinking and talking to friends? Only on weekends if you have the energy. Like sleeping in and you’re most productive at night? Too bad, the working world is governed by the tyranny of the morning people. Not feeling like showing up today? We don’t care, just be here.

That said, it’s not all so bad. Earning money is nice. Independence is nice. Learning a trade can be fun. I think it’s all about being willing to change. That, and finding the right job at the right place. I had a difficult time at my first job. They treated their employees like crap (that first boss regularly said things like this), but I also own that I wasn’t willing to change. I’d loved school and I resented having to move on.

I had a difficult time transitioning from being a student in Belgium to being a low-level employee in the states. Travel and downtime with friends are big parts of my life, so the realization depicted here stung. I like what I do, but I feel like in the states, the expectation is to work all the time. Taking vacation always feels sort of selfish. I don’t idealize Europe over everything, but this is one example of where I think they do it better than us.

As with all of the “Work” comics, this really happened and it happened exactly like this. Looking back, I can almost get her point, but then I remember that I was such a low level peon that it couldn’t have mattered.

To become a manager at that company, you needed to be hired into the management track. That only happened if you went to a school that they deemed upper tier (it never occurred to them that people might need financial aid or scholarships). If you weren’t hired into the management track, it was almost impossible to ever become a manager. You had to be stellar for at least 5 years. Even then, you could only attain the lowest level of management and they made it seem like it was some sort of magnanimous thing to taint their perfect world by advancing a lower level worker. It was gross to watch.

Those in the management track were put through the ringer. They only hired kids 0-3 years out of college, overpaid them a ton, told them they were better than everyone else, and asked them not to fraternize with the non-management employees. These kids were then put in leadership roles. Image a 22 year old coming in trained think she is better, more capable, and more knowledgeable than a group of 30-50 year olds who have had the same position for 2-25 years. It lead to terrible morale and I often felt bad for these kids. In such a culture, they usually refused to learn and only focused on short-term growth. They thought the only way to get ahead was to keep the lessers in line and squeeze them to be more productive. A lot of them had potential to be really great leaders, but often just became uncompromising dogmatic assholes.

Either way, I insisted this manager ask our director. He immediately said yes and was thrilled at the opportunity. Volunteering in Tanzania and working with those children ended up being one of the best things I’ve ever done with my life.

And we’re back at that first job. Once again, this really happened and this is exactly how I remember it happening. You may ask, isn’t that harassment? Why didn’t she file a complaint? Well, she did. As I’ve mentioned before, that company had a strict divide between management and non-management employees. If you were non-management and someone filed a complaint, you were usually fired. If you were management and someone filed a complaint, it just got added to the list and there generally weren’t really any consequences. I had a non-management friend who was actually stalked by a manager. Like, he would follow her home and such. It was bad. She filed a complaint and discovered that he’d done that to several other women. HR talked to him, but nothing came of it. Needless to say, morale wasn’t very good at that company.