For the past seven and a half years I have basically worked for start-ups. They were all at slightly different stages, but all still had that start-up idealism, free beer on Fridays, and an oft-recited nativity story that involved two guys in a garage with a good idea. (Why is it that companies always seem to grow from two guys in a garage? This might explain why, as a habitual apartment-dweller, I have yet to find entrepreneurial success. You don’t hear about companies being started by a girl, a bitey cat, and a small stall on the fifth floor of the parkade.)
Initially I enjoyed the energy of a start-up, particularly with my first one. It was fresh! It was new! We few bright-eyed folks were going to shape the face of a company and we weren’t going to let those staid fat cats tell us how it was done! My previous business experience had been running a cash register, but there I was creating bonus structures and designing marketing campaigns. And it was really good for a few years until one day someone woke up and realized that there was probably a reason all those businesses out there were run by business people.
(There are so many, many stories I could put here about my first real job. I take solace from the fact that one day there will be a great book out of it. Okay, just a taste: one of my fellow middle managers and I actually had a pretty good evacuation plan in place just in case our boss showed up to work one day with a gun. Actually, there were three of us who ended up being the first line of management. Of the three, one had to leave suddenly because she got hooked on crack, and then the other had to leave suddenly because he got hooked on prescription painkillers. I escaped with merely a predilection for weird ice cream dinners and cigarettes.)
Anyway, after a few of these types of jobs I started to yearn for something where I didn’t have to make up my own job title. I wanted to be a merry cog in the corporate machine. And as of last week, I am! It is exactly like a Dilbert comic, and I am full of zen bliss. The copy room — well, let’s start at the beginning.. there IS a copy room. And it has copiers! Many, many different copiers and printers. There are company coffee mugs and giant cubicle walls and something called a “fun committee” which sounds a little bit ominous but hey, I bet they’re not on crack! It’s so structured, it makes my toes curl. I even already have business cards and a little sign on my cube with my name.
There will be some adjustments — I am an independent cuss sometimes, and I don’t always bond really well with traditional office workers. They didn’t blink when I showed up on my first day with the burgundy art hair, though, so I think in the long run we are going to get along just fine.
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An entire album of covers of Axel F from Beverly Hills Cop? Done in 8-bit sound? For free legal download? (third album down) This is why the internet is still great.
