Old and New Jobs
Original publishing date: October 30th, 2023
By some strange coincidence, I have been hired in October three times in a row. This was never intentional - with my second job I was supposed to start almost a month earlier but my acceptance got snagged by some missing paperwork that I had to request and then wait for, but it feels almost fortuitous that it's worked out that way.
October, and by extension autumn in general inspires a lot of fond memories of the first few weeks of working at each of my jobs. The rose tinted goggles are obvious the more I think about them - my first job had me in tears after three weeks, and my second job was barely any better, but it's easy to look past that when I think about the circumstances that I found myself in for each. The first month of my second job had me doing next to nothing due to my boss forgetting to tell me to log into the phone system, and my first job's training saw me sitting in the back corner of the office on the week of Halloween working in the dark on emails. The vibes of that week still haunt me every time I think about jobs in general. "Oh, how nice it was to hang out in the office when it started getting dark out earlier and earlier!" No, it wasn't really, but I have a fondness for it.
The office I work in right now is easily the nicest that I've been in so far, with the first one seeing me and the rest of the team I was a part of being crammed into the smallest possible room with the hand-me-down desks and computeurs that the rest of the company had moved on from ten years prior. My second job was entirely WFH, so I can't say much about the office location (lol) save for the two times that I visited. Both times had me feeling distinctly uncomfortable, although it wasn't necessarily the fault of the company. COVID was still in pretty heavy swing when I started, and it hadn't abated in intensity the second time I visited, so a majority of the office was entirely desolate. Still, I couldn't shake the eery feeling that I was in a space that wasn't meant to be occupied. I took a few pictures back then, poked around a few of their older computers that were out in the open (there was in still in use that was rocking a 3 1/2 in. floppy drive) and explored the hallways that I had never seen before with absolutely zero resistance. Man, that place was weird.
I'm really looking forward to the next two months. The slow crawl into late autumn/early winter is my favorite time of the year aside from early spring. Even though the dark afternoons bum me out, the first snow of the winter is always a special event and any excuse to drink hot chocolate.
Okay, tangent actually, but I have a weirdly loving view of the keurig hot cocoa cups. I know they're not as good as real hot cocoa, I know they taste like hot water more than chocolate, but maaaaaan the second they were put out at my first job in the break room I would be drinking at least one a day. They make me so warm and fuzzy inside just thinking about them, and a weird part of me is really excited to have some more.
Have a good Monday, and a good week, everybody!