In November I started my very first Monday to Friday, 9-5 job. I pictured it being a bit like the show “The Office,” full of practical jokes, shenanigans and humour with the odd touching moment thrown in. Work would just be the background to our fake-documentary-worthy lives.
Instead, my work day mostly consists of doing actual work.
I would never dream of putting my workmate’s stapler in jello. My boss doesn’t play guitar and pathetically but at the same time endearingly try to be liked. And there is no psychotic but likeable beet farmer showing off his combat skills. I am by far the craziest person in my office but I spend most of my day keeping my head down while simultaneously (and often unsuccessfully) trying to keeping a lid on my crazy.
I do work in an office at a desk, but that’s where the similarities end. My day is filled with designing, proofing, editing and corresponding, all to a cacophony of mouse clicking and keyboard clacking and the crescendo of the email whoosh.
If someone did a documentary of my life right now I’m pretty sure it would be the world’s most boring television programming. The excitement of my day is the clicking in my head of when and idea snapping into place, the moment when the idea becomes a design on screen and the frequent instances when I learn something new about design or the programs that make it possible. My human interaction is pretty much limited brief exchanges of entertaining conversation with my 18-year-old office mate during the odd time he looks up from computer programming about at a rate of about 300 WPM, hours at a time. It’s fun but its fairly drama-free and it’s not great television.
For my daily dose of drama, I sweep through local shops on my half hour lunch break. Today, at the dollar store, there was a kerfuffle between two store clerks about a phone call from a customer about a bald cap, but the clerk who was waiting for the bald cap call was blowing up balloons when the call came in and the clerk who answered thought it was the bald cap customer, but it was a customer about another cap and thing got very tense and confusing. It was great.
I just read that last paragraph, and I realize it’s one of those situations where you had to be there while at the same time being fairly desperate for entertainment. I was going to write about the Shoppers Drug Mart lottery line story too, but I think if you’ve made it this far I’ll have mercy and spare you.
In conclusion, the moral of this story is that life is not like television, also life is what you make it, a dollar store is an intense, stressful work environment and last but not least, creating something, anything, makes the world a more interesting place, so do it!