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January 14, 2008
About work
The Columbian moved its headquarters over the weekend, from a 50-some-year-old crowded, florescent-lit structure that gave me the first migraines of my life to a massive six-story structure my publisher built to very high environmental standards. And did I mention that I have a window?
We broke ground on this building just about two years ago, a few weeks after I had started my job, and my anticipation has been mounting as I've watched the structure climb and I've waited through delays. This morning as I left for work I felt like the luckiest newspaper person alive. In these days of layoffs and pay cuts and broken business models, my newspaper is moving to an amazing new building and looking forward with optimistic trepidation to the future.
My euphoria evaporated soon after I arrived on the job. My computer wasn't set up right. I struggled with the voice mail system. I didn't know how to send outgoing mail. I couldn't get faxes. This are all pretty standard problems to have in the middle of a major move, and they were all resolved fairly quickly. But I went from feeling like the queen of the world to feeling like a lost and confused high school student on her first day of ninth grade.
Change is scary. I kept getting lost on the way to the bathroom. The building smells different. I don't see the same people I'm used to seeing every day. I do see other people who I've never even met before. The noises of this new building are different. The procedures we use are different. The facts of daily life are different.
Within a few weeks, I'm sure a new routine will begin to assert itself. Within a few month this will all seem ordinary, and I'll begin to forget how blessed I am to have a view of a river and a bridge, to have daylight even in the winter, to have high-grade environmental air purifying my lungs.
Soon, new people will be hired who have never known anything but the new Columbian building. Soon we won't call it "new" at all. I'll become a regular, a confident high-school senior who knows her way around the halls and feels superior to all these struggling new arrivals. Or, at least I'll be comfortable and happy and on top of my own little corner of the universe, I hope.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at January 14, 2008 08:30 PM