Pre-Unemployment

I have to go to work 4 more times. While it winds down, I’m being struck by a bit of pre-nostalgia, and while there were always things I liked about my job, I’m realizing that it’s neem way better than I ever gave it credit. I have friends with micro-managers who watch the clock and are aware of how long they’ve been in the restroom, a friend who has to have her timesheet approved by her boss on a daily basis. I have friends who have little or no internet access, a friend who can’t have a plant on her desk because of her ranking at the company (but coworkers in desks nearby can have plants and receive personal phone calls). I have friends who can’t stand the people they work with and friends whose jobs have cliques that they aren’t welcome into. I have no shortage of great friends and people to hang out with at my job, and I’m grateful for that, and I know I’ll maintain my connections with them.

Frankly, the cubicle life is not for me, but there are a few things about this particular job I loved.

MY BOSS: I’ve had many jobs with good managers, bad managers, psycho managers, and I know a good one when I’ve got one, and this one was the best. He has done the job for years and years and therefore was the kind of manager who could do my job better than I can (which is  a rarity!). He did 99.9% of my training and was always patient and kind, impatient and annoyed only once or twice.  He treated me with respect and checked in to see if I was in the weeds. His encouragement, kindness, and trust made me want to learn the job and be productive. (Then the company was sold and he became my co-worker again, but that didn’t diminish my admiration and respect for him).

INTERNET ACCESS: Nothing is blocked that I’ve discovered and I’m not monitored (to the best of  my knowledge). When it was slow or if I really needed a break from the crap I was working on, I would play a turn in Wordscraper, post a Tweet or a Blip, check my email. Sometimes I’d grade some quizzes and enter the grades online.  My boss knew I did these things and chided me occasionally, but it only mattered to him that I got my work done. And I did. I have friends who have no access besides the company intranet and others who do have access, taunting them like a cupcake in a cupboard, but who were explicitly told that if they went to any website beyond the five they needed for their jobs, they were in deep doodoo.

FREE FEMININE PRODUCTS: It took months for me to discover this (I wish someone had told me), but the tampon and pad machine in the women’s restroom by the cafeteria doesn’t require a coin. Just turn the crank and the tampon comes out! Granted, they’re old-school Tampax (the crappiest tampons known to womankind), and they have way too much packaging (a wrapper and a cardboard tube– is all that necessary??) so I generally brought my own, but it was still helpful to have them there in a pinch and it’s a nice gesture on behalf of the workplace.

REMOTE DESKTOP: True, when you’re used to big dual monitors at work, it’s hard to work at home with just one puny laptop screen and the performance is slower, but the option to work from home is a nice thing. There were giant snowstorms and plumbing emergencies that kept me home and remote desktop prevented me from having to take sick time or vacation. w00t!

NO TIMECLOCK: At this job, we’re expected to put in our 40 hours a week (I’m salaried), and I never had a designated start or stop time. If I want to go out to lunch, I go out to lunch. If I want to go to Stone Creek coffee at 10:30, that’s what I do. I found out in April that I was being laid off, and I’ll admit that in the last few weeks, I’ve definitely taken advantage of the freedom and the fact that my new boss is in Boston, but overall, it goes back to the non-micromanaging attitude my previous boss had with me. A caffeinated writer is more productive, afterall.

THE PATHS OUT BACK: Behind this office building is a cluster of woods with paths and wetlands. In the spring, there are countless species of wildflowers to admire. There are frogs and chipmunks and skinny little snakes. There are birds and mosquitos and deerflies. It’s fantastic to have access to such a thing, and with the relaxed dress code around here, I never worried about getting dirty.

In a month, I’ll have another thing to add to the list with nostalgia: a paycheck.

let’s dance (to the song they’re playing on the radio)

I went to a wedding Saturday. It was small, very elegant, and in a lovely place. Beautiful meal and tasty cake.  But what struck me sharpest tonight was an older white couple, in their mid sixties maybe, who were dancing. They were fantastic, doing all sorts of dances that I vaguely recognized but didn’t know the names of. I kept watching them, even after I was busted by each of them (twice by the man). The bride and groom were good dancers too, but with people of our generation, it seems that if we know how to dance, it’s because we were raised by wealthy parents who forced us to attend cotillion or we took some lessons for our weddings. I fall into neither category. But the baby-boomers can really shake it. They move like they’re not counting the beats in their heads, like they’re not trying to remember where to place their feet and position their arms.

I’m not usually a traditionalist. I do NOT feel that simply doing something  because it’s the way it’s always been done is a valid argument. But yet, something makes me sad about my generation’s lack of rhythm; that’s at least the case when the music playing is not Sir Mix A Lot. Is it our faults for resisting learning from our parents and grandparents? Or is it their faults for not forcing us to learn? I fear that when the baby-boomers all need walkers and/or die, that kind of dancing will be largely lost in the United States. This may be how linguistic anthropologists feel knowing that indigenous languages are dying. Sure, we’ll have the internet to tell us what the Charleston was, but you can’t learn soul and fire on the internet. (Shoot, I can’t even figure out how to crochet from books or the internet. Make a baked mac-n-cheese, sure, but movements that rely upon heart and beat? Not as easy).

Before my Catholic wedding, there were classes. A weekend retreat, actually, which relied upon workshops of varying topics (budgeting, communications, natural family planning, stuff like that).  What I’d wished we’d had was a weekend of dancing, learning with the masters. And by masters, I don’t mean professionals, I just mean people from a generation that cared about dancing as an art. Or even better– I wish that elementary and middle schools (many of which are seeing their art and music budgets slashed or destroyed altogether, by the way) could work dancing in. How do Latin American countries teach each new generation to do that? Learning to jitterbug or swing dance would certainly have benefited me more than the natural family planning class, as the only nugget I remember is that the couple teaching it had four children. I’m not going to go so far as to say that more dancing would have saved our marriage, but you never know . . .