On Starting a New Job

When you've been unemployed for a while and are starting to feel hopeless and useless and worried about money, you would give anything for a job. Just a job, hopefully a good one, but it doesn't have to be THAT exciting. Something that pays the bills and doesn't make you hate yourself, thanks.

Then you get a job. And you get that YES FINALLY euphoria. You're not a loser! You're not going to be homeless! You're not invisible! Maybe, just maybe, your student loans were not for naught!

And then you start the job.

You always forget this part when you're ass deep in unemployment depression or flying in the clouds on a new job high. It's not just the matter of getting the job, you actually have to start that job and work at that job. It's a job.

Inevitably it's a mess the first couple of weeks. No one is prepared to train you and the person you are replacing is never still there to help guide you. You spend days following people around being introduced to coworkers you'll never see again and trying not to look too sheepish or stupid. Your upcoming weeks are never planned ahead of time so you spend far too much energy sending "hopefully not too bitchy" emails prodding people to give you a solid answer on when you need to be at work and when you can leave. You feel dumb. Dumber than dumb. You get lost on your walk to work. You stress out far too much about missing your new bus. You have no idea what your day-to-day tasking is and feel like begging people to just train you on it already. And your commute causes a whole extra bag of worms because you HAVE to leave by a certain time, it's not a suggestion, if you don't, you miss your bus and are stranded two hours from home. So you have to be that guy who packs up and leaves in the middle of a meeting. And you don't have kids (which I imagine is way harder) but you do have two dogs who you don't leave alone for more than 8 hours at a time so you kind of have to know your schedule a head of time to plan for that which makes you that bitchy employee emailing people and telling them you WILL be leaving your shift at 5 because, well you will. Great impressions you're leaving here.

And you inevitably have that gut feeling of oh shit did I do the wrong thing is this the right place for me what the hell am I doing with my life. Why didn't I just get a nice, boring government job like everyone else?!

And maybe you got a job with a major food chain and part of training means working in the restaurant for two days and you've never worked in food service and know you're going to look like a total jack ass for two days straight and this happens tomorrow and you are beyond dreading it.

BUT you remind yourself that in a few months (hopefully) time, you will know your daily routine. You will have done the commute enough times to not be terrified of missing your bus because you're not sure where they pick you up as opposed to dropping you off. You will not feel so g-damn sad every time your alarm goes off at 4:45am. Your dogs will be used to the new 14 hour day schedule. You will not feel like a completely useless idiot shuffling around the office with no purpose or brains.

Right?