Today's Keyboard Smash

Today marks one full year at my new job. I know myself well enough to be sure I would have written something to mark that fact regardless. I find myself wondering, though, what I would be writing in some alternate world where the pandemic didn't happen. What would that version of my life look like? Would it be meaningfully different, at least with respect to my day job?

In a year, I've gotten used to the idea that I'm allowed to take breaks. I still don't take bathroom breaks at random, outside of my official breaks, like other people do sometimes. I don't overstay my breaks by more than a minute or two, unless I'm training with someone who takes fifteen-minute breaks that last half an hour. But I do take them; I've only skipped breaks a couple of times. The trauma of the last job has faded, so all that's left is my naturally occurring punctuality and neuroses.

In a year with a pandemic, I've become less enchanted by my employers. I've questioned their intelligence, their sanity, and their decency in responding. I've been pissed off about the diminished bonuses and the flagrant asshattery of the admin.

The difficulty of everyday life is that it happens every day. It's easy to lose track of the details that make it different from anything else. I'm now deeply wired for the four-day week structure and for getting up at three-thirty in the morning. While I remember, objectively, that I used to work a schedule that varied in quantity and arrangement from one week to the next and might change at a moment's notice, that doesn't feel real anymore. I can talk a lot of shit about my job now, but the one thing it is is reliable. I know exactly what I'm in for, even when I'm not pleased about it.

One thing I will say, though, regarding the general weirdness of the place: I got a card slipped into my locker by the HR department, thanking me for a year of work. It had a Starbucks gift card in it, but it didn't say how much it was for. I had already intended to hand it off to my dad, who works in proximity to a Starbucks and occasionally gets free promotional stuff from them through his job. Even that non-customer customer-ing is more than I manage--I can't remember the last time I set foot in a Starbucks.

I looked up the value loaded on the card so I could tell him and discovered--$5. That's...hm. Somehow that feels just right for this company, and I mean that in the rudest way possible.

Anyway! Happy one year to me! I haven't been sent to debtor's prison yet, and I haven't had to ask a single customer, "What can I get started for you today?" in the last year, and dad can have a small tall hot chocolate some time. So that's all pretty okay.