1734: Working Week

I am glad to reach the end of this week — it’s been a long one, largely because of that overnighter I had to pull in the middle; an inconvenience which even having the whole day off yesterday hasn’t quite allowed me to recover completely from. I’m not as young as I once was, I guess.

While I shan’t talk about the job itself — it is generally inadvisable to talk too much about one’s current employer if one wishes to stay employed — I did want to just contemplate how this new chapter in my life is going so far. After all, there’s a significant number of changes here, and while many of my friends and peers have been living this sort of existence for years now — in many cases since the end of university — being in the position of having a “normal” job is still something that is relatively new to me.

I’m enjoying the experience, though. Sure, there are quiet and boring moments, but there’s also a feeling that I’m doing something vaguely useful, and more than that, it’s nice to be around actual real people, even if they’re all busy doing their own things for most of the day.

That, I think, is the thing I missed the most. As something of a self-professed recluse at the best of times, a year or two back I never would have thought that I’d be craving human contact, but towards the end of my time working from home, I was really starting to go just that little bit crazy without having other people around. Sure, I could walk to the shop, but interactions there are fleeting at best, and those who try to strike up conversations with strangers in convenience stores are generally regarded as being somewhat on the fringes of polite society. (Not that my own social anxiety would ever permit me to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a convenience store, anyway; the thought of it is mortifying.)

At work, though, it’s been a pleasure to slot in as part of an existing team. It feels like some people are still coming to realise that I exist, while others have accepted me immediately. I’m particularly grateful for the fact that my immediate team of peers are all extremely nice people that I enjoy spending time with; while our job certainly isn’t miserable or horrendously difficult or anything like that, we form the sort of group that can share both positive and negative experiences together and feel like we have a “bond” of sorts; a sense of camaraderie.

This is, as previously noted, somewhat different to anything I’ve experienced before. In teaching, things varied from being cliquey to “us vs. them”; in retail, there was a sharp divide between the floor staff and management; in the online press, I rarely saw the people I worked with face to face. Here, I see the people I work with — at least those on my immediate team, anyway — every day, and as part of a large company we’re just one part of a whole. It’s an interesting experience, and one that I’m gradually getting used to as the weeks tick by.

I’m pretty sure that I made the right choice to get here. In some respects I’m wishing I’d made it a little sooner.