First Day Jitters

Starting a new job is kind of like being the new kid in school. You don't know anyone, you don't know where anything is, and you're never quite ready for just how much is expected of you right off the bat. My very first shift went for ten hours. Ten hours of working my way through a pallet twice my height, opening boxes to restock the shelves, only to toss them back onto the pallet because there's no room to put anything. Like a new kid I expected a bit of hazing from the hardened veterans, but for the most part they left me alone. I guess it's because the ones that liked their jobs were busy working, and the ones that didn't were browsing our selection of nooses.

Somehow it went by pretty fast. I guess that's because I did a classic new kid thing; I banded together with the other new kids. Me, Julz and Julz (I've also got a high school friend named Julz, so this wasn't confusing at all) stomped up and down the aisles all night trying to find where in the pink row one specific generic blonde doll goes, or seeing how many desk lamps and sandwich presses we could stuff onto a shelf without the whole thing collapsing under its own weight (sort of like high stakes Jenga). I don't know if we were what you'd call a well-oiled machine. We were more like a sewing machine hooked up to a V8 engine. Enthusiastic, but the end result was a mangled shadow of what it should be.

Of course, before all this we had to survive the induction process. I'd never worked in a job like this before, so I didn't know what to expect. Thoughts of college fraternity paddlings and fight clubs for the best position flashed through my mind. The reality was so much worse. We did paperwork.

Now when I say paperwork, I don't mean a couple of forms here and there. I mean for all the paper we used, you'd be able to see the missing chunk of rainforest from space. I didn't count it by page; I measured it in centimetres. We were expected to read and sign our way through the various operations manuals and safety procedures. To me it felt less like training and more like I was signing away my right to sue if anything went wrong. Still, I haven't had to use about 98% of the information contained in those pages, and all the important stuff is on posters all around the break room, so no harm done, I suppose.

It took me much longer than everyone else, partly because I was actually reading some of the pages, and partly because my signature is nine letters long. The girl next to me was just whipping down a sort of hybrid initial on each sheet, every penstroke radiating smug effortlessness. I, on the other hand, was seizing and spasming my way through a vicious bout of RSI as I scribbled my way to an early grave.

I'm certain at one point I read the line, "Do not stand on the safety step." Then what the hell is it for? And so much of the rest of it is just blatantly obvious common sense stuff that your eyes glaze over and you miss the one really important bit in the last hundred lines of text.

At one point we took a break from the paper mill to watch a very informative and educational video. It was a cautionary tale of a pretty young employee whose greed overcame her so completely that she stole a twenty-dollar note. It won't be winning any Oscars for acting or anything else, for that matter, and it was probably funded by that same twenty dollars, but what really got my attention about this video was that it just kept going. As you'd expect, she was called into the manager's office, given a severe dressing down-by which I mean talking to, in case you got excited there-and was fired. But then it showed her at home, scouring the newspaper for another job while her father cast shame upon her with his gaze. And after that, we saw her in an interview having to explain why she was fired from her last job. I started thinking, how far are they going to take this? Is it going to end with her as a shambling coke whore, living on the street trading sexual favours for spare change?

And of course with any job these days, there was an online portion. When dealing with computers, I can't help but feel like whatever program I'm using is plotting something terrible, like corrupting my files or saving my Internet history (shhh…). Call me paranoid, but right away I didn't like this program. The patronizing shitbag actually lectured me on the proper way to sit in my computer chair, complete with diagrams, ratios and segmented representations of the human form. Piss off; I'm the one who has to sit here answering the same multiple-choice questions over and over for the next hour or three (I felt like I was on trial). I'll do it sitting on my neck with the mouse up my arse if I want to.

Most of the questions were about social interaction within the workplace, so it's ironic you have to do it at home without anyone's help or input. At times I felt like I was undergoing a psychological evaluation. I kept waiting to see questions like, "Is it right to sacrifice one person to save a thousand?" or "If you could chose only one, would you save your mother or your father?" Instead there were questions like "Is it okay to tell an offensive joke if you are part of the group it vilifies?" Turns out it isn't, by the way. But being such an exemplar for middle class heterosexual white males, what joke of that nature could I possibly tell? Just try and finish this joke: "A white guy, a straight guy, and a middle class guy go into a bar…" It can't be done.

And yet, despite all the trials and tribulations put before me on induction, by the end of it I was able to raise my aching hands high above my head in triumph. I had survived. Of course, like any retail employee, it wasn't long before part of me wished I hadn't.