Two Days of Orientation Hell

I know I’m going to love my job once I get into the thick of things, because that’s how I am. Throw me in the water head first, and I’ll find a way to make the ocean mine. I don’t mind the awkwardness of being the new person, or the struggle to learn everyone’s name. I’ve had so many jobs in my short life that starting a new job is like second nature. The one common denominator, the main thing I hate more than a chick flick about love starring Julia Roberts, the getting started element that drives me to insanity is the orientation.

Granted, some orientation is good. You have to know what your benefits look like, and safety procedures are a good thing to have lurking in the back of your brain in case of a disaster, but orientation is something that should be worthy of no more than a half a day of coverage.

For the sake of legality (i.e. not getting my ass sued into oblivion), I am not allowed, in my writings, to name my place of work or identify my co-workers specifically. What I can tell you is that my job as a Special Events Manager has absolutely nothing to do with the business conducted at the place I work at. I am part of a small team in the fundraising department, but the rest of the folks that work at, what I will in the future refer to as, The Facility, are highly trained and specifically skilled. Basically, I have been sitting through two days of a fucking orientation that doesn’t really apply to me.

While I am happy to internalize the uplifting mission statement of The Facility, hearing the fourth person ask me for examples of each facet of the mission statement for the 100th time began to make me wonder why the hell I was there. Do I really want to spend my life in a regular job working regular hours with other suburban consumers highly trained in specialized fields?

As the way too perky training guru gave her never-ending shpeal about how to handle patrons to The Facility, I let my mind wander about everything from how my daughter might be doing at daycare to why Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under continued to hook up with Brenda once he found out her whole family was wacko.

Finally, one hour before lunch, Princess Perky broke us up into groups based on our personalities. I found out today that I’m a Green, or the “planner,” which is good for them considering that I have to start working on their major fundraising auction as soon as I’m done with the redundant, non-applicable bevy of information they are throwing at me. The rest of the personality exercise was humorous, but any sort of amusement ended there.

During the lunch break, I ate an over-priced salad and wandered around The Facility, but there wasn’t much to look at. The Facility I’m training at won’t be the one I will actually work at, because this particular organization has one main facility, a specialized facility, which will be my hub, and satellite facilities.

I pretty much zoned out for the last part of orientation, which has started every morning at 8:00 a.m. sharp. Thank goodness I’m not one of those clock in/clock out people, because I would be so fired. In fact, anymore, to save embarrassment and exasperation, I make sure that any job I take doesn’t require me to be in before 9:00 a.m. and will allow a flexible ten minutes given the flow of Seattle traffic, which I can tell you now sucks major ass.

Tomorrow is the last part of orientation. We will talk about having a sexual harassment free facility. Hopefully, if there is a G-d, we will get to watch another exciting training video to compliment the explanation of the boring policy. Those videos rock! They were all made in the ‘80s so every one of the actors, even the guys, has a really bad hairdo and major shoulder pads. These videos rival porn and local television commercials for the worst acting of all times, and I fear that I enjoy them way too much. I can guarantee you one thing, if they ask for volunteers to do a scenario of a sexual harassment situation; I will scramble to be the harasser.

Hopefully, after lunch when I report to my actual job, all of my fear and trepidation about taking a “regular” job will disappear, and I will lose myself in doing the event. If not, I know I will spend many hours over-analyzing every little detail of my life, my work, my purpose for being, but what can I say, I’m a Green and that’s what we do.