Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Working my way... somewhere

I have my own office. I have my own office. I feel slightly ashamed of the fact that the thing that is the most exciting for me about this new job is a white and grey room of about sixteen square metres. I guess it's the thrill of feeling like I have power over something, after years of being at the bottom of whatever ladder I happened to be on, even if it is just which pictures I have on the wall.

Today I bought two plants (my power is ever-increasing- who knows what I will do next... first pictures, now plants, next the world!) and they are making this space seem a tiny little bit less corporate. I look at them and feel the rising panic dim.

It turns out that having responsibilty is slighty queasy-making, even if your boss is very relaxed and there's really no-one to check up on you. At any time there are five or six things I should be doing running through my head and it's going to take a while before that feels like normal background noise.

A normal day for me seems to be: I come into the office, say hello to the walls, sit down and check my email. Halfway through doing that I realise I need to check something from one of my classes, get up to find it, notice a job I didn't finish from yesterday sticking out of the large piles of paper on my desk, pick it up, go to the photocopier to copy something, get back at my desk, check to find an email I should answer, get up to answer the bell, speak to a confused German about something I have no idea about, tell them I'll do something about it, sit down again and realise I don't know where the document I just picked up is, get up to look for it, find it, look at my watch to realise I have a class in an hour and should prepare, get a phone call about a translation and have no idea where my boss is or when he'll be back, sit down to my desk, get a call from my boss who is in the office next door (since when?), discuss something fruitlessly with him for half an hour, scrape something together for my class and then arrive with thirty seconds to spare realising I've forgotten my folder and my presentation cards and have to make up a lesson on the spot.

But as you can tell, I'm coping with the chaos quite well. It'll only be a matter of time before I manage to get at least one thing done each day.