Second Home

This has been one of the best weeks I've ever spent at my job, and I owe it all to my new home away from home.

I love what I do, work with a great team of people who rarely stray outside the boundaries of their responsibilities, and save for one or two annoyances things go smoothly, which is good since with the volume of work I have the slightest pause can set me back. There are good jobs in this world and bad ones, and attitude can easily influence one's perceptions. Aside from my old neighbors being loud, and one perpetually sick, they were all constantly complaining aloud, especially the sick one. I tuned her out as best as I could with my headphones, but often her stress over her workload(which was less than mine) was contagious. I would often find myself suffering from “What do I do first?” syndrome. I'd have two catalogs to work on after a meeting, one to create and one to refine, and somehow I'd send e-mails, or work on flyers or jackets, and suddenly it would be five o'clock and I hand't even touched either priority. I never handed in anything late, but I was constantly crossing the finish line just before the final buzzer, barely making it.

This was the first full week in my new digs. I only spent half a day there last Thursday and had taken the day off on Friday. The people in that area often speak aloud about various things. Occasionally some complain about work. Some even break into spontaneous song. And yet, it's a totally different chemistry than my old area, perhaps because some of these people are friends. I'm not annoyed(yet), and instead of thinking how dumb people are and putting on my headphones, I've occasionally joined in some of the conversations around me. Rey in particular gets a lot of visits from mutual friends, and back when I was considering the move I feared I would be distracted and talk instead of work. Somehow this week, I was able to do both. Even when I got up and joined in full conversations, and then panicked that I hadn't been working, when I did get back to work things went smoothly. Somehow, with a new relaxed attitude, I was not only on time with all my deadlines this week, but in many cases I was as much as THREE days early. Even yesterday, when I took a long lunch at Benihana to bid a farewell to a departing coworker, I accomplished quite a lot when I returned. I didn't feel rushed or pressured. I just sat down, started working on one thing at a time, listened to music, and suddenly everything that had to be done was done, and more.

Sometimes late in the afternoon, as people have departed, I'm still able to hear my old neighbor barking several rows away. I have two walls between myself and her now though, and while they block the infested gleeks that used to fly over my old wall, my headphones are more effective at drowning her out. I'm also less exposed to the stupidity of some of these people, whom I frequently overheard yelling at our techsupport guys on the phone, even hanging up, over things they honestly should know already given their computer-reliant profession. I sit near a printer, which is also a dream come true. I can see who comes over and shuffles the pages in frustration, or stares at the printer without reading the “load paper” message. I saw one woman just standing, looking bewildered and sighing heavily, until I excused myself, leaned in, and added paper. Later she returned, sighed loudly, and left as seconds later I heard the thing printing. We have print-monitors on our computer. They tell us if a job has gone through and if there's a problem such as a lack of paper or toner. In my old spot I never got up to check the printer unless I saw the files had gone through, and if I saw a problem I picked up the phone and let the tech guys know. It's all stuff that I think is common sense, but clearly isn't for some people. I don't have a lot of patience for those lacking it, and it doesn't come from any kind of nerd elitism, or at least I hope it doesn't. There's a difference between not knowing something and being ignorant, and it involves a choice. I read memos that go out. I experiment with applications. And when I'm stuck, I compare notes with more knowledgeable coworkers and ask them when I don't know how to do something. When I don't know something, it's my problem. When people cast the blame on tech people, blame other people for things they don't know, that's when I get annoyed. I even had a woman this morning rifling through the pages, not finding hers, and shooting accusing glances into the neighboring cube where I was talking to two of my friends. Like everyone put down their coffee, hid her page specifically from the stack, and then acted like they were in a conversation when she came by.

So far, my new space isn't cluttered like my old one. I think the organized area helps my focus as well and minimizes my panic states. I had several bad crashes this week, one this morning cost me quite a bit of intensive Photoshop work. The screen froze and instead of swearing, or throwing a pen at the screen, I took it as a sign to take a break and went to the restroom. On the way back, I ran in to one of my illustrators and we chatted for a bit. When he left, I turned back to my monitor and saw it was frozen and remembered what happened ten minutes prior. I hit restart, went back in to the file and recreated my work in a fraction of the time it originally took me.

At night the area gets really nice. There's just enough light to see, and it's very quiet. I feel like I'm in a den or a study or a library. My chair is more comfortable than my old one too. I found a streaming heavy metal broadcast and cranked up my headphones loud enough that I could hear them sitting on the desk, I lay back and almost dozed off. I was done well before 6PM tonight, and really hated to leave and come home. It feels like a home away from home now and I look forward to going there every day. I watched The Terminal tonight and besides thinking what a wonderful chameleon Tom Hanks is, I thought, “ I could do that.”

Seriously. Some of those night scenes where he has this whole large space to himself, with maybe 2 or 3 other friends around, just seemed heavenly to me. I'm just letting coworkers know that if you ever come in and see me at my desk before 9AM, there's a possibility that I've spent the night.