Happy Path

The Day After the Day After

My interview with Charles required me to take a transit route similar to the one I would have taken to the television station. I'd already travelled it twice that week, but to a totally different destination. At least this job would be a shorter commute. Charles had described the building: grey, two-story with a row of Canadian flags out front. Unmarked. I'd driven past it a hundred times.

When I arrived, the place looked familiar in a totally vague and forgettable way. Apparently, the building had housed a ball bearing factory until the bank bought it in 1983. Waiting for Charles to come fetch me at security, I still had no real impression of the place. There were people arriving at work that morning and it looked like any office space filled with office workers. I was used to seeing televisions everywhere and branding to the extreme. I was used to casually dressed, loud talking broadcasters. People who work in broadcasting are a breed. These workers were a different breed. Nobody ever walks into a tv station and thinks meh. A tv station is ADD personified. It's loud and visually dynamic. If someone dropped you in the front lobby of any tv station, a quick look around would tell you where you were and in which station you'd landed. It's also not unusual to see talent roaming the halls freely, ear pieces trailing over their shoulders. What I'm trying to convey is that I wasn't in Kansas anymore*.

Charles burst through the inner-building doors and whisked me into his nearby office. A few words about Charles: he moves fast. Not just physically, but also mentally. He's always eight steps ahead of the conversation. He has a lot of energy, and that's infectious. It was also difficult to rein him in sometimes. More on that later. For the time being, he really, really wanted to solve his problem of not having a PCO. The things his former PCO took care of were piling up and he'd interviewed a couple people who weren't a good fit. The job wasn't difficult, but he needed the right person. And anybody who came highly recommended by his wife was a sure thing to him. He again went over some of what the job entailed, touching mostly on HR and administrative duties, while I took in the work space.

I couldn't see much of the area since we were in his windowless 20x15 office. And en route to his office, all I saw was a football field of cubicles. That's actually what the real estate guy called the area: the football field. It went on for hundreds of feet, or hundreds of bodies, at least. The area was populated by three-walled cubicles, each wall five feet tall, giving the entire place the look of a maze. I wondered how anyone under 5'5", a significant portion of the people who worked in the building, could tell where the hell they were going. My genetics worked in my favor, even when my poor sense of direction failed me. There were also posts with letter/number combinations on them every 20 feet to facilitate finding a desk or an office or a meeting room. The pillars gave the place a real homey feel.

Gaining access to the inner office hadn't done much to change my initial impression of the workplace. Everything was grey and Charles's office had no ceiling, just four ten-foot high walls with a door. I was pretty sure that if the door were slammed, every connected office space would fall down like a house of cards. Beyond the top of the wall, behind and above Charles's desk, I could see a mezzanine with frosted glass. Figures moved behind the glass, making their way along a second-floor hallway. I could hear people in the area on conference calls, but otherwise it was eerily quiet for a space so vastly populated.