A Real Job

So I have a "real" job. I told a friend that I couldn't get on my Google mail account or my Facebook account, and she said, that's what people have to deal with at a "real job." There is far less flexibility, and I am still probing the little room I do have to maneuver. Can I take a lunch break? How long? The people in my group, at least, seem to be there all the time, at their desks, hardly even getting up to use the bathroom. Do they have some special ways to avoid going to the bathroom? No drinking water? Secret invention to retain urine while at the desk? Whereas I keep getting up and walking around the building, exploring it, but also taking breaks from having to sit in front of the computer too long, else I would just succumb to computer screen fatigue.

But there's also just the normal fatigue, from lack of sleep. My sleep schedule is also that of one with a "real" job. It was my third night of sleep for the real job last night, and I actually went to bed at 10:30. I didn't use to go that early unless I was sick or something. I kept tossing and turning, however, and so yet another night of lack of sleep. And like many real job holders, I got up at 6:30 this morning, though I had woken up many times before that. And I rushed, just like what I see in movies of real job holders, to get breakfast done, to prepare my lunchbox. Of course, I could sleep half an hour more by buying breakfast and lunch at the "firm." (Is that term only used for law offices? I've heard it used with my lawyer sister and from the movie "The Firm.") In fact, unlike many unfortunate real job holders, I get to work at a big corporation that actually serves very good food (and at a reasonable price). Maybe when I actually earn the salary of a banker, as opposed to an incipient banker, would I feel more comfortable buying food. But like a good incipient banker, I am counting my pennies, just I have in the past.

And like many real job holders in the Northeast, though probably a minority, I am taking the train to work. I held my Au Bon Pain thermos full of the hot chai I couldn't finish for a rushed breakfast, waiting on a chilly platform for the train as the sun steadily rose behind me. And I was lost in thoughts. Thoughts of having a real job. Thoughts of my feelings of having a real job. I realized the day was disappearing; not really disappearing, merely swallowed by something called "job" that had for eight years taken a backseat in my life. On a typical day like this, in the past, not so distant past, I would still be sleeping, after having danced all night, and I would wake up to make a very slow breakfast at a time when real job people would be starting to feel like having lunch, and I would spend an hour or two reading news, of the world or of Facebook friends. And at some point I would do some work, all in the comfort of my own home, in my kitchen, or the sunny living room.

Now I was lost in my thoughts while standing in freezing temperature, holding a cheap thermos that was rapidly letting the heat of the chai get swallowed up by the big world that I am waking up to. Of course, I chose this change; I wasn't forced to take the change. I didn't lose the job that permitted my flexible lifestyle and had to seek a "real" job. I found myself lost in that flexibility, without goals, without aims to direct my ambitions. So I picked something nearly the opposite: working at a bank, where the only thing non-real about it is that I was nearly sneered at for wearing a suit among people who dressed very casual. So besides the obviation of the tie and the suit, I have locked myself in this inflexible world where people think about money all the time, not really in the greedy way that those outside the finance world imagine "us" to be, but in the way that is the medium of the daily work movements. And money is the underlying engine and reason for the existence of the work, just as the pursuit of knowledge is for a laboratory, but most people, especially my group, aren't thinking about money at all, but how to help those who do think about it constantly.

So the switch in thinking is also new to me. I actually need to care about my work, be crazy about it at some point. I am not entirely sure how that will work. The finance industry has a reputation of being dry and boring. I have never known any programmer that thinks programming for this industry is the most exciting thing in their lives. In fact, many people use the banking industry as a counter example when they want to say how exciting their startup is. "It's not like working at a bank; we want people to innovate, to try different ideas. You aren't locked in to some structure."

So I need structure, for now. And I am not here to learn to program, because, as I am slowly discovering, programming here is quite easy unless you are the one writing those complicated algorithms to optimize your profit. I am here, in addition to re-learning structure and discipline, to learn about finance. Simply because I like learning but hate going to school where books weigh more than their gravitational pull by this solid earth I walk on.

Or simply, I want to know what it's like to be at a real job again. I have only had a real job for a year and a half after graduation in 1997, and even that one I was quite flexible. This would be the most inflexible job I have had, and I am curious as to what I will learn about myself out of this experience.