10 things I noticed on my first day at work

The thought of the first day of work can be most exhilarating feeling... before you get to the office.

The first day of work can be full of excitement... before you get to the office. It's like the first day of school; you can’t contain your excitement but when you enter the premises you are already dying to leave! I’ve listed the 10 things I noticed on my first day of work. Here goes:

1. The blank look on the HR guy’s face when you arrive at the office - the same guy who interviewed you and begged you to accept the package . No one knows where you are supposed to sit, how you’ll enter the building or if you’ll need a laptop to work on.

2. The horror on the admin staff’s faces when they are asked to fix the electrical boards beneath the desk of the most non-private cubicle you just have been bestowed with. Their facial expressions evidence the inconvenience you had dared to put them through.

3. You haven't been introduced to the peon, so he walks in and chooses to ignore your existence, skipping your cubicle and avoiding your eye while serving a tray of tea to the rest of the floor.

4. The awkwardness. Sitting at an empty desk, staring at your phone, you start re-reading millions of year old messages, refreshing Facebook every few seconds on your über slow GPRS, silently cursing your network service, trying hard not to listen to everyone else hammering away at their keyboards while looking super busy and important.

5. You start to personalise your cubicle all over again. As time (barely) crawls by, you wonder which photograph of you and your beau should be displayed at your desk, discreetly crane your neck to check if others have frames on their desks and think about the a bonsai you may keep eventually.

6. You are so bored that when it’s time for introductions and orientations, the relief and excitement that you keep in check is impressive, but wait - that’s a lot of people! Smiling and nodding at everyone, you struggle to remember who is who.

7. Trudging back to your desk after the orientation, you realise that the only department you know most about is HR - but you are nowhere close to working near that department, let alone working in it.

8. You finally message your super busy husband who is consumed with his super busy job a couple of miles away from your office, saying:

“So how about lunch today? You and me like old times?" (Hearts and everything, bribing him so he picks you up and steals you away from the awkwardness for a while)

Post-lunch and back at the office, you try to find the water cooler, the cafe and the washrooms. Success! Now that thechai wala peon has seen you, he has to serve you tea! So you throw in a “Shukria” in accented Urdu just so he knows you are a sweet person unlike the guys who do the “Oye… chai lana zara”.

9. The washroom survey reveals an array of soap dispensers.  You spend the next 15 minutes fixing your hair, refreshing the lipstick, cleaning cuticles, filing the rough edge of the thumb nail, drying hands while your desk beckons your presence.

10. By the time its 4:30, your face is so radiant at the thought of going back home that the lady beside you notices this expression of bliss and casually mentions that the work day at your new office ends at 5:45 PM and not 5:00 PM. She goes on to say:

But that’s just the official timing; your boss doesn’t leave before 8:00 PM.

After a long sigh of resignation, you sit quietly waiting, contemplating how to hurt this bearer of bad news. The last 30 minutes of the day are spent calculating how many years you will have to give in to this slaving till you can start your own business.

And this was just the first day of work - I have approximately 269 more days to go!

This post was originally published here. 

Follow this author on Twitter @mariumarif.