New job, new shoes.
I've survived two weeks in my first full-time office job since 1999, which makes it my second cubicle job ever. Every other gig has involved mixing solutions, magnifying specimens, and moving microliters of liquid from one tube to another. The first two weeks have exposed a few differences between the world of tubes and the world of cubes.
Sitting
I now know why America should be worried about our sedentary jobs. In a lab, I was forced to walk a mile or two during the course of the day because equipment was spread throughout the building. I quantified it for awhile using a pedometer, but I didn't write the data down in my notebook. Typical. Just kidding, old bosses! I wrote everything down--somewhere--but probably illegibly. In my office job, I can literally work all day without walking over 200 steps between entering the office in the morning to leaving it at night. The day requires me to walk into the office, walk to and from a meeting, walk to and from the lunch room for lunch, and then walk out of building. Maybe throw in a bathroom break, but given that I am sitting so much, I could probably get away without that. Now, let's compare that to my bathroom patterns in a lab. Or not.
At the office, I force myself to take a quick walk every day, which means I amble along a street lined by one-story office parks that are full of glass and cement. Compare that to my last two jobs where I could jog around a tree-laden college campus or through a world renowned state park. You may be thinking, "Yep, the grass is always greener . . ." However, there is no grass where I currently work; so the saying would go, "There is grass on the other side." I miss those days when there was grass.
The one positive that has come from sitting so much is that I think I understand my dad a little better. He would run 20 miles a week when he was working office jobs, which I didn't comprehend because I hated running. I couldn't figure out why people would want to run more than the length of a soccer field. I now realize that I've taken for granted all of the walking my lab jobs have required. After a day of sitting at a desk, I need to move my legs. I still can't say I love to run, but I am starting to see why my dad ran so much. Maybe someday I will be as fast as him, and run a 10K at a seven minute-mile pace, which he did in his 50s. Then again, I am genetically predisposed to being a sprinter so maybe not.
There is a slight difference between the wardrobe requirements for a human in an office and a grad student in a lab, but there are other appearance-related issues as well. Let's start with the clothes though. As many of you know, you can wear pretty much anything to lab, especially if you are in the right county. Lab safety requirements and their enforcement vary, so at Stanford, I wore flip-flops, shorts, and T-shirts on a daily basis. My friend took it step further and often wore clothes with holes in them. You know who you are. In San Diego, I was forced to wear close-toed shoes and pants, which was a real drag. My wide feet and chicken legs are my best assets. When I switched to an office job, I had to buy a new wardrobe, which meant shirts with more than three buttons, pants that post-dated college, socks that weren't all identical (so I wouldn't have to match them after washing--duh), undershirts without holes, shoes that had most of their soles left, and underwear that--hey, mind your own business. Then I had to figure out how to wear these things. I'm still not sure how to tuck in my shirt properly. And I think my pants hang on me in a weird way because my butt is flatter than my back. And I am considering buying those things that old guys wear to hold up their socks and tucking my shirt into my underwear and doing all those other sexy things I never understood.
Beyond the wardrobe, I am forced to do two other things that I didn't do in a lab: shave regularly and look busy. I probably shaved two or three times per week when working in a lab because . . . well, because I don't think anybody cared. Or at least I didn't care enough to see if anybody cared. Add the fact that I don't grow a 5 o' clock shadow because I am not a barbarian (or manly?) and there just wasn't much need to shave. Oh and I was super busy thinking about science. Except that I wasn't.
In lab, I could kill an hour or more surfing the Internet. I would say that I was abnormally lazy, but I am pretty sure everybody did this--for at least an hour. Back me up, science friends. There are many reasons surfing the web in lab is so commonplace. First of all, everybody else is doing it--but I guess that's the chicken and the egg problem. Second, you're usually in a space where only one or two people can see what you're doing on your screen, so there's no public shame involved. Finally, you're going to be in lab for another nine to eleven hours, so what's an hour or two on the web? On the plus side, it leads to a lot of smart people from different backgrounds being overly informed about the rest of the world, which is kind of awesome. Or it lead to a lot of poor people looking at retail items they can't afford.
In my office, I work in an open space. I don't even have a cubicle, so I have zero privacy. My back is to the rest of the office so anybody walking by can see my screens. I make sure I have some work on at least one screen. If I'm chatting, I tuck the box into the corner so it's slightly less obvious that I'm not working. I'm probably not being as sneaky as I think am, but I have eliminated almost all ESPN and Facebook at work (except on my phone if I'm bored-shhhhh). These sites used to easily suck an hour or two out of my days in lab, especially during college football season, and now I rarely visit them. The result of looking busy is that I am a less informed person about the world of sports and the lives of my friends. Sorry, friends. I do care that you posted some song lyrics and--ah, let's face it, most of my news feed is from pages I "liked".
People
This is the "I have no friends yet" section. Seriously though, the people were the most important, yet least appreciated aspect of lab life that I have noticed. I am still surrounded by scientists in my new job, so we can remove that variable from this experiment. However, they are a bit older than me, have teenagers, and have different goals than me. For them, this is a job. For me, this feels like a huge opportunity. In my immediate vicinity, they are all scientists who read and summarize papers, whereas I am the only one now who is shaping those summaries into client-friendly sentences. Most of them are gone by 5:30, whereas I stick around until 6:00 and still feel like I'm leaving too early. Not a lot of sports fans, possibly because it's an international group--or maybe because it's a group of scientists. Bottom line is that there are a lot of demographic differences between the group and me, and I'm not seeing many potential drinking buddies.
In a lab, you are in a group of self-selected, super smart, underpaid people who work long hours and gripe about their projects, their boss, their careers, and their own quirky issues. They are people who understand exactly what you are going through because they are going through the same psychologically grueling process. I was lucky because I made some good friends, but I was beyond lucky because, at each of my major lab stops, I found a person or two who I still really like, even without our continued shared experiences at the bench. I found a few really good friends who made the workplace feel less like work.
Leaving the lab means I'll miss those random chats that happened during the day while sitting at the scope next to somebody or peering under bottle-laden shelves. No more late night talks or pulling plates for somebody on the weekend, those moments that made you realize you were in it together with somebody. No more random and sometimes heated conversations about sports or international politics or a policeman's responsibility when using lethal force. No more distracting talks about personality types, where to get a less cheap-looking but still cheap haircut, or the worst part about throwing up. Those great friends who accepted all the anger and wackiness that come with me are the people who make my new workplace hard to appreciate.
I'm pretty sure I don't miss lab, but once in awhile, I do really miss the people who were in it with me and the simple and free life that it allowed. So when my butt outgrows my fancy new clothes, I'll think back to a time when I was unhappy with where I was in life but happy that there were great people right there with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment