I have a lot of time to think. Ask anyone who is unemployed for more than a week and they will agree that unemployment is like being married to yourself. I haven’t thought this much about my employment status, life, and the great meaning of things since I was an undergraduate in college and I was avoiding finals the next week. Throw in the fact that I’ve been doing contract work and my spouse-self never quiets down. Being married to yourself is like a small prison with no windows. The joys of actually meeting people outside of my own thoughts are welcome rays of happiness and strawberries. I look forward to those days when I am not answering my own thoughts out loud.
Contract work has been going well. Although working for three different companies and not being a core member of any of the teams suddenly reminds me of being a foreign exchange student. I was always amazed that my high school had foreign exchange students. I not-so-secretly felt bad for them. Here they were stuck in small-farming-town Ohio. A place I wanted out of it and couldn’t understand why someone would willing coming and stay. No matter the country every year my fellow students, and probably myself, would ask our exchange students if they had Nike or McDonald’s or Christmas in their country. A gesture of getting to know them and also morbid curiosity of another country. Our exchange students would usual laugh and say, “of course we have those things — silly Americans.”
As I go into week three of contract work I still feel like an exchange student. I don’t speak their company language. I don’t know the jokes, the jargon or the cultural nuances. I come in to the office and check to see what I can help with that day. I’m over the awkward first day impression but it is natural that when you come in to an office of people that have been working together for at least a few months — the exchange kid stands out. Besides each company has their own style guide of not only behavior but work documents as well. So I watch. I listen and I am there to learn. Contract work is a sitcom unto itself. It’s more PBS than TNBC with the amount of life lessons I’m learning. Besides, it’s not like I am that crazy kid hanging in the trees. I am just that pseudo-unemployed girl that answers the phone when it rings.
