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This is the third in a multi-part series detailing my transition from impoverished freelance bum to corporate art director. In this installment I am assigned missing hardware, introduced to a sampling of the wetwear, and invited to assimilate the company policy manual.
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Meatspace Pole Position
A spring rain has turned the winter snow into a morning fog.
The speed of the traffic animal in which I ride is unaffected. We all know we need to keep it above one hundred and thirty to make the nine o'clock bell. Nobody is willing to let weather gain the upper hand when the best doughnuts in the box are at stake.
The aggregated automotive beast sloughs off a thick, double-braided strand of people who need coffee, exiting into a wall of unfathomable whiteness we take on faith to contain a Tim Horton's because the blue sign said so. (Blue signs can't be trusted the way green signs can, but they're still a pretty solid authority out here on the 400 Series highways.)
"Medium Earl Grey with milk and sugar and a poppyseed bagel toasted with butter please."
"I'm very-very sorry sir, but we are no longer carrying poppyseed at this location. Would you like to be having sesame instead, sir?"
"I reluctantly concede. Make it so."
I join the flailing tendrils behind the next animal, the bright yellow Mini humming enthusiastically as I push it back up to one forty. I dodge an anxiety worm in the outside lane and work my way across to a whipping flagellum of motivated drivers attempting to find a weakness in a butt-plug of slow people erroneously riding the inside lane for fear of puddles. The middle way opens briefly and we rush through like water into a pierced submarine.
CBC-1 mutters about Canadian soldiers being exploded in Afghanistan, and I wonder if while they're poking around over there they might not look into the poppy situation for me. I pay my taxes! (Sort of.)
The final stretches of my journey are terrifying. The highway bifurcates into a messy spaghetti, new lanes spawning dizzying arrays of ramps and bridges, cohesive organelles of cars dissolving as their constituent vehicles are drawn to separate attractors.
I haven't memorized the way to work yet, let alone useful heuristics for which lane is optimal, and so I'm befuddled and dismayed when I end up behind a giant truck which obscures every green or blue highway sign until they're directly over my head, compressed by foreshortening perspective and nearly illegible.
"Fock!" I note, swerving violently to squeeze in between two SUVs without their headlamps on, nearly missing the exit for the 427 South/Sud. The lady in the SUV behind me is too busy putting lipstick on to honk at me. In a second her lightless truckosoar is lost to the rearview fog.
400 to 407 to 427 to 409 -- I'm almost there. It's 8:47 -- I'm doing well for time.
I'm supposed to be sharing a tandem parking spot with the Producer, but she's already arrived and evidently forgotten because there isn't enough room for me to pull in. I zip around the building and take a visitor's spot. I briefly consider that I should try to find the Producer to arrange re-parkage, but then I remember that I have no idea where her office is.
I have been assigned a security card that bleeps the back door open but I forget about it and go through the front. The receptionist is very nice and always polite.
I make a few wrong turns along the way to the art department, because the rest of the floor is a dense labyrinth of fractal cubicle space fringed by growths of glass-walled office tanks -- it all looks the same. I have heard tell of a Main Boardroom but I've never seen it. Instead I mistakenly pass through some sort of printer gauntlet and catch sight of a quaint luncheon area I'd never suspected. Every way is marked by the same mix of white and $OFFICIAL_CORPORATE_COLOUR so landmarking is difficult.
The art department is too dark. I am the first to arrive so I crank up the dimmers to un-dim as I take off my coat. I set up my Powerbook and it looks absurdly wee on the big empty desk decorated only by one of those faintly caucasian-coloured blocky office telephones. A workstation has been requisitioned for me but continues to elude delivery. I sigh and log into my Outlook box to see if Gondor has yet responded to my request that he get the digitized contact sheet from Monday's shoot posted STAT. Alas, nope.
It is Friday. It is the last day of my first week at my new job.
When the art department's Unit B arrives I ask him about the absence of Unit A. Unit B explains that Unit A is working from home on account of the school day being nixed by foul weather. Apparently school buses are no longer sent out to collect children when the visibility is poor, lest they plunge off bridges and kill all the children and have a movie made about it.
Unit B, who has been charged with tidying up the department for my arrival, sets to deconstructing a minor Ikealith in the corner that's being sent to the Server Room for use by the IT Leprechauns. The Vice-President of Communications comes by to apologize for the lack of a workstation at my desk, and for not having given me a tour yet. She delivers a company policy manual for me and has me sign a declaration that if I lose my security card I have to pay for a replacement. Seems fair.
Next, the President of the United Paycheques of Employment comes in with no fanfare and leans against my desk to chat about Gondor's missing photography. I tell him that once my workstation arrives the next thing I would need would be a credit card for purchasing stock images for the construction of the photo-collage elements in the background, so he gives me his credit card and tells me to just forward the receipts to the Vice President of Administration, who is at home sick.
Then the President of the United Paycheques of Employment suggests a change to my design for the album cover, which I counter neatly, providing support for my statements, and managing to gently bring him around to my point of view -- an conclusion that Unit A and Unit B had both assured me was more impossible than Wonderland. It is not the first demonstration I have had this week that the state of the nation as reported by my coworkers can be somewhat unreliable, skewed by their own histories with the firm.
I buy stock images. I mail back and forth with Gondor, who is having trouble with his computer and thus has no previews for me yet.
My equipment arrives and is wheeled in by the polite receptionist. I am presented with a stack of boxes bearing exciting logos. Unit B wanders over from his workstation. "It's a good thing Unit A's not here," he whistles.
"Why do you say that?"
"Look." He points to the biggest box, and then points to Unit A's workstation for comparison. "They got you a G5."
I spend the afternoon configuring the workstation. They have also provided me with speakers and sub-woofer, so I experiment with different places to arrange them on the desk. My new drawing tablet is very big and nice, though I don't like the revised design of the stylus cozy (which seems to be re-engineered around the idea that some people might prefer to rest their styli horizontally for some reason). The stylus itself has a swank new hand-grip much improved over the model I use at home. My monitors are flat LCDs, which gives me the desk-space the tablet will need. I can always have Unit A or Unit B check colour for me on one of their CRTs for hue sensitive work.
Unit B has a picture of his newborn son on his computer desktop. Unit A has a wall and a half papered with his daughters' smiling likenesses. I have a little shelf where I plan to put three framed pictures (wife, daughter, son) and a plant (though I may have to reposition my lamp to be closer to the plant to make up for the fact that I seem to be losing the dimmer battle).
Between us there are leather couches and an unmanned G5-based editing station, the monitor of which Unit A had helped me to pilfer for my first few days when all I could find to hook-up to my PowerBook was a wavering hallucinogenic CRT which turned intermittently purple and cast smoky trails from the edges of type and windows.
The department also features a small closet with a refrigerator and microwave oven.
"Can I have one of these Cokes?" I call over to Unit B.
"Yeah. The Vice President of Administration buys them."
I'm hot from bustling about setting up the new equipment, but I can't take off my Casual Friday sweater without revealing the extent to which I have grossly mistied my tie this morning, with both ends terminating clownishly just above my navel.
The Vice President of Communications comes by to communicate that the pitch that I generated material for along with Unit A (presentation infrastructure) and Unit B (3D set visualization) went very, very well. When she leaves the Staging Technical Director wanders in and shoots the shit in a loose and half-smiling critique of the company's revised policy manual, the contents and wording of which amuse him greatly.
It is interesting to note the somewhat nonsensical personnel org chart, which broadcasts management's nervousness about the politics of increasing stratification as the company grows by refusing to address the issue at all below the level of vice-presidency: the Production Assistant is shown as a peer of the Producer.
"Who the hell is the Art Director?" asks the Technical Director, frowning.
"That would be me," I say.
"You're on the very bottom of the stack."
"Yes. I hope the receptionist doesn't fire me."
"Why are you at the bottom of the stack?"
"Probably because they added me last."
"Or because you're all of our bitch."
"I'm not playing it that way. Want to take me on?"
He chuckles. "No, it's okay."
The company's growing pains are evidenced as I am installing software and Unit B suggests that certain elements within management are always on the lookout for ways to pointlessly curtail our freedoms. "You just wait," he tells me. "When I tried to install Photoshop on my machine the System Administrator came and gave me hell and installed it for me and then took the discs away back to his office. They don't trust us."
I continue to install the software and then, reasoning that organization-minded people might be clamping down chiefly in areas where they sense a loss of order, I generate a very orderly report of registration information, serial numbers and model numbers and e-mail it off to the System Administrator.
"He's going to come back here and take the boxes. Just wait."
The end of the day approaches and the System Administrator has stopped by, but only to discuss the issue of Microsoft Office:mac being overpriced and asking if I might not mind test-running something open source. I confuse him by calling X11 "ecks-eleven" instead of "ecks-one-one" but other than that we see eye to eye. He leaves. Unit B is perplexed.
It is explained to me that things are changing. It can be smelled in the water. Where once "we all worked together" now things are becoming "political." Growth is empowering the wrong people, whose anti-patterns are punchlines for the frustrated. Unit B reports increasing departmental unhappiness as of late.
"You'll see," he warns.
So far everyone I have met has been friendly, and no one has demonstrated a level of potential incompetence that I would describe as alarming. The company is young enough and still small enough (approximately sixty full-time employees) that those in positions of power have arrived there by virtue of their solid work and basic social functionality. The areas of business that have been described to me as coming under stricter control occur to me as areas desperately in need of stricter control. And, while the company's policies may be disgruntling to those used to more casual times, none of them is bizarre or without basis.
Maybe I will learn better, or maybe it's one of those things where it's easy to lose your perspective after becoming inered. In my experience it is the outsider's perspective that is often privileged with greater clarity.
The worst thing all week: I have started wearing my new shoes, and they squeak when I walk which I find embarrassing. I find it very heartening that this modest blip represents the low point of my transition. Who could complain?
Monday: my first 8:30 Global Status Meeting in the elusive Main Boardroom.
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