re: Welcome
Near the end of my first day at a new job, at a company that had sprouted so many tendrils that it had adopted many of the same bureaucratic structures and tendencies that it bemoaned and claimed to disrupt, meaning much of my first day was dedicated to reading the documents prepared for me, including a bulleted and sub-bulleted scaffolding of history, manifesto, glossary, even corporate atlas, my having been instructed to absorb as many of the acronyms and as much of the organizational jargon as possible, with the explicit acknowledgment—given offhandedly by my new supervisor—that failure was inevitable, which in turn made me dedicate the day to proving her (or at least the general dismal appraisal of a new hire’s ability to, as they say, hit the ground running) wrong—until, after I had devised a mnemonic to, by 2pm, commit to memory two-thirds of the listed divisions as well as their subsidiary departments (and then again those departments’ subsidiary offices), I considered that perhaps the manner in which my supervisor had expressed that she expected me to struggle had been not offhanded but underhanded, which is to say, not a collegial attempt to commiserate over the overwhelming nature of a first day but actually an insidious reverse-psychological behavioral control strategy deployed by the company’s managerial tier intended to, as it had with me, incite a resentful work ethic, that most potent of motivators—this hypothesis prompting me to cease working out of spite and instead spend the rest of that first day not working out of spite, at the end of which my supervisor stopped by my desk, standing a few feet away in a kind of swaying sea-legged posture, to inquire how things were going, either sincerely or disingenuously, to which I attempted to respond in a way that communicated both that, if the former, things were going fine, and also, that if the latter, then I knew what she was getting at and had figured out the whole charade, so that the conversation took on a kind of combative charge, and that was when she asked me (again in a suspiciously offhanded manner) to write a paragraphic biography of myself that she could email out to the rest of the team, for me to introduce myself to my new coworkers.
As this request came at 4:30pm and I was to leave—ostensibly—at 5pm, I understood that I was to write this paragraph within the next twenty minutes. I then would, I assumed, send it to my supervisor, who would give it a perfunctory review for suitability for dissemination before copying and pasting it and sending it out to the rest of the team. My new coworkers—also ostensibly leaving at 5pm—would then either read my introduction as their last task of the day or their first of the next. I saw how this would work. I said, no problem.
With my fingers on the keys, I tried to begin, but progress was immediately halted by a phalanx of internal questions:
To what extent was I expected to introduce myself? I did not recall such guidance appearing in the onboarding documents I had reviewed. At least so far. And I trusted my memory. Or at least I didn’t have time to go back and check. The clock was ticking. Metaphorically. None of the clocks in the office—which were not actual clocks but only digital time readouts on the desk phones and computers—ticked.
To what extent did these new coworkers expect to know me? As I had done no more than smile in their general direction thus far, any assumptions I made would be on flimsy if not nonexistent bases. The only way out was through.
To what extent did anyone know anyone? Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? The knowledge of others seemed to me, based on some reading I had done, asymptotic; but how should one even approach (let alone intercept) the tangent of interpersonal understanding? My supervisor had requested one paragraph, but as a reader I knew that the length of a paragraph could vary from one sentence, like in a newspaper article, to an entire novel of many hundred pages. One paragraph was not a precise measurement. Admittedly I had a sense that a typical paragraph was five to six sentences—that sounded like something I had learned in grade school—with its topic sentence and three to four supporting sentences and a conclusion. But how rote. A picture of a hamburger came to mind then, with the realization that I had skipped lunch.
I decided to start with perspective: first or third person? If I wrote in the first person, I risked giving the impression that it was not me introducing myself but my supervisor introducing herself, unless she delineated clearly in her email between the two different speakers, myself and herself, and that I could not control—and even then I suspected that many of my new coworkers habitually leapt to the meat of an email, skipping superfluous salutations and epistolary throat-clearing, in their attempts to maximize efficiency, so that they would miss my supervisor’s delineation (no matter how clear), which, at best, would cause minor confusion and frustration and, at worst, give the impression that either I was attempting to impersonate my supervisor or she me. Third person, however, I thought, would give the paragraph an erroneous air of objectivity, as if I were being described by some disinterested narrator of life (God?). So the question became whether I preferred to appear to impersonate my supervisor or an omniscient cosmic governor, and I knew that, although one wanted to impress new colleagues, that impression must be tempered with humility. Second person, of course, I had learned long ago, was advised against.
In the new blank Microsoft Word document I opened to draft my paragraph, I typed the single letter:
I
As I stared at the little Doric column of ego and began to worry whether its sturdy serifs did not uphold a certain myopic emphasis on the individual, I was interrupted by my supervisor who again appeared at my desk, apparently on her way out of the office for the day. Only then did I notice the early evening light slicing through the slats of office blinds and into my eyes, so lost in reverie I was. I had been squinting hard. My supervisor, after waiting for me to blink away the tension in my orbitals, asked me, again, how it was going—there seemed to me disproportionate interest in the goings of my various doings given that I had, except for two brief trips to the bathroom, remained seated at my desk for the entire day—the “it,” I assumed, being the introductory paragraph, specifically, and perhaps my first day, generally. In reply, I asked whether she could perhaps share any exemplary paragraphs written by new employees past that might serve as a template for my own, not that I intended to steal the content of anyone’s biography, but rather for inspiration related to voice, form, tone, etc., and to get a feel for the parameters of an introduction such as this—but then at the look on my supervisor’s face I said, never mind.
Don’t overthink it, she said to me, eerily cheerily, as she walked toward the elevators, into one of which I watched her disappear.
I had never cared for that particular admonishment. It suggested that individuals could control the quantity of their thoughts or even, as the premise necessitated, tally their thoughts on different topics and compare counts so as to know which were the subject of above-average quantities of thought and which below-average, the implication being, I suppose, that an individual should attempt to think an equal number of thoughts about all topics, so that no topic was either over- or under-thought? Or were some topics supposed to be the subject of more thoughts than others, there being agreed-upon ranges or thresholds for all topics? Based on some reading I had done, I had become relatively versed in neuroscience and -psychology, and so I knew that it was possible to depict and identify patterns and magnitudes of thinking, but to demarcate specific thoughts proved harder, even for a strict materialist, and still harder to define what a thought was—a single synaptic firing? So I thought it futile, this counting of thoughts. What concerned me, rather, was the quality of thoughts—in other words, what use I made of my thought allotment for any given day. I wanted to think good, admirable, maybe even, in my most honest moments, enviable thoughts; but of course to be admired or envied one needed an audience.
I began to think that the font was stymying me. I selected some sans serif and watched the laden pronoun become a sleek delimiter of my identity:
I
But that was not quite right. The letter looked too much like the blinking cursor to its left (my right), and as I watched my new coworkers one-by-one and sometimes two-by-two stand up and gather their things and tread the path to the elevators, all of them heading out toward whatever their afterwork lives entailed—dinners, drinks, trysts—crossing the Rubicon from work to play, I was reminded, as I glanced between their departing figures and the Helvetican I that resembled the blinking cursor, present one instant and absent the next, that identity was transitory, ever evolving—which meant that the truest way to introduce myself to my new coworkers would be in the immediate moment of that introduction’s reception, i.e. not in writing but delivered orally and extemporaneously, and also that I ought to introduce myself to every one of my new workers simultaneously, or else each would receive a slightly different introduction, so that in effect there would be not one person who joined their ranks today (me) but many, which was maybe what the Existentialists meant (at least I was pretty sure it was the Existentialists) by saying that the self is dependent on the other. I considered whether my new coworkers would be familiar with this vein of philosophical thought. I knew that Existentialism was not for everyone, at least the capital-E kind, because I had read an essay once in which the author casually (and, I thought, impressively) dismissed the entire school of thought as annoying. Maybe, along those lines, I thought, my introduction should detail my own familiarity with, and evaluation of, philosophical thoughts as such.
Sometime around 7pm, a member of the custodial staff entered the room pushing a cart of cleaning supplies, the bulk of fluid jugs and spray bottles and paper rolls and plastic trash bags undulating like a pachyderm, and I wondered, briefly, whether the custodial staff were employees of the company I had begun working for and thus, at least technically, my new coworkers and thus potential recipients of my paragraphic biography—or rather, as I thought more probable, employees of a second company that had been contracted by my new company to provide the services required for office upkeep, in which case the custodial staff wouldn’t care how I introduced myself to my new coworkers, they not being my new coworkers, though we literally worked in the same place, which among other things proved that not even immediate environmental context provided a solid basis for relational identity.
But. If the blinking cursor signified the potentiality of identity in the present and future, then the stable typed I must signify the affirmed aspect of identity rising out of the past, and that aspect of identity, I had read once in a book the title of which I could not recall at that moment, was purported to be the accumulation of memory. So one option was to regale my new coworkers with a seminal memory by way of introduction. But how to know if a memory was seminal? The first memory that came to mind was a fifth grade spelling bee, in which I had advanced to the finals, as expected by both my peers and myself, I having had put in considerable effort to establishing and maintaining a reputation as the smartest kid in class, because what else did I have—and I knew I was playing the long game. The position of smartest-kid-in-class came with the aforementioned expectation but little to no commensurate status among my peers or even frankly with the teachers, all ten-year-old children being, compared to adults, biologically and experientially de facto dumb, which is why it was especially humiliating when I was asked, in the final round, to spell the word “miasma” —a word I, as a ten year old, had never heard before, Greek and Latin vocabulary being more in the purview of high school, at least in the course of my regretfully average suburban education—and so I thought I was being mocked, which seemed especially cruel seeing as the teachers were running the bee, and maybe on some level I was being mocked, or at least condescended to, because they let me spell the whole word before ruling me incorrect: M-Y-A-S-T-H-M-A. Cute, the teacher judge had said, but at that age I had already learned that there was no honor in being that kind of cute. I left the stage teary, from wheezing and shame, scrambling for my inhaler, while my finals competitor, a girl who never amounted to much intellectually, spelled her winning word, which was something like pantheon or poise or restaurant, if I remembered correctly.
Yes, the question, if I were to share one, was how intimate, how telling the memory should be.
I sat there for a long time remembering. It must have been a long time, because as I was staring up at the ceiling that consisted of those lightweight foamy tiles pocked seemingly randomly with tiny holes, out of which I half-tried and mostly failed to discern a pattern, the ceiling lights, fluorescents covered by plastic ribbed sheets and evidently motion-sensored, turned off. I waved my arms around as one does when attempting to draw attention, exaggeratedly, like a mime, and the lights stuttered on again, as if aggrieved to operate at that hour. I was the last one in the office.
That bodily movement, my most significant in some time, came at an opportune moment, I thought, as it offered an alternative biographic premise: the internal was difficult to communicate adequately, if not actually impossible, as I, at that moment, suddenly remembered having learned from an article in one of the periodicals to which I subscribed that Cartesian duality was considered antiquated, as out of fashion as Newtonian mechanics or Einstein’s relativity, and that we could rely only on Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s observable fact, which meant that anything inherently subjective, like a conscious state, could exist only if perceived—the ideal, of course, being the biological processes in the brain, the so-called material evidence of conscious states, but as my office was not (as far as I knew) equipped with an MRI machine, I was forced to find other means of demonstrating my conscious functioning to my new coworkers, and so perhaps the most obvious evidence of my thoughts was the externally physical behaviors they prompted, and so perhaps that was what my introduction should consist of: not a description of my physical appearance, which was quite literally superficial, but rather my mannerisms, preferred hand gestures—I have always been, despite knowing better, trigger-happy with finger guns—the rhythm of my gait, the tenor and pitch of my voice and how each modulates depending on my state of excitement, my sitting posture in a chair, my particular if infinitesimal gravitational pull—those behavioral subtleties would be the “me” my new coworkers would experience, not the mental machinations whirring inside my head.
I returned to the serifed font (the sans had been a mistake)—
I
—and, with steady footing atop the first person singular, was about to type some idiosyncratic verb, when a melancholy descended that stayed my hands. A biographic introduction that detailed my physical way of being in the world might have been demonstrably and verifiably accurate, but was I so bereft of means to show my coworkers who I was? If I did not have my thoughts then I was nothing more than an automaton, imitable and interchangeable: a mime could behave like me, but a mime could not think like me. My thoughts constituted a self sui generis (a Latin phrase that I recalled from high school and could spell confidently), and of course, to me, my thoughts were as real as the grumbling of my stomach (a reminder that I had yet to eat dinner), and so if it was observation, an audience, that really made the real, then I only needed to reveal to my new coworkers the thoughts I could and did think, thoughts like the thoughts I had thought that evening, meaning—and here I found myself in the thrall of inspiration—meaning that the thoughts I had thought while attempting to construct my paragraphic biography were themselves the means by which I could introduce myself. Would those not be sufficient to prove that my mind could produce admirable, enviable, good thoughts, thoughts that were thought by a person worthy of being their coworker, thoughts that justified my presence among them?
The question of the paragraph again. My supervisor had asked for one. But! But I knew, from the reading I had done of the company documents (in particular the Competency Matrix and its accompanying usage guide) that one was expected to exceed expectations. In fact, only by exceeding expectations could one demonstrate Actualized Competency, and merely to meet expectations was to fall into the Approximated Competency quadrant of the matrix, and to fail to meet expectations was to fall into the Approximated or Actualized Incompetency quadrants, which were themselves grounds for dismissal, and so, there was essentially an imperative to provide a biographic introduction that extended past a single paragraph. Really there was no other way, because I certainly wanted (maybe even needed) to actualize my competency, and so I decided that the thoughts I had thought that evening while thinking of ways to introduce myself were what I would write to introduce myself, or at least a multi-paragraphic narrative approximation of those thoughts because better minds than mine had proven the nigh impossibility of accurately documenting in-real-time thinking.
So that was what I wrote. “To what extent,” I began, and then I continued exhaustively (and, I hoped, admirably) through the thoughts I had thought that evening, attempting to keep as best I could the revisionism to a minimum, which was a challenge, I must admit, the temptation to tweak and tinker with one’s thoughts before exhibition being powerful. What I wrote was long, perhaps, for a biographic introduction, but not having seen any of my new coworkers’ own biographic introductions, there was no way to know whether mine was any longer than anyone else’s. I sent it, my multi-paragraphic introduction, according to the Microsoft Outlook outbox, shortly before 10pm.
When I returned to the office the next morning, I saw that my supervisor had forwarded it to the rest of my new coworkers very shortly after 10pm the previous evening. She herself did not comment on what I had sent. By that next morning, I had received one response:
“I too love to read …”