orienting

I’ve been banished to New Employee Orientation. Not forever. It just feels like forever. Amazing, really, how you can make time freeze in its tracks by putting any random set of Power Point slide up on a screen and have somebody read them to an audience. Einstein would’ve busted a blood vessel trying to figure out how that fit into his concept of time.

Lucky for me I’m at a table of people who don’t take it too seriously. Yesterday we designed a new license plate (because every single briefing has to have an activity), so we drew a fish swimming under some wavy lines and called that our Save The Great Lakes plate. Our plate wasn’t chosen by the committee to make it to production, but by then we’d moved on to playing with the pipe cleaners, so we weren’t bothered much.

If there’s one thing they should change about New Employee Orientation, it’s the candy. There’s probably way too much candy in the bowl on the tables, and it’s all gone by the end of the day. That means we’re eating it, but I don’t remember eating it, so we’re eating it without realizing we are, which usually happens when there’s a bowl of candy on the table. They should either get rid of the candy, or replace it with nuts or something healthy. Or, if they’re not willing to get rid of the candy, they should put out full-size candy bars, because when you eat one of those little things you always think, That was just a little piece of candy, so I can have another one. And you keep doing that until your stomach tells you you never want to see another piece of candy for as long as you live.