Training

In an isolated room, the worker sat me down in front of a television.

“Watch the video for the next 15 minutes. Then when you’re finished, I will return to administer the test.”

“Sure thing,” I said.

She walked out. I scoffed. This was my natural response to most people, but it felt below me to even consider that the job I was about to get into would be serious enough for me to participate in a slight brainwashing of work culture. Work culture. It was the hardest thing that I had come to grasp, as a weathered, back sliding military brat-church boy. These days, I still have trouble relating this information to people that are perhaps curious, less so discriminatory. I often catch myself in the middle of social settings noticing, as Justin would say, the impulse that starts in my gut and travels up to my temples. I didn’t want to believe that I was above anyone, but back when I had decided to move to Seattle, the truth was going to come out sooner or later.

I had never considered the corporate world. The corporate world, a place where I had run to after a failed stint of working as an archivist. The archives qworld, then, felt like a much more relevant career I could jump into. While in graduate school, I struggled with the prospect of being a librarian. I didn’t read as much as other librarians. I wanted to be in proximity to books. I believed that, like a rugged Ash Ketchum, I was going to read them all. What really pushed me over the edge was knowing that my writing career would never take off. I had jumped into an MLIS, because I had been rejected by an MFA program. The shock of rejection, especially after writing a 20-page sample about a friend nearly dying, had shifted my worldview. One rejection was enough to quit it all. Boy, did I wish I could tell the 26-year punk that I was that was lost that you just had to try again. And keep trying. And keep trying.

[future exposition]

When my job ended at a project that I literally shed blood, cried tears, and sweat through winter layers, I left Queens for the green pastures of Seattle to work for Amazon as a corporate receptionist. In that isolated room, I bargained with my choice to leave Queens. My life would all be solved now that my past was in the rearview mirror. I would trade my failures for my name, face, and address that are still probably embedded in the blip of some corporatized system system. It would be my new life to greet people and to watch as people would push through, in- and out- , those revolving doors. Boy, did I really wish that I could tell that kid that he was headed out sooner than he believed.