Orientation Clues

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I've had a lot of different experiences when starting new jobs. I now take it as a first clue to the place.

On my first day at one job, no one knew I was there. I walked in the door, wandered over to the area were my interviews were conducted and asked for my manager. I found out that he was out of town. I got down to HR and asked around only to find that the HR staff was part-time and I had started on the wrong part.

I waited until a few days went by and got a number for the part-time HR lady. I called her at home and was told that there was nothing she could do for me.

"Really?" I said "How will I get paid if you don't have a W-2 on me?"

"We must have gotten a W-2," she argued back with her dog barking in the background for emphasis.

"No," I emphatically stated even though I felt like barking. "I haven't completed any formal paperwork besides my application. No one is here from my department and no one is here representing HR. I've been alone at my desk for three days now."

She made a point to come to the office the following day.

This job ended in a chaotic battle for bonuses. Our new team saw that our bonuses were through the roof, more than double our respective salaries. It looked like the ambiguity of management was playing to our favor. However, the old timers on the job knew how to play the lack of leadership. All of our bonus money was redirected to areas that defy connection to the work that was done. Management was so out of touch that they simply advised us to work it out for ourselves. We did. My team left.

At another job you would have thought that I was working for the CIA. I reported to work at a different building than where my interviews had been held. The new building had no name or address on it, like it was invisible - all glass. A security guard on the first floor kept an eye on me until someone from HR came down to escort me.

We walked through a maze of desks then into a "People Trap," which was a new term for me. It's a walkway that only one person can be in at any time and it has a door on either side. A photograph is taken of you when you enter and the door closes behind you and before you can open the door ahead of you. It made me wonder if the people at the desks are merely actors and not real employees of this secret company.

Once beyond the people trap, I was (silently) escorted into a conference room with other new hires. I was directed to sit at the place setting with my name branded into a brass name plate. The name plate was in front of a stack of binders that towered over me when I sat down. The day was spent reading silently through the binders and signing every page that needed a signature. At intervals someone would enter the room, advise us how many pages needed to be signed for a particular binder and they would check for signatures and remove the signed binder. There was always the feeling that you would be asked to report on the contents of the binder, although that never happened. At Noon food was brought in for us. Otherwise the entire day was spent in silence as we signed away all of our future brilliant ideas, patents, or products.

This job ended abruptly when a team of creative visionaries developed a product so different from the rest of the company's projects that we thought it should be a new company. We worked on the spin-off legalities and set the wheels in motion and our sights on our profitable futures. We must have missed one of the signatures in the orientation notebooks that tied us forever to the mothership. The mothership squashed us.

I now see the first day on the job as a telling clue to the future with the company. It's sort of like checking out the toilet-paper situation on a job interview. If they have those tight holders that allow for only one square of paper at a time, I'm out of there.

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