I posted this as a Note on Facebook on Tuesday, October 5th, 2010, 6:22pm.
Last week I had a dream that I was beginning my first day on the job as a front desk person for a school. I arrived at the school and I opened the front doors. Immediately upon entering, I was struck by the length of the front desk. It almost took up the entire length of the large lobby, almost went wall to wall, but missed by a few feet on either side. I saw two women behind the desk, off to the left side of it, and I walked up to them. I didn’t know either of them from my interviews or correspondence. I told them my name and told them that I was beginning work today as the front desk manager. One of the women, who seemed to be in charge, told me that she would be training me. She told me that the other girl was a part time assistant and was still in college. She told me that I was taking over her job as front desk manager because she was going to work somewhere else. She showed me a few things behind the front desk, such as pencils and paper, and I thought that seemed like sort of a petty thing to be showing me in light of how many responsibilities belong to the front desk manager, but I figured I guess she wants to start with the absolute most basic things. I thought, At this rate, the training will lag on for months. She then showed me a tv monitor hanging behind the desk, which showed a constantly streaming live video surveillance from the roof of the school building. She said that they have a problem with kids going up on the roof when they're not supposed to, and she told me to pay special attention to the monitor at all times. I understood the importance of keeping the students off the roof, but their intense attention paid to watching the monitor seemed like an immense distraction from them being aware of their surroundings in the actual lobby and seeing what’s going on from different ends of the extremely long front desk.
The two women then continued to talk to one another and ignore me. I tried to interrupt them in order to ask what they would like me to be doing or what I could be learning about, but the woman kept motioning to me with her hand to go away. Obviously this was very unprofessional, but was also not entirely shocking. I saw a young girl of about eight or nine approach the other end of the front desk, so I went over to her and said Hello. She said hello and told me, "I'm here to pick up my 'equestrian tee shirt'. We got tee shirts for participating in riding the horses," she said. "Oh okay," I said. "I just started working here today, so I'm going to go find out about that for you. Hang on a minute, ok?" I said. I walked back over to where the woman was speaking with the other woman at the other end of the desk, interrupted them and told her what the girl had asked me. "Oh yes, they're over there on that table by the front door," she said. "They came from Fed Ex, they're all in envelopes with their names on them." "Okay," I said, and I walked back over to the girl and showed her to the table with the envelopes. I thought it was strange that they had left them all out in the open like that, on a table right near the front door. There seemed to be a lacking in supervision and attention going on, and I worried that the packages were easy for someone to steal. I asked the girl her name and she told me and showed me her student ID. I found the envelope with her name on it and gave it to her. She asked me if I could open it for her and handed it back to me. I told her "Sure" and I began to unseal the top of the stuck-down envelope flap, by trying to tear it back with my fingers. (Those plastic shipping envelopes are always difficult to get into without scissors.) Then I heard the woman yelling and saw her running towards me, shouting, "No! No! Don't open it like that! What are you doing?!" The woman came over, holding a giant pen, about a foot long, inside which one could see the giant tube of ink. She picked up the envelope and punctured it by sticking the tip of the pen into and through the plastic envelope. She then pushed down on the back end of the pen, which caused the ink to slowly leak out of the pen and be injected into the envelope. The envelope began to swell more and more with the steady injection of the ink. The pen seemed to contain an infinite amount of ink. The envelope bloated beyond its capacity to contain the pressure of the great amount of ink and the envelope began to burst at its seams. Ink sprayed everywhere, including on the woman, myself and the little girl. The woman then gave the envelope (absolutely sopping with black ink and messily busted open) to the girl and harshly told her, "Here you go, it's open now. Go take your stuff somewhere else and clean it up.”
Then I woke up. :-(
The harsh and unfriendly (bizarrely so) attitude of the woman toward the little girl reminded me of the attitude of a boss of mine at a prior job at a tutoring center, where I worked last year for a short time...This is not the small tutoring company I mention in other posts, it was one center location of a large national tutoring company, whose name I won't mention on the blog. I'll write about that story soon...
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