In which Siobhan takes an office job!

I don't recall if I mentioned how the interview with Bronx House actually turned out; I actually DID, in fact, get hired. Which was somewhat surprising as she called me two days after she said she would be calling were I to be hired, so I had already pretty much written it off as a bust.

Anyway! After two semi-hellish but very informative training Saturdays (let's just say I have not yet mastered the art of having a responsible, appropriate for an 8:30 am workday Friday night yet), today was my first real day.

I have never, it occurs to me, held a job before where I am actually obligated to sit down. In 8 hours at work today, I probably stood for a grand total of a half-hour. When you work, say, corralling children and willing them to learn something about this thing we call theatre and/or trying to convince foreign tourists to buy copious amounts of fashionable American lingerie and/or... wait, nope, corralling the children again, sitting is frowned upon. It connotes laziness and disinterest and a general unwillingness to do your job. Not so, when your job is to work in an office.

Relatedly, I have never had a job in which downtime was to be filled with... well, doing whatever the hell I want, rather than some kind of semi-productive menial labor. Today I finished two plays I have to read for class, made a to-do list about an impending project for class, and then got 60 pages into a play I don't have to have read for two more weeks. (Related to all this play-reading, I made a list of the plays I have read this semester: we're only at midterms and it numbers 26.)

But what strikes me most of all about this job is, really, how little human interaction is involved. It's not solitary; I talked to the Bronx House teachers most of the day, answered the phone at regular intervals, handed out parent registration forms and instructed them in that protocol - in short, all the customer service related tasks available. Again though, when one's frame of reference involves talking close to all day, everyday in an 8 hour weekday, that I went two hour stretches without speaking to another human is extremely odd to me.

Nonetheless, I do, in fact, quite enjoy this job owing to all these aforementioned assets, plus the teachers are all cool people and this job is already proving my heretofore already established theory that East Coast parents are so much less obnoxious than West Coast parents. It's just very different. That, and I have to BE THERE at 8:30 in the morning on Saturday mornings.