As the duty roster turns

It’s remarkable how the workday routine, for me, can be so quickly and completely upended. For a while there I was sitting in my quiet, secluded storage-space keeping to myself and minding my own business. And now I have two officemates. So minding my own business takes some effort.

The impact was minimal when my first new coworker arrived, because as mentioned, she is a perfectly nice middle-aged woman who is very polite and professional and focused and naturally inclined to keep to herself. The third member of our improvised workspace is the wildcard, though. He is also about the same age as our female colleague (and it just occurred to me that I’m in my mid-almost-late-30s and I am referring to my co-workers as “middle-aged” in a way that is ultimately intended to convey “them, not me”. I guess to me “middle-aged” has always meant approximately “my parents’ age” and has shifted accordingly through the years. ) but he is significantly less predisposed to keep to himself. At all. My best snap assessment is that he is in love with the sound of his own voice, which is a trait I’m not particularly judgmental of because it applies to me in certain situations, too – just not work. But some people make that kind of extreme garrulousness verging on compulsive attention seeking work for them in the office setting, and that’s fine.

So the thing is that neither of my two new officemates has anything to do as of yet. The government, and its departments and agencies, move slowly at best, and for whatever reason all of the processes of integrating a new person into a particular role are not initiated until that person shows up for their first day. (Doubly true if said new person is a contractor or, Heimdall help us, a sub-contractor.) So the new hire ends up sitting at a desk which may or may not even have a computer at it, and has no way of using the computer even once its set up because the new hire does not have the network permissions or the encoded security card to log on. Mostly they do a lot of reading and filling out forms. Also, the new hires do not have badges, which are required to roam the halls of most secure government facilities. The facility badge and the computer access and all of that comes along, eventually, but the first few weeks as the gears slowly turn can be a bit dull, especially if they happen to fall in the summer when lots of people who might nudge the apparatus along happen to be on leave.


That’s the position my new officemates find themselves in, but what does that have to do with me? Well, it’s certainly less quiet in here than it used to be, as the two of them talk to each other quite a bit during the course of the day, sometimes about the job duties they’re slowly getting acclimated to (their functions are fairly similar, and of course totally different from mine, so it all becomes background noise which is essentially meaningless), other times just about random crap to stave off the boredom. And in either case, of course, Mr. Gregarious has (and vigorously exercises) the ability to blow any discussion out to three or four times longer and louder than it needs to be with digressions and personal anecdotes and wanton pop culture references (may it go without saying that I am not saying pop referencing is bad, per se, I am just saying?).

Also, there are a few things which absolutely require a computer, such as signing up for Army intranet accounts, and since I’m the only one in the room with a functioning workstation I’ve been asked a few times to scoot aside and let them sneak on, do the mandatory online in-processing, and then get back to their offline reading. Of course since I’m such a swell guy I’ve also let them borrow my internet connection to check their webmail or Google things now and then.

The badge situation is even more impinging (which is a word I’m choosing to use because I am in full-on Bitching About Work mode, not because it’s really all that horrible) because I end up as the de facto escort required for my colleagues to move about. If either of them leaves the building, for lunch or whatever, they need me to come downstairs and meet them in the lobby to escort them through security and back upstairs. And even if they stay in the building and don’t go past the security station and run the risk of being found out by a hall monitor with their “escort required” temp badges, they get locked out of our particular office as soon as the door shuts behind them – the electronic lock has a badge-reader. So Mr. Gregarious will ask me if I’d mind strolling down to the vending machines or accompanying him to the restroom, which can’t help but be disruptive. Ms. Polite, on the other hand, will just slip out to the ladies’ room but then has to call my desk phone to let her back in through the locked door when she returns. And none of this is either of my colleagues’ faults, it’s just the way things have gone since Thursday of last week, and it’s the way it’s going to go for the next few. Those two are bored but, almost as a direct result, for me it’s never a dull moment.