pfinally

Friday was my last day at work, which was a surprisingly emotional experience, due in part to the accumulative effect of a week of goodbyes as people took off on vacation. I suppose it’s difficult to do anything around a group of people for a few years and not feel some level of sentimentality when it comes to a close, no matter how much you disliked what you did and (most of) the people you did it with.

I spent almost four years at the company, which I had somehow not realized until this week – it didn’t seem possible that it had really been that long. Four years ago, my old friend, Ari, responded to my mass “I just got laid off by my insane boss and if I don’t get a job immediately, we might have to move in with my parents” email and hooked me up with a cushy tech gig at the company.

I’ll never forget how initially comforting Corporate America was, especially coming from a small organic catering company ran by a micro-managing, unstable lunatic. Everything was so calm, so clean, so predictable – it was almost like being institutionalized, reinforced by the fact that everyone dressed the same and the walls were adorned with posters for anti-depressants.

When that gig ran out, I briefly enjoyed the most fantastic temp assignment in history: I worked at the Associated Press for one month, during which I wrote some of the articles that I still use in my portfolio today, assisted with the news coverage of the Blackout of 2003, and helped comb through the 9/11 transcripts on the day they were released to the press. The whole experience is on the short list of “memoir/essays I need to write”.

But then it was back to the company, where I temped for a year as an “onboarder”, assuring that all the people the company hired (they were in the midst of a huge hiring spree) got “onboard” as quickly and seamlessly as possible. It was mindless, but harmless.

After a year of that, I took a full-time job as an administrative assistant, which offered fantastic benefits (including, um, that free Masters) but occasionally degrading work. And that’s where I’ve been for the last two and a half years. Four years, three jobs in five different buildings in Midtown East (ugh), all for the company

It has often occurred to me that the work (and the people) was not really all that bad – that I just associated it with a period of my life in which I felt stuck and unchallenged (and turned 30 as a secretary). Regardless, I will happily leave the sterile conference rooms, the endless acronyms for pharmaceutical terms I never bothered to learn and the glaring lack of culture and diversity.

Friday was a day I had dreamed about for the last few years – finally leaving. But it was not the triumphant “fuck this place” defiant departure I had fantasized about, but rather a whirlwind of tying up loose ends and cleaning out my cubicle (which was really depressing). By the time I finally left, the place was completely empty, the numbing hum of the fluorescent lights and ventilation system the only sounds. Somehow that was fitting.