Notes on Office Life

cropping out my manager’s name. The office has two stories. I sit on the fourth floor!

Here are some quick notes and updates on my first week as the Consumer Marketing Assistant in Executive Marketing Strategy at Hachette Book Group:

Dress code:

• Fridays people wear jeans and more casual wear. Plain white sneakers and other monotone closed-toe shoes are acceptable. Polos have been spotted!
• notes from my manager: sneakers are ok – untucked shirts are ok – personal style is ok – jeans are ok !!!
• Not ok: no ripped jeans or shorts.
• Plaid is …also ok apparently! 

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Some office life thoughts:

• Tough question: what about the office doesn’t sit right with me….what does work? Basically, as a new hire, what do i think about the office environment? It’s a priority that I feel comfortable. I can’t think of anything, because I like the office so much that I even have a hard time leaving at the end of each day (which I’m low-key trying to play cool). My manager caught me staying past my required hours on Friday and I tried to play it off like I was charging my phone – which I was !
• Professional relationships between supervisors and assistants, assistants and the supervisors of their supervisors, and more: my manager is very friendly. She has brought up the fact that I am young and connected to the youth and more in the know. I don’t know if I know anything about all that. But I definitely have friends who are/do know.
• Office environment: as I sit right next to probably the most beautiful Take Shelf in the entire office, I do get lots of people near my desk all day. I’m also located in front of the printer room and a conference room which are also infrequent sources of noise. Usually people aren’t loudly talking in the office, but it does happen and this can be kind of distracting. 
• As I noted earlier in the week: sometimes people aggregate near the spiral take shelf next to my desk, but that’s okay. I can always move to a common area or just put in headphones.

Final points of note: I can’t believe every time I see the CEO just walking around like a regular ol’ Joe! I wonder if he feels like his position has warded him off from new hires. Would love to say hi to him one day and introduce myself. The amount of times I’ve spotted him my first week (3-4 times?) has been alarming in an office of 450 employees.

Despite my attempts to keep my pile of to-be-reads low, I have already stock-piled several free books digitally and through the online lending library and am inevitably going to collect more. I am also unsure what to do with my two drawers, shelves, and file cabinet. Currently I have a belt, my expired passport from orientation day, and the packets from training awkwardly settled among the empty spaces.

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Content blues

Deciding what to post now for the next few days. As of this draft, 08/01- a Thursday night, I haven’t told the current start-up company I’m working with that I’ve accepted a job offer with Hachette Book Group. It begins Monday! I don’t know how and when and even if I should announce this on socials. I updated my closest friend, told a close one vaguely and basically told another close one through my previous blog post delivered to their email but refrained from sharing that post on socials by disconnecting my socials, that I set to automatically share on all blog posts here, from that post. Right now I’m thinking of blog posts surrounding it that I could write. This one was supposed to be about the interview.

Tonight I want to work on the social media for the startup including: building out their August editorial calendar. Creating more assets, completing the rest of the week’s duties like writing social copy for next week. I want to be more proactive with the Instagram as well, with the look and with creating a link in bio.

As for the blog, I guess I’ll start to draft some current content for today and tomorrow. I’m under the impression that Autostraddle is going to read my blog like my supervisor at Hachette did and be the opposite of impressed because the recent backlog is realllly bad.

I want to tell my coworkers at the startup that I’ve accepted the job offer by Friday and provide options for work going forward. I also want to create a blog post about applying to jobs as a full-time job and another on the process of this job with the help of my email inbox timestamps. I also want to make one about what the job entails and about my future anxieties. Eventually I want to write one about budgeting too – all of these have been on my mind since I got the job.

I got a job! Multifarious updates on blogging and life

reading the past few backlogs has me some sort of way toward stress. The mediocre movie reviews stricken by emotional tumult and dictionary spew seems likely for a time in my life since pass but not lost. Its future tendrils spin around the opening sentences here, delaying the point.

Anyways, I got a job in publishing – my first right out of college. A result of an incredible interviewer and an unusual eloquence (on my part) born of enthusiasm and prep. I brought printed slide decks. The job will be under the Associate Director of Consumer Marketing at Hachette Book Group – a Big 5 publisher whose New York office is right next to Radio City Music Hall. I’ve never been to either, and I was no less than thrilled to step foot into the former.

My position culminates disparate strands of personal-cum-professional interests surrounding the written word. The official offer letter came in Monday morning, but the complete process has been stretched over the past two weeks or so.

Waiting to announce it on any platform has had the desired effect of dulling my feelings around the subject. For an understanding of my feelings around employment, hard-work and good news, read this post from my backup blog.

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Full disclosure, this blog was referenced as evidence of my acumen regarding various writing styles. The comment has no doubt been a boon and a deterrent to my feelings surrounding the content I’ve uploaded and have prepared to upload. From now to the end of August I’ll be uploading daily content reflective of the varying nature of my past daily content this July. They are flawed. Some are dull – those of which bend light leaves nothing for me as a reader in the present. Many have brought remembrance to static folds, and these (however cliche it is to say) shine with an unknown brilliance. I’m hopeful my connection to the expansive unknown is yet unbroken.

If I find the need to, I’ll be writing updates as this new period of my life takes shape. Change occurs on a dime, and this portends a great deal of it. Still, many things stay the same, and its even in this sameness that an unchanging change plays out – within the silent drives, grinding asphalt, the duty of steam, in heat waves- in rice. Noted textures observed internally and in solitude, I’ll make sure to send senses out to these as well.