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four and a half hour orientation
Tuesday, April 19 2016
location: West Hollywood, California
The public face of The Organization is meticulously cultivated, and as part of that face, photos of all the employees are taken and displayed on the website. We were instructed what colors to wear, and since I don't really have much in the way of sunny optimism in my wardrobe, I wore a light green button-up polyester shirt, which represented a subtractive mix of two of the acceptable colors. I wouldn't even own that shirt if one of Mary Purdy's boyfriends hadn't accidentally left it at the house. When my turn came, one of the staffers took a bunch of pictures of me from different angles. When asked which angle I preferred, I said that I don't really think about myself that way (although on some subconscious level I probably do).
For lunch, we all went to the nearby Whole Foods and got stuff from their extended salad bar area. I was hungry and filled a big box with a multicultural jumble of things that proved too much to eat. I jokingly pointed out to Da that, according to its labeling, the kombucha he was drinking had enough alcohol in it to be illegal to sell to minors, which (unbeknownst to me at the time) put him further in the doghouse with our new boss Jo, who was showing himself to be something of an anti-alcohol puritan. He had apparently told Da that he wasn't to drink any alcohol this week so that his thinking would be clear for the lessons to be imparted. This sounded implausible to me, but Da insists that Jo also told him that his fruitarian diet made it possible to regrow lost adult teeth.
Da and I spent the afternoon in orientation for The Organization down in a basement conference room in the main office. There were two other newish employees with us, as well as the head of human resources. Initially we went around the table making introductions, and, as expected, Da went on at great length giving details that were of little interest or relevancy. When it was my turn, I tried to keep things succinct and to highlight interesting or vaguely-shocking things. For the "unusual thing" about me, I told the assembled that I had built and now use my own outhouse.
Da was even the only gratuitous talker in our small orientation, and for this reason it dragged on a record four and half hours. A lot of it was spent with Ja the HR guy scrolling through a document reading highlights about things like sexual harrassment, diversity, and vacation time, and it seemed to linger with the scroll indication near the bottom. But the document was so long that any hope of it ending was premature. Eventually it did end, but at the end there it was rushed when Jo came over to set up for the evening post-work activity: the playing of a video game he'd written and the eating of vegan pizza. About twenty people showed up at various times to participate, including the founder of the organization.
The game looked a lot like a primitive version of Grand Theft Auto, though instead of a thuggish protagonist equipped with an ever-growing arsenal stealing cars and running over prostitutes, our avatar is a bipedal steer with washboard abs going around committing minor crimes for animal rights (releasing cows from stock yards, stealing a truck full of chickens, and posting anti-fur propaganda in department stores). With fingers slightly-greased by pizza, I played a round of the game, but I was terrible at it. Jo is very anti-automobile, so the steer's main vehicle is a bicycle, and mine kept getting blocked by curbs. For all its faults in terms of game play, it was an impressive effort for one person to have pulled off. Jo said he'd drawn all the textures for cars and buildings himself, and somehow it all came together as an only somewhat-stylized three-dimensional cityscape.
Eventually I got my laptop out of the other building (which was locked) and made my way back to the dreary intern apartment, where for the first time since arriving, I had a place all to myself. The first thing I did was take a nice relaxing shit.
It wasn't long after that that everyone else in the house showed up. Something about my brief moment of alonetime had recharged my batteries, and I was feeling good again to socialize. I microwaved a cup of hot water so I could drink some tea, but evidently the ceramic cup used non-microwave-safe glazes, and when I grabbed its handle it was like grabbing a hot frying pan. The burn was painful, but had completely vanished a half hour later.
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