Welcome to your future. Yes, it's a cubicle.

So today was take your snot nosed brat…I mean take your child to work day. This day always poses a challenge to me as I am significantly lacking in the snot nosed brat department. Well, I am a brat and depending on how my allergies are that day the other portion of that phrase might be applicable but as someone without kids this day always makes me feel weird at the office. It is like I am supposed to go out and rent a family for the occasion. Otherwise I feel as though I am being left out.

This whole take your child to work movement is a rather recent phenomenon starting while I’ve actually been working. I never went with my dad to work to see what his day as an architect was like. To be honest, even when I graduated college I wasn’t entirely sure what working a real job was like. I could never quite understand how you were given assignments or how you ever knew what to do. Now with twelve years of work experience (and a two year hiatus for grad school) I can confidently say that I still have no clue what working a real job is supposed to be like. I still feel like I’m doing it wrong and that one day someone is going to ask me where the electro spanner that all employees are given on their third day is.

So I guess it is a good thing that we show kids what work in the real world is actually like so that they can enter an office without it being a blank space. I can’t blame any parent for taking time out to be with their kid either (though why the purpose is to take them out of school in the process is a little bit counter intuitive). My big issue is that I can’t understand why we want to introduce our children to the mindless drudgery that is our daily life in the office any earlier than we have to.

Now don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy my job. I get to talk about dollars and megawatts and how to best design an electrical grid for the US. I actually consider it to be cooler than being paid to talk about ringtones. But at the end of the day I am spending hour after hour looking at numbers on a computer monitor, drinking overpriced coffee under the glare of fluorescent lights. Halfway through the day I have a hastily prepared lunch or eat preprocessed food that increases my cholesterol by ten points while I am eating it. In the winter I drive to work in the dark and come home in the dark. My new job marks the first time in years that I am able to tell what the weather is like outside while sitting at my desk as opposed to having to get up, walk down a hallway, turn a corner and then look out a window. All in all, I would much rather be a kid and have my afternoons being spent doing whatever I feel like. Sadly, that doesn’t pay nearly as well.

So bring your kids to the office if you feel like it. It’s probably a nice experience. But let the kids be kids. We don’t need to show them what their future holds. Let them think it is still limitless. Much better to be nine years old and dreaming of being an astronaut than realizing that you are destined to be an accountant.

One day I'll be able to work outside

We all have our own habits and idiosyncharacies at the office. It is one of the challenges of creating a positive work environment: you need a set of rules and guidelines except that you know by nature that no two people have the exact same work style. Some people are morning people, some are afternoon people, some need to be constantly talking while others would prefer it if they could go the entire day without human contact. As much as I might question the field of Organizational Behavior I have to admit that it does have its uses.

Typically what happens is that I try to find my own optimal working style in the framework that is given me. What is interesting is that after a three month experiment in the office I am going to try to go back to my old ways and see if that has a beneficial impact on myself and the company as a whole. It might seem like the most minor of changes imaginable but I really think it is going to have a huge impact and it all focuses on how I have lunch.

See, my office lacks a cafeteria in my building but we have a quarterly lunch program in which we have the food from the cafeteria brought to us. On the surface this is a great idea as it saves you from having to walk out in the cold or the rain or even deal with case on a daily basis as you pay for the entire quarter in advance. And I’m certain for a lot of people in the office it is a great thing. But after a quarter trial (done mainly so I wouldn’t have to walk out in the cold) I’ve come to the decision that it is not for me.

First of all, having an all you can eat buffet that I’ve already paid for sitting directly outside my office is just way too much of a dangerous temptation for me. I can blame the five or ten pounds I’ve put on so far this year entirely to the fact that every day I could go and grab an extra chocolate chip cookie or bag of chips without a care in the world. All of those add up to some additional padding along the waistline that I do not particularly require. Sure I could have a salad but what are the odds of that happening?

The other aspect, and maybe the more interesting one, is that I have discovered that I just need to get out of the office and get some fresh air every day. In a weird way this is why I envy smokers. They can step outside for a smoke break and while emphysema is a rather high price to pay it does have it benefits. I am just not a person who can spend ten hours under fluorescent lights staring at computer screens and looking at numbers. I can do it when it is required but it just takes a lot out of me. For me to be at my best I really need to take a lap once a day. Step away from everything, walk around for a bit, and completely forget about the office for fifteen minutes. I am not sure if that disqualifies me from being an executive but it is just the way my mind works best.

So I am going back to the old method of getting out at lunch even though it will turn out to be more expensive and most likely have me end up spending more time in the office. But I think I will feel better for it and that is what matters at the end of the day. Now if I can just convince my body to get out of bed thirty minutes earlier so I could actually have breakfast then I will be making some real progress. If anyone knows how I could accomplish that little miraculous feat please let me know.

I still have a copy of the test somewhere...

Ugh, I’ve just had one of those nights where you spend the entire evening taking care of all the work that you didn’t do during the day when they were technically paying you to work. Not that it was intense work, it’s just that I tend to have a few tasks that just take time and that are best done with music in the background. Sadly, my company frowns on my tendency to play Slayer during normal working hours. Something about choruses of “Destruction will occur” not being suitable for the modern workplace I guess.

True work story (since I doubt anyone believes the Slayer bit): There are a few reasons why I’ve been posting videos. One is because I do hope that people enjoy them and maybe find out about a new band. The other is that over the past few months I’ve created my online playlist through these videos (just click on either Wednesday Night Music Club or Best of 120 Minutes on one of those posts and you’ll see what I mean.) So if I get bored with Pandora or my MP3 player I’ll just click on the videos.

What this means is that occasionally I will be at my cubicle with the Rollins Band’s “Liar” playing very loudly in my headphones. And if I’m not careful I might hit the wrong tab and call up the webpage in which a red painted Henry Rollins is simply screaming into the camera. There are many things that are going to keep me from being an executive and the fact that this is the way I prefer to work is high on the list. Still, talk about getting pumped up at the office.

I’ve got another true story to share based off of a news headline I saw today. It probably explains a lot about why I am the way I am. For those of you who missed it, scientists recently found that in a certain logic test chimpanzees were smarter than college students. The experiment involved identifying patterns based on numbers being flashed on a screen. Given that numbers were involved I assumed that the college students scores were normalized for the inclusion of liberal arts majors because otherwise the chimps would have had a definite natural advantage. But, this isn’t the only example of a chimp being smarter than a college student.

Fall semester junior year I took ECE 340: Solid State Electronic Design. This was one of those course every electrical engineer took at Illinois for reasons that escape me. The course gave you the overview on how all electronic devices (transistors, computer chips) were built. Specifically, you dealt with all of the math and physics behind the design and talked about the diffusion of electrons across a 9 micrometer surface. Yeah, this was not exactly the most intuitive material one could study.

Anyway, it’s time for our first exam and I spend the entire weekend studying for it. I feel like I have a great grasp of the material, can answer all of the homework problems and was helping others prior to the test. Plus, how tough could the test be? It was fifteen questions, multiple choice. I mean, by definition a monkey could get a four on the exam.

I got a five.

With an entire weekend of study I could barely beat a chimp. A buddy of mine actually got a three. One guy, who didn’t even know until that morning that we had an exam, got a twelve. I think the class average was eight. That was what it was like being an electrical engineering major at Illinois. You knew by definition that you were one of the brightest people on the campus but that still meant that you were barely smarter than a chimp.

I think the rest of my life has been spent trying to prove to myself two things. One, I am more than an intelligent ape. Two, no matter how bad my life gets it will never be as bad as ECE 340.