Thursday, October 16, 2008

So guess who has a real job in the real world making real money and paying very real bills? That's right, me. I was lucky enough to graduate with a full time position and unlucky enough to have to start 2 days after graduation. So what's this real world like, you ask? My mother said to me the other day (and I'm providing nearly an exact quotation) "Trishaaaa, I feel so bad for you. I feel like all of your dreams are over! You've always looked forward to college, got there and loved it, and now it's done. All of your friends at Wheaton aren't here. You loved dance, but dance is no more. All you have left now is work... for the rest of your life... same thing, every day. I feel so bad for you! Do you feel bad for you!?!?"


.........


Gee thanks, Mom. Nothing about marriage, or raising a family, or a producer seeing me walk down the streets of Milford and shouting "I have to put her on Broadway!", or the possibility of graduate school, or a career change, or... I don't know.... traveling! I myself prefer to keep a positive outlook. I have things to look forward to in life still! I'm only 22! If I didn't have things to look forward to I'd have a pretty miserable 60+ years ahead of me. Thanks for helping me keep my chin up Mom :-) So optimistic.

So how do I think my life is going? It's pretty good. I actually feel like an adult for the first time in my life and I don't think it has anything to do with the real job or living on my own. It's like it sprung up out of nowhere. All throughout college I would look at pre-teens and younger teenagers and feel like I could relate more to them than I could relate to "legit for real" adult-adults. In my mind I would think, "I remember what it was like to walk around giggling and worrying so much about how I looked to boys and trying so hard to fit in and all that silly adolescent stuff". But now when I see them all I can think is "Teenagers are so bizarre with all this stuff they do, worry about and obsess over. I can't understand it". Suddenly I feel more like a parent to them than an "older kid" reminiscing about youth. I always wondered if I would ever really feel like an adult and now that's it here, I know it's here. It's bizarre.

But like I said, I really don't feel like that has anything to do with all of the "out of college now" changes. So what about those changes... well, the big one is the job, the topic with which I started out this blog. I'm doing market research which in a non-pretentious nutshell is writing surveys and analyzing the data that comes back. I decided to apply for market research jobs about halfway through senior year when I realized I had no idea what I wanted to do. I've always taken surveys online to earn a little (very little) extra money and suddenly came upon the realization that someone must actually write these things and look at the results. Being a huge math nerd, I always wished I could see the data after taking a survey and play around with the numbers and their implications. One trip to google and I found out these people are called market research analysts. So I said "okay!" and applied for a bunch of these positions that had relatively little to do with math but I thought might be fun because "well, hey! I like surveys!". And when none of the actuary, statistician, logistics, transportation planning (aka more "mathy") job applications worked out I said to myself "okay Trisha. let's go for the survey thing because, quite frankly, it's your only offer and you need to work." Hooray for my logical thinking.

Now I'm at a job where me, the girl with social anxiety, answers the phones and at least once a week (professionally, so as not to taint our company's reputation) has to tell off solicitors. I do real market research stuff too, I swear I'm not just a "phone girl" secretary. It's just so amusing that I have to answer phones when perhaps my biggest phobia is Telephonophobia (real word). Let's just say I'm getting over that one quickly. I have to! I can't sit there in front of the phone for 19 minutes, tapping my foot and twisting my hair, getting up the nerve to call a client. I can't just let the phone aimlessly ring when I know that if I don't answer it by the third ring someone else will and then I'll be "that Trisha, shirking her duties". In my first five months here I've gone through some pretty, after-the-fact, hilariously awkward mishaps due to my lack of social competency. I'd share some here but I'm paranoid that someone I work with is as crazy as me and will google me, find my blog, read this, be horrified and either a) fire me, though that would be a huge overreaction to any of my stories, and now that I think of it, would never actually happen because my stories are ridiculous and embarrassing but don't actually involve me doing anything wrong... b) heinously judge me for my social oddities.... c) create awkward tension in the office because they know my stories, but I don't know they know and they don't want me to know they searched me and secretly read my blog.... d) both b & c. God, they have me talking in survey language. Except that's really not how it's done at all... I just thought it would be humorous if I said that. Eh, not so much.

My biggest hassle with this whole answering the phone thing is I can't even pronounce our company's name correctly. I say "Ah-sew-see-its" instead of "Ah-sew-she-its" because Associates is such a freakin hard word to pronounce. I created a pronounciation cheat-sheet post-it note that I keep hidden on my desk near the phone. Not really, that's a lie. But it would be funny if I did. I'm lying a lot today in a vain attempt to keep things funny.

The last paragraph has been removed for reasons of paranoia. So this is the blog's new ending.