The corporate world is foreign to me... familiar, but foreign. I have worked in it for over 2 years now, but I still feel like a square peg being forced into a round hole. All the little unwritten rules and subcultures and weird watercooler talk. For a long time I resisted entering the corporate world, but the paycheck was too sweet to resist. The ultimate question is... are the sacrifices of personal expression worth the monetary rewards?
Case in point: Exercise Ball Fiasco of 2009
I brought in this exercise ball to take the place of my bottom-numbing office chair. It was FABULOUS! I could bounce quietly to work off stress, and my legs and back have never felt better.
But alas... my 10 dollar TJ Maxx find only lasted a week. I came to work one morning and had a voicemail from our safety officer saying I had to get rid of the ball for safety purposes. This incident came as a close second to the greatest outcry of my corporate experience... when someone said to me, quote, "sometimes we have to hide aspects of ourselves in order to succeed."
*sigh*
Well, now I am quite literally waiting for the ball to drop. In about an hour I will find out if I am among the 20,000 employees that will be laid off by our Fortune 100 company. I have been waiting to hear this news for a week, and I can hardly focus on anything else.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad to part with this butt-numbing, personality-suppressing corporate world after all.
How do you keep up the balance between love and money?
No comments:
Post a Comment