No boyfriend.
No first kiss.
Not even an alcoholic drink.
Some people called me tightly laced, or a prude, but I was just busy.
And now that I was working for an illustrious company that could open about a billion and one doors for me, I wasn’t about to get any less busy.
I rode up in the elevator that was entirely too fast, and the doors opened to reveal a middle aged, Dad-looking man standing there with a clipboard. He looked up at me quickly before a friendly smile spread across his face.
“Beverly Viello?”
“I prefer Bev, please,” I said with what I hoped was a winning smile.
“Oh, of course. My name is Chris Daniels. I’ll be your orientation manager for today. If you’ll walk right this way, we’ll take your picture, so it can be printed by the time your tour is done.”
“Tour?” I echoed uncertainly.
“Yes! If you’re going to be an assistant here, you need to know how this building works. Naturally we don’t expect you to have everything memorized with just one showing, but we’ve found it definitely helps to see everything from top to bottom.”
“Ah, that makes sense.”
I followed him to one of the only blank walls around us and he held up his phone, taking a few pictures of me up against the partition, before hurriedly emailing them off.
“Alright, very good. You’ll have to have that badge to come into work in the future. You forget it, there’s no one who can buzz you in. You’re allowed one loss a year, after that you go on warning. Another loss, you don’t come back into work. However, if your wallet or purse is stolen, it will not be counted against you as long as you have a police report.”
“Wow,” I murmured. “You guys take your employee badges really seriously.”
“We take almost everything here really seriously. Don’t get us wrong, we have our fun, but in order for that to happen, we have to have a structure that we adhere to.”
“Of course,” I answered enthusiastically but not particularly committedly. Although I was new to the workforce, I’d spent enough time freelancing on web design to know when to agree with someone without actually agreeing with anything.
“Anyways, we should start with this floor. I think that makes the most sense.”
“We are already here, after all.”
“Indeed. Well, shall we?”
“Of course,” oh goodness. I was going to be saying that a lot, wasn’t I? “Lead away.”
He walked off at a fairly brisk place, but I managed to follow behind. I’d worn flats because I figured there would be plenty of leg work. Going on what I read online, the management liked to make their assistants go, go, go and I wouldn’t be surprised if I had to hit the ground running.
Well, it wasn’t quite running, but the tour was more intense than I had ever imagined it could be. There were ten floors in the building and he led me through all of them. By the time we ended back up by his office, my mind was spinning.
But boy did GSME have a lot of goodies.
There were free snacks on all the floors. Literally. Free snacks. As in I could just walk up, grab whatever I wanted, then go back to my desk. There was also a huge cafeteria with a buffet and salad bar. And apparently free lunch on Fridays. And there was a work out room towards the bottom floor and even a nap room for women and for men. All they needed was a ball pit and a slide and they would be too good to be true.
And yet it was true. I couldn’t believe it. I had a real job and it was practically in paradise! I even had benefits after my first month. I would have had them immediately, but apparently, they took time to get into the system and get set up.
We went back into an office that I recognized as Chris’ and soon he was pulling a picture of me off a small printer, pulling the back away to reveal it was a sticker, that he slapped onto my badge before putting the badge itself into some other sort of small machine.
“The heat will melt the enzymes in the glue to your badge, fusing it.”
“Huh,” I said, more than a bit fascinated. “That’s cool.”
“The opposite of cool, actually. Hot.” he said, waggling his eyebrow at his pun. Oh God, he definitely was a dad.
“Let me guess, you have two kids, one of which is under three, the other is just entering school?”
“Uncanny!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “My girl is five and my little boy is just turning two. He’s a real terror, actually. How did you know?”
I kept my face flat as I answered. “Well, the pun for one. Secondly your tie isn’t tacky or kitschy, which means your children are either too young to give you Christmas presents or old enough to have enough knowledge about work-place appropriate ties.