Springtime as a young consultant though not really young, almost 48. An office of about 200 with capacity for 150 and me in the oldest 10%. Young consultants dressed to look older, older consultants headed the other way. Office chit chat and shared food prep areas, microwaves, signs reminding people not to abandon their Tupperware; the fridge gets emptied on Fridays. The importance of looking busy. Of trying to be personable when you re-emerge from your work. This, an open office layout with no barriers between work spaces. The most flexibility you have is to stand or sit (the desks raise with a hand crank as do the chairs). They call this hot desking. No one has assigned seats. In fact you’re not allowed to sit in the same spot for more than a week, though this isn’t really enforced. Older consultants with more clout rebuff the policy. I move every Monday.

Moving to different parts of the office you realize there are micro-climates to work culture. People tend to move in clumps, cliques. The older 10% like me don’t put down roots. We don’t even affiliate much with one another. We aren’t at our desks a lot because most of the time we’re in conference rooms. And because I’m a manager I should be in these rooms inspecting my team’s work. The younger consultants, some of whom wear ties or dress slacks when there’s no obvious reason to do so other than as a costume for a role they imagined themselves playing fresh out of college. They are so young some still live at home with their parents. And so as a manager you have to be aware of that, to not call them “kids,” and to always know where the Kleenex is in case someone has a meltdown (which happens more than you’d think).

But for that spring and most of the summer I get no direct reports and no projects. I’m still in training you could say. That, and the business slows down come summer. Everyone else is fully utilized. That means they’ll bonus and they’re genuinely busy, not trying to look it. People make small talk and ask what I’m working on. It’s hard to make it sound good; it’s process work (busy work). How can I make it sound interesting if I’m not interested myself?

And yet it’s spring and I tell myself I should enjoy this time, the long walks around the corporate office park, the cherry blossoms, no stress. I’m just killing time. Here after almost 20 years at Starbucks corporate I’ve graduated in a sense too, to consulting. To working with kids fresh out of college I shouldn’t call kids. There’s an energy to the office and I can learn a lot from them. I hope they can learn from me too.

Doing laps around the corporate office park in the pastel dawn with nowhere to go and no one noticing I’m gone. How the morning air hung on a day that would be hot. Thinking back to how poorly things ended for me in my last job—was this some kind of reward? But killing time feels lousy because if your time isn’t worth much it’s hard to believe you’re worth much either.

We have a strange relationship with time and how to use it. Working with IT people long enough I’ve learned about this idea of “next best action.” The NBA is a predictive analytical tool to determine the most appropriate action to take, often for highest efficiency or impact. Seven years later it’s spring and I’m working for the consulting agency again, this time from home, with little to do because I’m waiting, just killing time. Now I think my next best action is a hot bath.

Categories: Corporate America, Creative Nonfiction

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, mid-life crisis, mindfulness, Nostalgia