onboreding

Today I was in an all-morning mandatory “onboarding” (god I hate that word) meeting and my exhaustion hit me like a sucker-punch. I felt like I was going to yarf in the middle of a review of business strategies, with all the fancy people looking on.

My exhaustion is all my own fault: I’ve felt all week like there weren’t enough hours to do all the things I’ve wanted to do, so I just stayed up and up and pushed myself past sleepiness and wow that is not a way to behave, not at my age, not at any age, and not while I’m trying to be a good productive worker bee.

I really need to be in bed by 23:00 tonight for tomorrow not to be painful. When I’m this tired, everything is yarftastic, even public transit. At the bus stop, an older man asked me what I was listening to, and was confused when I told him “lectures on physics”.

Thank goodness for Inkbot, who is picking up dinner right now, and for my new coworkers, who are bright and helpful and who make me laugh. Eating then sleeping now.

About Halsted M. Bernard

Halsted, a/k/a cygnoir, does stuff with words. Her favourite things to do with words are keeping this diary, writing stories, and organising information. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, two cats, a few gadgets, several fountain pens, and many books.

Posted on 7 Sep 2006 in Diary
  • Shannon

    At two of my old companies, they called those meetings “All Hands” meetings. Which, now that I type it out, looks really dirty. At any rate, I never went, so it was a LIE.

  • http://journal.amanita.net/ Meredith

    Er, not the cafeteria. The auditorium. Everything but the unplugged sessions are in an auditorium. Plus little sub-sub-sub-deparment meetings, which are wherever they can find an open conference room.

  • http://journal.amanita.net/ Meredith

    I didn’t know what “onboarding” was until I read Shannon’s comment. They call them “all hands” here too, but that specifically refers to when everybody has to go and sit in the auditorium and get told stuff. We also have “town hall” meetings, which are by department, and we all go sit in the auditorium and get told stuff by the department head. And then there’s the “open forum” (recently renamed “director’s call”) meetings, which involve sitting in the cafeteria and getting told stuff by the agency director. Both town halls and director’s calls include a question-and-answer period toward the end, but you have to have submitted your question in advance. And then there’s “unplugged” sessions, which is when the sub-department head lets the employees bitch at him in a conference room.

    I end up in a lot of meetings.