Culture Shock

Call me Prooferbert.

I’ve just started a four-month long assignment as a temporary proofreader, checking holiday advertising for one of America’s largest sporting goods retailers, and I am scared. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been immersed in corporate American culture. I sit in my cubicle within a maze of other, identical cubicles, within a building that requires a computer-chipped ID card to get one through any of the doors, within an enormously expansive concrete parking lot that also demands the flash of a card to get one’s car in or out. I keep reminding myself that I am only a temp here, and so this place is only a temporary part of my life. I tell myself that I can live inside a Dilbert cartoon for four months without losing my trademark quirkiness. It’s not like I’m planning to make a habit of it. I will stay here to proofread the holiday sale ads, and then I will celebrate Christmas by leaving my cubicle forever and settling down, with the freedom afforded by all of the money I will have saved up, to follow my dream of living in a very loose schedule, learning to make a living copyediting books and writing magazine articles. “Eyes on the prize,” I keep telling myself. “Delayed gratification is the hallmark of adulthood. Delayed gratification is the best kind there is.”

I feel like writing love letters to my sloppy, freewheeling, freelance self, the one who stays up late reading books, sleeps until nine, doesn’t care what her hair looks like, and volunteers for every arts organization event she can find because she has the time to do so. “We will be together again in January,” I would say. “Only thinking of your beauty keeps my soul alive. Wait for me, my love.”

Yes, I’m being melodramatic, and life in the standard giant corporations’ offices has grown far more authentic and casual in the past two decades, since the days when everyone wore suits to work and the novel American Psycho took place. Still, this place scares me.

I long for my last full-time job, at a company in Boulder, where we published books and audio programs on yoga, meditation, Jungian psychology, and other spiritual topics. I had to leave my job there, as it had expanded to the point where they really needed a calm, assertive manager, and I am none of those things.

Still, though I didn’t fit the position, I surely fit the culture, or rather, it fit me. Instead of a cubicle, I worked in a large, open room with two other people; it was like sharing a childhood bedroom with two brothers. There was no dress code. Those who met with clients dressed up on the days they met with them, not because a company rule told them to, but because they realized that it might impress the clients. Otherwise, we wore jeans, shorts, hiking boots, no shoes at all—whatever we felt like wearing on any given day. Friendly dogs roamed the halls. (There were rules banning unfriendly dogs and dogs who tended to pee on the carpet.) We had a full kitchen where people didn’t just reheat, but actually cooked lunches, the meat-eaters and the vegans, the Atkins diet devotees and those who’d determined they were allergic to wheat all coexisting in open harmony. The guy who rarely made eye contact was not passed over for hiring or sent to a seminar on assertiveness. He was just declared to be a “5”—his Enneagram personality type—and enjoyed because we need all types to balance us out. I once overheard a coworker declare, “Well, the company manual told us to bring our authentic selves to work, and sometimes my authentic self says ‘fuck’!”

I am afraid that, in my current office culture, I might forget who my authentic self is. Today I am wearing a spandex-infused polo shirt from Target and cheap, no-wrinkle polyester pants because jeans are only allowed on Fridays. I’m sure the company intends this to be a treat, but in practice, this means jeans are required on Fridays. I have even less power to choose my own appearance on that “relaxed” day. Strangely, anything else made of denim is allowed. The receptionist at the front desk wears a 16-inch jean skirt that clings to her behind. Surely whatever human being within the company wrote these rules—I imagine it’s some executive-level human resources expert, working so far away in this maze of an office building that I will never meet her—thought she was creating a comfortable professional environment, preventing people from scaring each other by wearing any old thing.

In practice, these strict but incomplete rules make each of us look a lot less interesting and a little less human. All of us look into our closets each morning (or, as time-management professionals suggest, the night before), see what looks best to us, what most expresses how we feel at that moment, and then subject the poor shirt or pants or pair of shoes to a list of rules: No jeans. Pants must hit below the knee—this is the official difference between “pants” and the forbidden “shorts.” Flip-flop sandals are, inexplicably, allowed, though my beloved Teva sport sandals are not. Then each of us sighs and selects something less exciting, something that doesn’t break any rules. After a while, we start to impose more rules: All of the men seem to have the same haircut, clipped close to their heads and gelled into place. The belt I crocheted out of fake suede isn’t expressly forbidden, but it doesn’t look right with anything that fits the dress code. My most comfortable socks look silly with “acceptable” shoes. I worry about what my higher-ups will think of the shawl I knitted out of the hand-dyed yarn whose colors remind me of the St. Lawrence River.

I miss my old job. I miss wearing pigtails in my hair and eating vegan chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. I miss the little white dog who used to snooze in the corner of my office all afternoon. I miss the guy who used to play guitars with me in the kitchen at lunch—his fuzzy beard and his hair, longer and curlier than mine, flowing over his shoulders or tied in a messy ponytail. I miss spending breaks playing Frisbee with my office brothers in the dandelion-infested front yard.

But to my surprise, as the days pass and I get to know my coworkers better, I discover that they do still have personalities under their khakis, polo shirts, and cookie cutter hair. People still talk about where they’re from, what they did on the weekend, and what kind of music they like best. I see stuffed animals on desks, and pictures of small children and dogs pinned up on cubicle walls. Apparently, one’s authentic self is more difficult to leave behind than I’d first thought. It seeps through around the rules, becoming more creative in its quietness. I try pushing the boundaries. I put up my A Series of Unfortunate Events wall calendar, and nobody complains. My stuffed Dogbert doll becomes my “in/out” sign: the rest of the copy team knows that, if he is sitting on top of my monitor, looking down on my chair, I am in the office and will be right back. If he’s sitting on the desk, in front of the keyboard and with one paw on the mouse, I am out for the day and Dogbert is taking over the world via Internet.

As I sit outside on my lunch break, getting my polyester Old Navy Essential Trousers damp as I sit on a tiny patch of grass in the shade of one anemic sapling at the edge of the parking lot, a young man walks by. He is wearing the regulation polo shirt and khakis, with brown shoes and belt that would make my vegetarian friends cry. His hair is cut and gelled into a tidy imitation of Ward Cleaver. And yet, under his arm, he is carrying a Frisbee! Where does he play? With whom? When? Can I play, too? Is there grass there, and are there real trees? I restrain myself from tackling him and barraging him with these questions.

There may be hope for this place yet.