rachel@home

Lost

Usually, my sense of direction is pretty good. Drop me down anywhere in the Pierce/King/Snohomish county area, and I can get myself turned around and knowing where I am in no time at all.

And I rather like that about myself, that I can miss my exit and get off at the next one and find where I'm going with only a couple of turns and not have to get back on the freeway to try again from the beginning.

But my image of myself as someone who knows where she's going is about to run abruptly into a solid brick wall.

Right now, at work, I'm on the 12th floor of a 13-floor pyramid-shaped building. That means my floor isn't very big, and even when I was on the 11th floor, that wasn't very big. I could navigate around no problem, from the copy room to the kitchen to the elevators and back to my office. Swoosh, swish, I was there and back again.

In a couple of weeks, though, that's all coming to an end. My team is moving to a downtown office, and I got my first look at it today. It doesn't have the quirky art-deco charm that the current castle on the hill has, but it's not bad. Natural light, a decent kitchen, much easier access to Starbucks or Tully's, depending on my mood, near all kinds of restaurants for lunch, plus the giant Asian grocery store, with all sorts of wacky treats is right across the street.

What it also has, though, is rows and rows of cubicles that all look exactly the same, and when you find your way out of the cubicles, there's hallways with banks of elevators that all look exactly the same.

What I have come to understand from analyzing the situation is that my good sense of direction comes from paying attention to landmarks and remembering where they are, so when I find myself in a situation with no landmarks, I'm way more lost than a person who depends on memorizing which way to go.

Today, I went with a co-worker to look at the new offices, and she led me there, and led me back down. When we got back to the elevators, I had gotten myself all turned around and completely confused. Then, we went to a meeting in the building next door, and after that meeting, I followed someone else to the place where the shuttle between my current building and my new building stops.

As I was waiting for the shuttle to come, I looked back across the street at the building I'd just come out of, and I realized that I had absolutely no idea which of the several buildings across the street my new office building even was.

I can picture my first day of trying to go to work in my new office. I'll have to go into the one building that I can find downtown, and beg the security guard to show me to my new office. Later, I'll try to go get lunch, and will get lost again. After that, they'll probably they'll pin a note on my shirt and recommend that I think about a GPS.

After about a week or so, they'll be snickering and pointing when I walk in, and a week after that, they'll be diving under their desks, pretending they're not there.

I obviously need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, or maybe some of those construction paper footprints that teachers cut out and tape to the ground for the first day of kindergarten. Maybe I can even get them color coded -- blue to go to my office, yellow to the kitchen, green to Starbucks... I think it could work!

Posted by Rachel at April 30, 2004 12:54 AM