the battle scars of the office worker

Never having a job that required me to mingle with the morning worker crowd - my work started mostly at 10am...in fact all my past jobs did not require me to work early... I meet the morning crowd with a bit of novelty, and lack of jaded-ness. Somehow I do enjoy waking up in the morning and drinking coffee, now a neccesity. I see the queues at my train station, two metal dividers making three rows, people queueing up for free newspapers.

I become aware of how much trees I waste daily, yet in a quasi gahmen job the job has a need to leave a paper trail, especially being stringently audited by the powers that be. And most surprisingly of all, I start to eat at foodcourts everyday. I've never thought of sandwiches as a luxury, now I do that I have to queue again at snaking rows. The food is often unpalatable, a cheap, tasteless version for what passes as a meal. But I've cut my lunch cost by half and can ... buy more things. I can't imagine how an office worker life is like, and now I am living one. They give us drawers with our own keys to make us happy, and files to keep around us like bricks building our work-home. I have to cc- and bcc- many people, not like in the past where I work for mainly myself, and the cc-ed people means they have to do my bidding. I finally found out what the 'b' in 'bcc' stands for.

Even though my past job was tough, I do miss certain aspects of it. Like no one caring if I walk in half an hour later (I am disciplined though, I do come in early, earlier than most!) And having an assistant. I didn't know that only higher levels had assistants. I miss having one. Not being showy or anything, it was just the nature of my job.

I have paper cuts, scotch tape holder cuts. I nicked my shin on a cardboard box. Being a small place, we tend to bump into things. And things start to irk us too, even the cleaner lady that comes in everyday and picks every little bit of my trash up with a tong.

And like what Kie said, I start to notice the people who take the same ride as me.
'The guy who looks like Roger', or 'the lady with the penchant for wearing flowers'.
I noticed 'the auntie with the purple Longchamp bag.' I wouldn't have noticed her apart from the Longchamp bag, in a very 'orbit' shade of purple. I like the bag but after seeing masses of them everyday, and usually on a certain pattern of ladies, I still opt for coach. The coach fanatics have all disappeared into kate spade and thus coach bags become once more, covetable again, if only because they are not-so-common-as-before. I start to judge people with ugly shoes and people with wet hair. Those with ugly shoes seem to be stuck in a low-end job, they can't even bother to wear or buy nice shoes to work. Ditto for those with wet hair. As I now no longer can afford the time to wash my hair I judge those who do not care about their hair being wet and limp. Next month I shall buy the Sephora dry shampoo.

A moneypinching lesson is: If all my lunches cost only $3.50 I shall save loads... it's nice to live cheap as an office worker in sg.