limbo!

Top 10 - Best Free and Cool Stuff You Get Out of an Office Job

·         Company Mug

1) It has a handle

2) It doesn’t make evil Styrofoam noises

3) And yes, environmentally friendly

·         Coffee, Tea or Hot Chocolate to put in Company Mug

Especially the Hot Chocolate. Nothing can start a day like this. DELISH!

·         Water Bottle Refills

Lovin’ the agua. No I don't love water because of all of that health/diet stuff. I just like the clear drinks: Vodka. Gin. Water.

·      One of those cool/snappy retractable company badge holders

Fun to play with. I snap them like every 5 mins. Thanks office gods they are free, because I'll probably break it soon.

·         Personalized Business Cards

So I can finally say things like “Let me just give you my card” at bars. Lame, I know.

·         Sticky Notes

No need for an explanation here; clearly AWESOME

·         Folders

I think organizing is fun. Is Manila a color? I've always wondered. Apparently, it's actually a hemp. Sadly, not the kind of hemp you are thinking. Otherwise, free stuff like this at work would make us even more happy :).

·         Pens which are magically highlighters too

I’m a writer. Nuff’ said

·         Paperclips

In different colors! Who could ask for more?

· Printer paper

Useful for obvious reasons like printing things you are not supposed to at work.

Access to this website is restricted at this time. You’ve probably seen this type of page a million times. I know I’ve been seeing these very words, or something in that vein since I was in middle school, when the internet really took off and my school was blocking inappropriate sites.

These days, I’m working at my first job and I signed onto my computer account, opened a Mozilla Firefox browser to research the company’s move to use new media platforms for marketing…and lo and behold, I have no access. While I can certainly request access in the near future and probably get it for research purposes, the restriction got me to thinking about the bigger picture.

Perhaps social media (Facebook, Twitter, Blogging software and etc) began as a purely social concept, but today, friends can be fans and you can do market research on whatever product or company you choose, with your subjects and clients right at your fingertips. These sites are not only beneficial tools, but also often a required form of innovation. Everyone’s doing it and if you’re not, you’re pretty much a loser in the business sector.

A new generation has entered the workforce. We can multi-task better, we have a short attention span and we are eager and spongy when it comes to learning. We absorb new technologies and new ideas on a daily basis and don’t even break a sweat. We’re young, we’re annoying and we are definitely different… and the time has come to make room.

So the question arises? Won’t we get distracted? Why allow “fun” distractions into the workforce besides the fact that they might be valuable tools for promotion, marketing, market research, networking and much more? Those reasons are all obvious, but the question of distraction is not. How do you tackle that hurdle?

Here’s the thing. Because we spent our college careers glued to our computers browsing Facebook profiles, listening to iTunes or Pandora.com, while writing an essay in another window, chatting on AIM, Skype or MSN on our desktops and then eating our cold dry ramen with another hand, we’re pretty good at the multitasking thing. But what’s even more interesting is that we need it. Crazy idea, right? We’ve been so programmed to our distractions that we can no longer work without them.

While all of this might seem like some sort of lame excuse or rant for me to be able to access my Twitter feed at work, it’s really not. Believe me. With sites like Twitter and Facebook uploaded into our brain chips or whatnot, they have become necessary for our creative process and we often create new products or ideas or even book manuscripts based on something we scanned over on a blog or twitter post.

So yes, I finally got a job. I sold out my writing and editing skills and got a job in marketing because I need money and I need a job and I was sick and tired of waiting for the journalism industry to turn around. The problem with all that is that I spent my whole college career wanting to work because I was one of the few people who knew…I knew I would love what I was doing when I got a job. And now I don’t.

Here’s what I don’t like and don’t get about my marketing job:

I grew up in a generation and a time when things, media and the world moves faster than you can catch up with it. Young people, start-up developers, know full well that in this day and age, success is about just doing, rather than planning. The older generation wants to plan it all out. We are, however, a generation of trial and error. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but in a time when you can make a completely absurd changes to Wikipedia and see them gone in minutes if not seconds, then why the hell not?

The other day, my mom asked me a question about how to use a feature on her new keyboard phone. I played around with it and eventually figured out what to do. My mom began to sing my praises and exclaim that I was born to work with technology. For me, it was just trial and error; for her, it was pure genius.

So far, in my first week in this job, here’s a list of things I learned one does in a marketing job:

·         Long conference calls daily if not twice a day about planning things

·         Planning things

·         Making charts planning things to do somewhere in the far off future

·         Re-making the charts facing in a different direction to plan things

·         Send above mentioned planning charts to people to look over

·         Changing above mentioned planning charts again

Nowhere in there are the words doing, creating, or making, which sort of makes me sad and makes me feel hopeless. By the time this process is over and you do actually get permission to do something, all of your competitors would have gotten there first.

On September 11, in the year 1609, Henry Hudson discovered Manhattan Island and the indigenous people living there.

Nearly 400 years later, on September 11, 2001, the twin towers came crumbling down.

Last year, our economy came crumbing down.

Today? I had an interview.

I’d like to think that things are looking up. I’d like to think that today we value our freedom more than anything; and those who protect it. I’d like to think that we don’t take each other or our freedoms for granted. I’d like to think that we can rebuild our freedoms, rebuild our faith and rebuild our economy. But…you never know. I guess all we can really do is see where life has brought us and what we have accomplished in these eight fleeting years.

On September 11, 2001, I walked into my freshman year high school French class. I was a bit late, as usual. The TV was on and I wasn’t really sure why. It looked like some sort of action movie with planes and buildings, set in New York. Then, minutes later, when I saw the news headline appear in red below the visual, I realized it was real. We weren’t watching an action movie in French 2; it was reality.

I took my French AP exam junior year, finished high school the next year and then took a French Cinema class years later in college, only to realize French people aren’t really that into action movies.

Since that day in 2001, I also took up Latin and Italian, I majored in Journalism at Boston University, studied abroad at Oxford University and graduated cum laude from the College of Communication. Much good all of that did for me, as I am still here looking for a job, but hey, there’s a lot to be thankful for. I have a great family, great friends and nothing is the end of the world.

It’s a strange date for me to start this tumblr blog, but at the same time, it seems just right. Life is sort of a mystery right now and looking at how much has happened till now, I can only imagine what the next eight years will bring.

Limbo is defined as a state of uncertainty. It was also my favorite party game back in the day, mostly because I always won. Here’s to winning this game of limbo and to not forgetting what happened in between (the good stuff and the bad stuff).