Yesterday, I walked into my new office and felt true despair.

I am not actually starting the new position until Oct. 14th, but I’m still part-time until then (weird) so I get to spend my whopping five hours a week doing proto-management stuff. Like, cleaning the office.

Here’s the deal in regards to my despair:

My new job at the SDRC is actually the job of my former supervisor. I worked with her part-time for two years, on several major projects for the department as well as day-to-day operations. We even presented together (at her kind encouragement) at a national convention last year. I was part of her team, a group of four who accomplished some amazing things — ask me about “the math book” sometime, and I will bore you to tears! She and I were friends before she quit, and remain so.

However our personal work styles are radically different. She’s a clutterer, stacking things up to be “close at hand” even if it means piles of paperwork all over the place. She knew where to find what she needed. If I moved things, she knew it (and chewed me out!). Her system worked for her.

On the other hand, I’m an organizer. Here’s a clue: one of the first things I had the program assistant (office manager) order was a label printer. I want wide open clean space on my desk so I can think, I want stuff filed and orderly, I want to LABEL ALL THE THINGS.

As you can imagine, looking at the office now overwhelms me.

It is, interestingly, a common problem in the work force. Different methods of organization/procedure mean that it’s nearly impossible for new employees to walk onto a job and start doing it seamlessly right away. To counter this, corporations work very hard to standardize and monitor everything — to the point of impinging on productivity, IMHO. People work differently, using different modalities and skill sets. We react differently to similar environments.

For instance, as much as I need organized surroundings, I loath regimentation. If I am told a stapler has to be at a 90-degree angle to the edge of the desk, I will purposely set it catty-corner. And yes, I’ve worked in places with ridiculous rules like that. :/

Other people actually like that kind of oversight, as it leaves them with no doubts about where the stapler is supposed to go.

And some people, like my former boss, might put the stapler in the correct position but then cover it with 40 file folders!

I can’t just sweep all the stuff away, because it includes important data that I may need to reference later, things like software licensing agreements, manuals, contact information, log-on user-ids, etc. But how to organize it is the question…or whether to organize it, even. Most of it I won’t need, I’m pretty sure of that. I could put it all into boxes and shove them in a closet, and dig around later if I ever need that one scrap of info shoved into a file somewhere.

Still, it rankles me to not know what I have.

Meanwhile, as I suspected, my learning curve for other aspects of the job is going to be steep. I know a lot of it on a shallow level, due to helping out or filling in when needed, but the nuts-and-bolts of, say, getting a textbook cleared from the publisher in order to scan a copy for use by a student who needs it in an alternative format…yeahhhh, not so much.

Ugh. LIVE THE QUESTION.