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2006-02-20 - 9:12 a.m. The first week in a new job is always the easiest. When everyone's expectations are low, it's easy to impress them. Saying "I'm new here" is the easiest way to get out of a scolding when someone catches you racing down the hospital hallways riding on a cart like a bobsled. But then the next week comes, and you're expected to know your job, and it's no longer cute to see if your ID badge will get you into the doctor's lounge. And if you happen to slip in when someone is leaving, it will no longer take them two hours before they realize you don't belong there. And then the next week comes, and you start getting bored with your job, so you start taking longer and longer to come back from doing rounds, because you're asking patients to tell you the coolest thing that happened to them when they were under ten years old. And then the next week comes, and you start looking for a way out. You start looking for ways to get fired, so you don't seem like a quitter. Your resume is full of jobs you got fired from, knowing that nobody checks past work experience anymore. So you show up in jeans one day, even though it's against the dress code. They let it slide, because even when you want to get fired, you can't resist saying 'it's laundry day', even though you picked up two pairs of pants that morning, and specifically chose the ones that were inappropriate. All the while you keep thinking about every single person who walked into work one day with a semi-automatic. You think, did they try to get fired the week before by sending an urgent package labelled 'Washington, D.C.' to Tulsa? Did they take two hour lunch breaks, and give mumbled responses to where they were? Perhaps they passively-aggressively told their bosses to fuck off, but bosses have never been very good at listening. So they bought a gun. Maybe every person who hates where they're working realizes at some point that pretty much everyone else hates their jobs also. Perhaps the terrorists who organized 9/11 went after the WTC just because nobody had noticed their jean pants for three days in a row. They are the same as those guys who shoot up the post office, just with a bigger world-view.

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