I once had a job where I had to recreate the world. My first day was a bit overwhelming. My boss was a five foot eight, 240 pound black woman with long knotted hair that changed from jet black to rust as it made it's life long journey from her scalp to her salonists shears. I didn't meet her during the interview process. I met her on my first day.

I sat in the front lobby having given the receptionist my name. When my new boss finally gathered me up I was half way back to sleep land. She walked and talked like she'd been written by Stephen Bochco. Her speech stammered, slowed, and then sped ahead in patterns unfitting of a human. It made the words difficult to find, her sentences hard to reconstruct in my brain box.

She showed me around the office. Well, she pointed out a few things and mumbled while taking the direct path to my small dank meeting room with a table and some stored boxes of paper and broken computers. We both agreed to pretend it was an office. There was no need to talk about it.

I kept to myself that first day. I accidentally met a few people who gave me names to forget. I gave them mine in return. I was a foreign particle in their long island iced tea. Had they bumped into me walking around their homes I'm not sure their glances would have been much different.

I spent some time after lunch with a bull of a man with hair for horns who's job title was People Power. He explained how I could make more money by sleeping less, being in the office more. I could exchange my life for cash. He also gave me a card so I could get my teeth cleaned and pharmaceuticals to keep me awake at work and asleep at home.

The first day on a job is like the last few minutes of a hard night drinking. You find yourself staring at the muddy ground, on all fours wondering how the fuck you got here and how you're going to make it stop. You assume puking will make you feel better which is only partially true. You've given up swearing you'll never drink again so you skip past that. You know you'll feel like shit tomorrow but somehow manage to do it all over again.

I started smoking my second day on the job. I needed purpose in my day, something to do, something to keep track of, something to lose track of, something to occupy my thoughts. I met a girl after my second day. We started dating. I needed someone to explain my version of the world to. Someone I could convince of my interpretation. I stopped calling her a month later when she became my zealot. Some guy at the bar overheard something I'd said to her four times before. He rightfully disagreed with it. She gathered up my words and threw them at him. I didn't like hearing my own words spoken by someone else. Words I knew were false. I was full of shit and she had no clue. I loved that about her at first but it bores quickly.

By the third week on the job I had all but shut down. The people in my office spoke some language I had yet to learn. It was english but with it's own words, phrases, and lingo. It was all inside jokes and secret messages. I had no idea what my job really was. I was convinced no one could accomplish what I'd been asked to do. I'd only talked to my bosses rusty head three times, once on the phone. They hadn't fired me so I must be doing something by being here.

I decided to quit the same day my boss came to fire me. We both changed our minds, changed each others minds.

"Just relax, you can do this. All you have to do is answer the phone and take the new subscription orders. It's not like we're asking you to recreate the world or anything."

"Pardon?"

"Which part?"

"The last thing you said."

"It's not like you have to recreate the world or anything, it's not all that complicated."

"Oh, that's helpful to know, thanks."