It’s morning and one of my coworkers has been teaching me how to tie a Full Windsor tie. I tried before riding the bus and I think I was over-tying. I have until my-next-week to practice then we’ll all be working remotely. Even if I don’t get this knot, I can return to the easier Pratt, and go with others. They’re like picross puzzles in that they have a logic that, once identified, makes sense.

I can’t make sense of work.

The problem is that we’re being thrown so many things simultaneously so it’s hard to remember what I just learned or where we’re at in our learning. It’s all easy enough stuff, but being asked to do this, and that, and before you do those do this and that, but this is more important. I understand that the trainers deal with more complicated things, and for them this is all easy, but there’s a difference between telling us about the materials and teaching us the materials.

It’s probably just my neurodiversity kicking in.

For an analogy, I feel so exhausted from having all this material half-digest in my mind’s stomach. I’m eating this information as fast as I can but there’s just so much and the kitchen is closing. There is so much that trying to learn the tie with a reputation for being extremely difficult is easier than juggling all of these disparate ideas that make sense with years of context and consideration.

Am I under qualified?

Am I being lazy or inefficient? I guess there is no easy job. My last job was easy in that the expectations were so low in priority that as long as I did some work, I was free to do whatever else I wanted. Now, I can’t even check work emails pertaining to document my manager needs me to sign because the training is so interactive that I can’t even steal time there because then I’ll lose track of where I am in the training.

Once I’m trained up, I can work in peace.

I hope, but I think the reality will be closer to what I’ve experienced here, where there is an endless bombardment of unreasonable requests piling up because of everyone’s favorite reason: no planning. On the first day of my first job, there was a sign that said, “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Maybe soon there will be planning? I told the manager, who asked me to sign the document, that I wasn’t able to since we were all focused on our training, so maybe we’ll get a breath of fresh air, along with me getting some hostility from my trainer now for pointing out a flaw in the system. If it gets to be too much, they can fire me. I’ll find something better. The job as advertised sounded too good to be true. If trends continue in this direction, the job was too good to be true, and I should be working toward navigating elsewhere.

It would be nice if I didn’t need to, though.