I got the job!

It's completely perfect! I set my hours (within, as they like to say, "the company horizon").

My work is all project based.

I like the people I've met at the water cooler (though I can't figure out *at all* how or why most of them work here...).

There is a real water cooler and someone already changes it regularly (I don't take this lightly, given my "curse").

I'm allowed to...no, wait....(L2T) I'm encouraged to blog, do email and search the web.

Eric always used to say that the problem with bands was that as soon as they signed with a label, the angst drained out of them like a Hot Air Balloon on a cell phone tower. If we wanted to have good rock music, he said, we should force promising young artists to take jobs in fast food.

So before you cross-apply his arguments and get out of my blog like a bat out of hell...

Wait. There is a downside.

This perfect job? This fantasy of a workplace? This wet-dream employment?

I work in the boiler in the bowels of the earth.

That's right. A lovely pristine mac and drafting board, some nice IKEA shelves. All very neatly organized IN THE BOILER. You have to take a stairway hidden next to a broom closet. Once you get into the basement, you have to wander through a maze of file cabineted archives. You walk through these for about fifteen minutes, and then you arive at Hades, er, my "office."

Oh sure, it looks like it has a door and walls and such, but these MUST be a clever illusion, which MIGHT (if you were lucky) distract you from realizing that you were working INSIDE of a boiler for, oh, maybe, if you were really naieve, one full work day. Your first work day, when you were still dizzy from the nectar of your perfect job's benefits and work habits and 30 minute training. (30 minutes! Seriously! I've spent longer watching assembly videos for lamps I got for "Christmas presents"). Given how magical that day has been. How great you're feeling. You might actually say something like,

"No, this is great!" To someone giving you a tour and showing you your space, and incidentally apologizing for the slight inconvenience of your office location.

You might, somehow not hear the thunderous belches of motors, the wild banging of metal gears, and the shrill release of steam from the boiling lurching bowels that you now live within.

It might actually take three days of fruitless exploring to realize that there is NO heater, NO boiler that is accessible or locatable anywhere within walking distance of your "office" until you realize that all the sound and fury is best heard inside your office. You realize that you are actually working INSIDE the boiler.

Okay the banging just started again. I gotta go up to the water cooler.