I don’t know quite how to explain this. But I have to write something about it in my own stumbling way.
When I interviewed at my new place of employment, I noticed that every staff person I met save for two was of a brown persuasion. The person I was being interviewed to replace was, too. This factored into my decision of deciding to work here, and not in the way you might think. It was actually a con versus a pro. I’ve mentioned many times here how I’m way more comfortable in a diverse mix of folk or even a group of mostly pink people than I am an all brown crowd. This is because when you have a crowd of garden variety black folk working together without pink folk around, they will let go and pretty much act the fool while running around and getting things done.
There’s a flat screen TV in the lobby that’s tuned to things like Divorce Court and other voyeur type programming in the afternoon. There’s a bookshelf stereo system in a team’s common area that’s always playing an urban station and sometimes it’s BLARING, seriously. I can hear conversations in other departments for miles. But really, all of this is minor, really. The thing that troubled me as I was deciding to come work here is the thing that I think is happening.
They’re starting to realize that I’m not really black. Not black like them. Today a director had an entire conversation with me that was nearly over before I even realized he was talking to me…because he never looked at me or even turned towards me. Conversation volume in a room where folks are already gathered will drop noticeably upon my entrance. I even asked the IT guy if I’d committed some sort of faux pas because I’d started to think so due to the lack of response to my getting-settled-in-as-a-n00b IT requests. He assured me I had not. Someone’s unanswered phone calls have been rolling over to my extension since I got here. I asked twice, once to his face, another time via email. No response whatsoever. My computer is a flashback to 1998. Remember how you could only have Outlook and one other program open otherwise you were courting a crash? I’m running an Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.66 GHz…currently I have 248 megs of RAM available. IT guy knew this as he was getting me up and running and couldn’t understand why my predecessor hadn’t complained. So I’m on the very long waiting list for a better system. Not a new one. A better one. Because I was afraid to ask for a new one. I saw a coordinator with a brand spanking new laptop on her desk yesterday.
Like I said, I don’t really have the words to explain it properly. I just know I feel that familiar tightness in the back of my throat. I don’t know if they sense my feelings about working here. Without giving away too much, suffice to say that I have my reservations about how this organization on the whole is run and how that will eventually look on my resume. Is that hesitancy/worry/concern coming off as…uppity? Me thinking I’m better than they are? That’s how I’ve been read in the past when that couldn’t have been further from the truth. I don’t know. And mind you, it doesn’t seem that everyone to a person is behaving this way, but when it starts all I want to do is go all pill bug, which in turn makes it a vicious catch-22. The more I wall off, the worse relations get.
However, in this case it may not matter much longer. Remember when I said in the last entry “I took the first and best offer I was given, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still shop.”? I might have a purchase in my basket of the very best kind.
