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FIRST DAY

Since 2020 has been such a weird year, I wanted to do something a bit unconventional and tell my last daily story about my very first day at work in aviation. The highlights included waiting at my desk for hours, a new reporting structure and a surprise early morning meeting. I made my way to my desk and awaited my manager's arrival and IT equipment. Once my manager arrived, he asked me to come into his office and explained that he had just resigned with his last day being at the end of the following week. I was flabbergasted! I barely had a computer, and my first day was supposed to be figuring out the intranet, getting my desk and IT access set up and meeting the team. I thought to myself: "Am I fired?" Instead, the deal he struck with his boss was to define my summer internship project in the few days before his departure. While all the other interns were running around having coffee with coworkers and going through orientation, I was furiously trying to sort out my responsibilities (with no supervision) for the rest of my work term.
My manager's focus was obviously on transitioning out of his role, so he had an exit interview scheduled with HR in the afternoon. He asked me to read the intranet and work on a project outline before lunch. We had lunch with colleagues, and I went back to my desk. He told me that he would be back in a couple of hours to check in with me at my desk. An hour passed, then two, then three, so I circled past his desk and saw that nothing had moved. I assumed that he had been pulled into other urgent meetings. I tried sending him an email to check in, but received no response. Other colleagues in the department popped by my desk to introduce themselves, and nobody had seen my manager. I wasn't going to leave the office on my first day directly contradicting what my boss had asked (to meet with him before the end of the day), so I continued to work for another hour. After 4 hours, I began to covertly pack up and check if he had magically reappeared, but he was still nowhere to be found. As I waited, a friendly looking man passed by my desk to say hi and mention that there would be a department-wide meeting tomorrow morning at 6am. I thought it was a "haze the intern" kind of joke, but he explained there would be Asia and Europe-based teams joining the meeting as well. He also looked far too nice to be playing a prank on me.
At nearly 6pm, I decided to shut down my laptop as I assumed my manager had left the office and forgot to close his office door. He then appeared and was surprised that I was still there. I reminded him that he asked to meet with me after his HR session (which somehow lasted hours longer than expected). I also decided to double-check about the 6am meeting tomorrow, and he confirmed that it was in fact real. He then told me to sit at the back because the senior leader was a "character"  and liked to pick on people. I trudged back to my car - instead of a fun, carefree first day of work, I was worried about a 6am meeting and having to basically work as a lone ranger for my summer internship! The good news is that it turned out well and I learned a lot. I also rejoined after graduating and accomplished quite a bit over the course of my time at the company.
I wanted to tell this story today to demonstrate how things that you expect to be great, quickly turn out to be very difficult, and ultimately end up making you grow exponentially as a person (plus lots of funny stories). This year has been hard and often demotivating, not unlike my first day at work, but in spite of that, I still ended up having great professional experiences and developed resilience to tackle projects that colleagues with much more experience couldn't handle. A year of uncomfortable change helps us to gain perspective on who and what matters most to us. Even if one of those things that we miss is our coworkers' stories.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for something new in January!