My First Day at Work

Daniel arrived at his new office twenty minutes early, which he considered the minimum a first day deserved. He was wearing the blue shirt he had ironed the night before and carried a small notebook, ready to look both organised and enthusiastic. The welcome email had said that the team would meet in Room B at nine, but the building was considerably larger than it had seemed at the interview.

He took the lift to the second floor and followed a sign towards the meeting rooms. Two glass doors stood side by side, and he chose the one on the left with the confidence of a man who had not yet read the small print. Inside he found not a conference table but a storage room full of old chairs and cardboard boxes. Fortunately nobody was there to witness the mistake.

He returned to the lift and weighed his options. He could wander around until he stumbled on the right door, or he could do something that would feel slightly embarrassing for ten seconds. He chose the second. “Excuse me, could you tell me where Meeting Room B is?” he asked the receptionist downstairs. She explained that it was behind the blue wall, not beside the storage room, and then walked him to the correct corridor.

When he finally walked in, two colleagues were setting up the screen for the meeting. He introduced himself and admitted, with a rueful smile, that he had taken a wrong turn. “Everybody does that in their first week,” one of them said, laughing. “Last month I ended up in the kitchen in the middle of a client call.” The tension Daniel had been carrying since the lift vanished at once.

He arrived on time after all, and spent the next hour taking notes while the team described their projects. Before lunch he added one more line at the bottom of the page, underlined twice: if you don’t know where to go, ask. It was, he reflected, a useful first lesson, and one that had nothing to do with his job description.