How to impress on your first day at work

Life throws me so many curveballs that I am always pleasantly surprised when I actually find a building, I actually get to a place on time, …well, when something actually works out.
So, it was my first day at work. I finally found the office, did some paperwork with the HR ladies, and settled down. We did the customary things. Creating a password. Setting up my Outlook account (I hate Outlook). Here’s the bathroom. Here’s the break room (“pantry” here). Hi everyone, this is our new intern Vivien. Hi everyone, I’m Vivien.
“Work” was fairly uneventful, as is to be expected the first few days. A whole lot of nothing. They gave me some old reports to read to get a sense of what the projects are like.
Then, exciting news. A welcome lunch for Vivien Wu. At the Sportful Garden, a dim sum restaurant.

Our team of 12 people or so headed to the Sportful Garden, a welcome respite from my hum-drum of reading reports I didn’t really understand. A traditional Chinese round table setting with a glass lazy susan in the middle. (My first week in HK, most meals I ate were on a lazy susan. Mental note: I want to get a lazy susan when I have my own place.)
A senior member of the department, Beth, seemed to be the one calling the shots. She ordered the food and out came baskets of steamed buns, shumai, and spongy cake; plates of tofu and Chinese broccoli in oyster sauce and assorted meats.
Most of the time I talked to one of the associates, who was actually very nice and seemed to have had interesting professional experiences. Our conversation had a good mix of collegial familiarity and professional respect.
Midway through the meal, Beth challenged me to name every person at the table.

Everyone chuckled. It would have been a difficult task for anyone, to name 12 people you had only just met. But they didn’t know me. I was up to the challenge. I had over 1200 Facebook friends, and I remember how I met every single one of them. In a residential community of 350 students, I had campaigned for public office. Twice.

I named every person at the table correctly. Except I had confused the names of the two fobbiest men, 1 sitting across from me…and the other sitting right next to me, the very one I had been talking to for most of lunch.

Call it poetic justice for my hubris.

Then Beth addressed me again. “Tell us about yourself,” she said with a pleasant smile. OK, I thought to myself. I’m sociable, I’m likeable. I can do this.

“Well, I’m Vivien, I just graduated from college last week. [smile] I majored in Environmental Science and Public Policy, and have a minor in Economics. I like cats, and I like comedy.”

“Oh, comedy? Tell us a joke,” Beth said. “Yes, tell us some jokes,” echoed the others.

Oh shit.
“No, I’m too embarrassed,” I said. That was half true. I would have obliged them if I could have remembered a clever joke. But everything funny or work-appropriate escaped my head at that moment. I could only think of 3 of my 5 standard jokes, the 3 most inappropriate ones:

Q: Why don’t girls wear mini-skirts in the winter?
A: Chapped lips.

Q: Why do all the girls love Jesus?
A: Because he was hung like this [gesture widely with hands].

Q: Why was it hard for Jesus to eat M&M’s?
A: Because they kept falling through his hands. (A little weak, I know.)


*I just remembered the other 2 of my 5 standard jokes, and those 2 are even less appropriate, if that is possible. Because they are about race. My poor memory at the time was for the best.

But they kept pressuring me. “No, you really don’t want to hear my jokes,” I protested. But you know how saying something like that only piques their interest. It was my first day, at a job I really wanted to excel at. I have had my share of negative internship experiences. I didn’t want their first impression of me to be crass.

In the end, I went with the M&M’s joke.
The reception was okay.

“So you have to tell us a joke every day from now on,” Beth said. “You like comedy.”

“Well, I like comedy but that doesn’t mean I know 90 jokes..”

“It’s like that story,” she cut in. “A woman has to tell a story every day or she will be killed. What was it? 1001 Arabian Nights?”

For some reason I have always confused 1001 Arabian Nights with Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves (I have a weird fobby tendency to confuse random items that sound similar or are thematically related), so I refrained from commenting.

I told Alingon about this story later. “Well, she’s got the story right,” he said. “Except they are probably going to kill you anyway after that start.”