On Energy

I've pretty much grown up with the knowledge that people thought I was a little strange, or weird, or out there. I became used to it but I also take it for granted and forget it from time to time. My friends in high school were called "The Coalition of Nerds," by somebody. I'm not exactly sure who said it, but we took hold of that name for a while. Point to the story, I was attracted to Freaks N Geeks before I was a freshman at Willamette based on the name alone; I was atypical, and I knew it.

My strangeness comes from several areas, but for the most part I'm able to "pass" in regular society. Some of my interests are typical (baseball/sports), but the way in which I'm a fan of them is fairly extreme or geeky (closet of jerseys, regularly reading statistics-oriented blogs). The differentiating characteristic between me and the general population seems to be my energy.



I suppose I should have been aware of this the time sophomore year when I was the president of two clubs, took a more-than-full course load, and maintained a serious romantic relationship, but somehow it didn't register until a few weeks into the one semester of graduate school I did. All of the first-year classes are held in the same lecture hall, so you'd get a class, then a 15-minute break, then another class. Feeling a little out of it today, I got up out of my chair in the break to jump up and down and get my blood pumping. Everybody else in the room seemed to look at me, sip their coffee, and say collectively, "What are you, nuts?"

When I started working at the Bowling Alley, I danced a lot to the music that was playing over our public address system. If I wasn't helping a customer and I wasn't cleaning, I was probably dancing for much of the first couple months I worked there. I relished working the late-night leagues because I would dance my way through the league customers in effort to bus their glasses back to the bar before they got another round. I always felt that if I want the customers to have fun in my place of business, then I should have fun in my place of business. In general, I feel like it's a little less fun as a customer when working with a representative who isn't feeling it.

I think it's this notion that makes me different. A lot of places tell their employees to be really committed to their customers because the customers are the reason that they have jobs, but I think very few people actually live that out. I can't tell you how many people I've met in customer service who seem to think negatively about their customers, or seem to think their customers are stupid. They might even be right in some cases, but man, if that's really your opinion of your customer then you have some problems. Sometimes, customer service representatives come off as resentful that the customers exist, that the customers being there means that the representative finally has to do something.

I want to do something. I had a desk job for a while in Pioneer Square where my job was very simple. I think my job had two requirements: use my key to send the appropriate people up the elevator, and make sure the fire alarm was set before I left. I made projects for myself to do in the interim, like learn more about Adobe Illustrator and get better at crossword puzzles, but the amount of waiting, of nothing that I was doing at that gig just about drove me nuts. When I tell people about that job, it's pretty common for them to stop me and ask how I could possibly dislike that job. Basically, it's because I need to keep moving.