Same company, new job, new building

A couple weeks ago, I interviewed for a new internal job with my company. I got the job, but it’ll require me to commute with traffic both to and from work. I became increasingly concerned about this since every time I mentioned that I was moving to this new building, the conversation was always similar:

“Yeah, I’m moving down to the Dallas building.”
“Oh really? Where are you coming from?”
“North Plano.”
“Oh. Ah. EEEEEeeeewwwwwwww… That’s rough man [you should just kill yourself and be done with it].”

It was like I’d just punched the other person in the face, their portentous*, vicarious pain was off the charts. Yesterday I left at 4:30, which is about when rush hour starts getting nasty, and I was home in about 20 minutes. Today, I left my apartment at 7:45 and I was at work by 8:00. I’m pretty sure that’s a shorter drive than I was making to the old building, against traffic. I’m not getting too excited yet because this is a short workweek in the middle of vacation season, so traffic could just be unusually light.

One big perk to my new assignment is that I have a “one-man cube”. At my old building, one-man cubes were difficult tough to come by. The unwritten rule is that you have to be an E03 (read: “E-three”) or higher to get a one-man. E01 (new hire) and E02 (that’s me!) employees share a two-man cube. Obviously, the major driver for this “rule” is a lack of space in my old building. If they had the space, I’m sure everyone would at least have a one-man cube and maybe even a prestigious “high wall” appropriation, but because space is short, they’ve created these rules where the new people get to have cube-mates. The other day, I joked that they were going to have to start assigning co-ops and interns to bathroom stalls if the space problem isn’t dealt with. Anyway, there’s plenty of space in my new building, so I have a very spacious one-man cube.

* I wanted to use “portenful”, but dictionary.com says that ain’t a word, which is odd because I’m pretty sure Romeo screams out “I am portentful!” in Romeo & Juliet and “Shakespeare” repeats the word several times in Shakespeare in Love. Actually, I just checked Drew’s Script-O-Rama and neither movie script has the word “portentful” in it. Am I just imagining that I heard that word? I can totally see Joseph Fiennes saying it! I was kind of hoping it was one of those words that Shakespeare just made up, but that maybe it hadn’t survived to modern English. If that were true, maybe I would’ve looked smart or something. Now? Now, I just look like a doofus who’s written more about how he can’t remember stuff than about the topic of his post. Of course, that’s not even entirely true since I’ve clearly written more in the body of this post than in this asterisk (Is this an asterisk, footnote, aside? I have no idea). What’s my problem?