Making a fool of myself during my first week was one of the best career moves I ever made

You know that dream you have the night before you play a big game?  Take an important test?  Go on a first date?  Or, I don’t know… start a new job, perhaps? It’s the dream where you miss the winning basket in the final second.  Show up to a test in only your birthday suit.  Accidentally throw up in your date’s spaghetti.  Or, I don’t know, make a huge gigantic fool of yourself on the first day of your first job, perhaps.

Yes folks, that dream became my real-world nightmare. Okay, so it wasn’t the very first day of my first job and my blunder was more silly than serious.  But still, it was a shocking moment for me, someone who after seven in-office internships considered myself well prepared for my first full-time position.  I came in confident that I could handle anything anyone could throw at me with grace, competence, and professionalism well beyond my years.

But on my fifth day, after running out the door (without stopping for breakfast or coffee) to get a head start on my three page to-do list for the day (and impress everyone by finishing early), I was needless to say not at my best state when I arrived at the office over an hour before we officially opened.  And of course, on this fateful morning, the printer decided to throw a technological temper tantrum.

Frazzled, frustrated, and a little bit frantic, I began trying to fix the only visible sign of distress on the massive machine that I could find… a small blinking (unlabeled, of course) orange light.  I checked the feeding trays, the monitor screen, under random miscellaneous lids, and was heading around to the other side to check the output tray when – BAM!

Stunned, and reeling like a cartoon character, I stepped back and realized that in my un-caffeinated intensity I had slammed my forehead into a metal tray holding heavy-duty printer paper. Um, Ow. Of course, at that second, the printer started working again, so I shook it off and counted my blessings that no one else had been around to see my faux pas.

Unfortunately, when the rest of the office began arriving, I did not realize that my forehead was now sporting a swollen red and blue lump the size of an Easter egg.  My first “good morning” to my coworker was greeted with “Oh my god – did someone beat you!?”

They only got better from there… “Were you drinking last night?” “I wonder what the other guy looks like”, “Headbutt someone on the metro, Rach?”, “When we said we wanted you to dive in head-first, we didn’t mean for you to take it so literally”.  Oy.  Not really the first impression I had intended to make.

But once I got over my embarrassment, and my lovely coworkers helped me get some ice and ibuprofen, I realized it had spurred some fantastic conversations.  I got to hear about how these successful, talented, and accomplished people I work with were human too – that they had made mistakes and blunders along their career paths and they were some of the things that shaped them and inspired them the most.

Even more importantly, my laughable faux pa had not only broken my forehead, it had effectively broken the ice between me and my coworkers.  The fact that I was new was now not the most interesting or memorable thing about me.  I suddenly became a real person and member of the bigger office team because I wasn’t just some over-achieving newbie anymore.  I was human. And humans don’t connect with perfection, they connect with other humans.

Making a fool of myself during my first week was one of the best career moves I ever made.  Second only to starting my career at Delucchi Plus!  #ilovemyjob