-One gloomy afternoon back in my Wall Street days, as I roamed the fourteenth floor of my company’s mammoth skyscraper, I came across a desolate and sparsely decorated cubicle.  Sitting on the desk between an unused monitor glare guard and an ergonomic mouse pad was the book, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work.”  Half absentmindedly, I picked up the book and found that I was soon heartened by its spirited tales of teamwork and levity in the workplace.  I turned to a nearby receptionist and asked whose cubicle I was standing at.  Eyeing the book in my hand, she replied, “Oh, you can just take that, he was laid off last week.”  And so it goes.  The plight of the twentysomething in corporate America is a paradoxical one.  We don’t want jobs but need them to support our gluttonous lifestyles.  We hate our jobs but are scared to death of losing them.  We find new, exciting jobs only to find out they suck just as badly as the last one.  And so let’s once again examine what I call the era of Job Insecurity.

-In our first jobs out of college, we are so naive.  We don’t realize that being given a pager, cell phone, or BlackBerry by our company is very, very bad.  Sure, the NYU chicks at the bar may think it’s cool when you pull that little toy out of the holster on your belt to send a quick email, but everyone else just thinks you’re a jackass.  Plus, now your boss can find you wherever you go.  You know what other organization has that capability?  Prison.  I do not believe this is a coincidence.

-The “off-site” meeting is another misdirected attempt to boost productivity.  Ostensibly, the purpose of the off-site is to gather the whole team in a mildewed conference room somewhere far from the actual office to prevent distraction and engage in embarrassing team-building exercises.  In reality, everyone spends half the day in the hallway checking their voicemail and about the only team-building that occurs is the unanimous agreement that the sandwiches brought in for lunch are soggy and inedible.

-Your first drug test is a rite of passage in corporate America that all twentysomethings remember.  I’ll never forget mine.  Most people in line for the single bathroom were calm and collected while everyone who partied in college was cowering in the back and chugging huge bottles of Poland Spring.  I think my buddy Harlan has my favorite drug test story.  While filling up the cup, he suddenly realized he had more business to take care of in the bathroom.  So he calmly turned around and took a dump while the rest of the puzzled first-years waited patiently outside.  Now that’s stickin’ it to the Man!