9 to 5 or 6

After nearly two weeks of apartment hunting, car shopping, and sightseeing, it was time for Bryan to start his first job. His father had joked with him that he thought that he would never live to see the day when Bryan would no longer be a student, but twenty-two years and six months after he first set foot in a classroom, Bryan was about to embark upon his first day of work. He had had summer jobs, of course, but this was his first permanent job - one that he had to report to nine hours every day, five days out of every week. He would now have to get up early every morning and sit at a desk all day; quite a change from his easy, flexible days as an applied math graduate student. One consolation that Bryan had, one thing that helped him ease into the working world from the grad school world was the informality of his new office's dress code. His jeans would not have to be reserved for the weekends, and tucked-in shirts would not be required, a small comfort.

Much like Jane imagined he acted on his first day of school, Bryan woke up very early on March 17. His first day of work was St. Patrick's Day, surely an auspicious sign of the good things to come. He dressed in a new outfit that he had bought in Chicago weeks before he had left: a polo shirt, khaki pants, and a new pair of dress shoes. The dress code at Industrial Research Limited was a loose one, but Bryan wanted to look nice on his first day. Jane reminded him as he dressed of a Dilbert cartoon in which someone informs Dilbert that customers don't trust an engineer who dresses well - the worse dressed you are, the smarter they think you are. Bryan tucked in his shirt anyway.

Without his usual Sports Center to watch, Bryan had to content himself with a New Zealand morning show on TVOne. It being St. Patrick's Day, Breakfast had a roaming reporter stationed at an Irish pub in Auckland that had begun selling it's first Guinnesses at 7am that morning. This reporter even talked to one man who had already had three pints of Guinness and was preparing to head off for his day of work. It seems that every part of the Irish diaspora celebrates in style . . . or at least drunkenness. Bryan's beers would have to wait until the evening, though, because he was off to work by 8am.