Love in the Time of Computers and Commuters Part 1

I spent this Valentine’s day with my grandmother. Several of my friends spent it with work colleagues or at home on the sofa. Even some of my coupled up friends didn’t have plans.

Why was this?

Because this year Valentine’s day was a Tuesday in half term and everybody had work or family obligations.

At university dating was very much a matter of choice and convenience- social life was easily available, everybody was your age and it didn’t really matter anyway because you were young.

Subconsciously, we all assumed that we would meet our long time partners there at some point (for some reason I persisted in this belief right up to graduation). 

Once you graduate and this hasn’t happened you realise two things:

  

    Your free time and social life almost completely disappear once you start work

                 

                    Other people are starting to get married

These two things can induce panic and/or despondency but they also bring about a dawning realisation that the way we go about looking for relationships is going to have to change. Setting aside chance meetings, fated lovers and kismet, most workers and postgrads meet their partner through work, mutual friends or online dating. Over the next couple of posts I will be examining the efficacy of these three methods using first-hand experience, dubious statistics and the hastily collected testimonies of my friends and co-workers.

Online Dating

Over the last few years the acceptance and utilisation of online dating as a legitimate form of courtship has grown exponentially, blossoming from the last resort of the truly desperate to the smart choice for the modern working girl or boy.

 As interest has grown, so too has the number of websites catering to the singles market and you can now find sites catering to the love-minded for almost any hobby, physical trait or idiosyncrasy you can think of, alongside more corporate mainstream forums such as match.com (For an amusing look at your options check out podcast- The Complete Guide toEverything and their episode dating part one).

Just how valid is the choice to go online with your love life though? Do the results support its apparent popularity? Well according to my survey of Wikipedia, 17% of married couples in 2010 had met online, and as soon as I mentioned the topic of online dating at work I was inundated with tales of success from friends and family, far outweighing any disaster stories that might have occurred. In fact, aside from the lingering prejudice that online dating is a bit ‘desperate’, few people had a bad word to say about it.

As I shamefacedly admit to an irrational dislike of online dating as an option for my own love life (despite enthusiastically championing it for other peoples’) I have ‘interviewed’ a friend who has regularly used online dating for a couple of years, albeit to date unsuccessfully, about her experiences with love online (Names withheld to protect the embarrassed).

Q When and why did you decide to start online dating?

A I started when I was still at uni because it wasn’t proving very successful. It just wasn’t very easy to meet people because when I went out I was drunk and the men I met only wanted one thing.

Q Do you think online dating is a better method of getting to know someone then?

A Not properly knowing someone. It gives you a start and it’s a way of meeting people you wouldn’t normally meet. (It’s more) checking the basics, checking you’re compatible.

Q How successful do you think online dating has been?

A For me personally not very, although it’s nice to speak to people. But my friend found her long- time partner that way and I’m quite picky.

Q Do you think online dating is a good option when working full time?

A Yes because there’s less time to get out and it’s nice to meet people outside of work.

Q Have you tried other methods of meeting people?

A Yes, work- its awkward when you split up though. Friends have been good (for meeting people) but again I’m picky

Q What’s your worst story from online dating?

A I’ve got two: one is meeting up with guys and them not looking like they should (from the picture) and I’m picky about looks, the other is the guy who was much keener than me and didn’t leave my house for five hours.

Q What advice would you give to people starting online dating?

A Be open to different kinds of people, be completely honest on your profile, message as many people as possible and when you write a message be interesting- don’t just write ‘Hi, how are you’.

So that’s the lowdown on online dating- a reasonable chance of success and a way to fit your search for romance around your schedule. It might not be the most romantic story to tell the grandchildren but it’s better than never having grandchildren at all… Tune in next time for all the information you need about meeting people through work and making the most of your friends and relatives.

Mind the Gap- minimising the transition between uni and work

Photo by honeyjew via flickr

Photo by bezajel via Flickr

Apologies for the latest post being up a day late however I started work this week- as will be evident from this thursday's post- and as a result am tired. All. The. Time. Despite this I have still found time to gift you all with my thoughts and feelings on the first week in a new job. Enjoy!

Tomorrow will mark the end of my first week in the working world, a world that is very different from the university life that proceeded it. In honour of this momentous achievement, this Thursday’s post will focus on dealing with the differences between life at university and life at work. Some you may be aware of, some you may need to prepare yourselves for, either way I hope this will be an educational guide to understanding and minimising the gap between student and worker drone.

Getting Up Early: as a student you may have occasionally had to get up early (or what you thought was early) for lectures and supervisions but generally you set your own hours, especially if you studied for an arts degree. If early did occur it meant getting up for something scheduled at nine meaning that you seldom needed to get up before seven. When you go to work you have to get up ‘early’ everyday, only it doesn’t count as early anymore it just becomes ‘the time you get up’. The average commuter gets up around 6-6:30 and those with long distances to travel will get up even earlier in order to make it to work on time.

This means for the first week (at least) of the uni-job transition you will be very, very tired. There are two main ways to combat this: 1. Go to bed early at least for the first few weeks – this will give your body the rest it needs to adjust to the new schedule. 2. If you can, the week before you start work, reduce the time you get up at by an hour/half hour (depending on the disparity between the two schedules) every morning leading up to your first day so that when you start, your body has already had time to start adjusting.

Not Having Any Friends: this is not something I had considered being a problem but after four years of building friendships at university suddenly you find yourself starting from the beginning only this time the people you’re trying to make friends with aren’t the same age as you and they’re not in the same boat: unless you join a company through a big graduate recruitment scheme, you will be one new person in a group of people that have had at least a year to work out who they eat lunch with and what they have in common. From my own experience, the majority of people I work closely with are middle aged women with school or college aged children; they are absolutely lovely but their conversations are generally about the things they have in common which unfortunately are generally not something I can relate to. So no matter how friendly or helpful or welcoming your new colleagues are, it is likely that at least a few times during your first week you will end up feeling lonely. 

This will probably pass but in the mean time there are a couple of things you can do to make yourself feel better: firstly, up your contact time with your friends. With Facebook, Twitter etc there is little chance of truly falling out of contact with people you no longer see every day but make sure you get enough real time contact: try and meet up with friends on the weekends, grab some face time on Skype, give them a ring or even send them a good old-fashioned letter (this will be discussed in more detail next week). Even better, if you have a friend that works nearby make plans to have lunch, giving you the chance to break up the working day with a chance of scene. Alternatively you can put your efforts into making friends: take an interest in people, engage them in conversation and you might discover you do have things in common, age notwithstanding. Search out people closer to your own age and experience in the organisation as well if you are trying to discover common ground – you may feel more at ease trying to befriend someone you feel comfortable reminiscing about those drunken halcyon days at uni with.

Feeling Out Of Your Depth: Logically you know you’re capable of doing the job: the interview process and competitive job market leave little room for erroneous appointments. However, few graduates these days go into a career that makes direct use of their degree- the phrase ‘transferable skills’ looms its ugly head. Yes you are capable of the work being required- you just don’t always know how to produce it. Admittedly the start of university evoked a similar sense of inadequacy and confusion but after your first essay wasn’t sent back to you via the medium of a cross cut shredder your working style adapted fast and panic was more about completing the work on time than any worries about how to do it or what to use. It has taken me four days at work to sort out all my passwords and get to grips with the ICT system, on top of the work I am supposed to be doing.

To tackle this make sure you ask lots of questions and take extensive notes: few people will object to a barrage of questions in the first week and most will be happy to explain or demonstrate how things work (like the photocopier for example) and this will not affect their opinion of you or your abilities; after all they were all new once too. However, if you don’t make a note of procedures and end up asking a second or third time you will find people’s good will- and their good opnion of you- considerably diminished. Another strategy for dealing with this is to try and find a mentor within the company- this relates back to point two about making friends- who will be happy to act as your guide to the workings of the organisation over a more extended timescale. This minimises the people who are inconvenienced by your questions and inexperience and gives you a more secure relationship which should make you feel happier to ask questions however simple.

These are just a few thoughts on my first week at work. If you are in a similar situation and have found my advice helpful or have thoughts of your own to proffer, please let us know in the comments section below!