115: First Day
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Think for a minute about your first day. Not your first day on the job or the first day with your spouse or the first day in the neighborhood. I'm talking about your first first day. The first time you ever had a first day. Up until the time that Tarpley was three and a half, everything was always the same. She'd been in the same day care since she was six months old. Her parents were still together, they lived in the same place. Her house has these rooms in it and her backyard is this way and her teachers are the same teachers. Her friends have been the same friends for three and a half years, which in her time frame is all of eternity. There are no other friends. There are no other people. That's her dad, our contributing editor, Jack Hitt. He says that all of this changed the day that he discovered that he could switch Tarpley to a different school, a preschool that was a lot closer to their house. As he told Tarpley, it was a school where the big kids go. They were suddenly in opening. I told her about this. The idea of moving on to the next stage in her life, the first time she'd ever had that option, was so exciting. She literally jumped out of her chair and ran circles around this cafeteria, screaming, dancing, just sending up hosanas of glee. And we talked about it all weekend long. All the books tell you to do this, and it makes sense. You talked about it all weekend long. What was there to talk about? Well, just that there would be new people and new teachers and new everything, and that would require some getting used to. You save that to a three-year-old and you think they understand what you're saying, but of course they don't, because they don't have any experience encountering anything new. She had never had a first day before this, and comes a big day. They set up for school. On the morning of her first day, this was Columbus setting off into the Atlantic, right? We walked up the block and hung a right and started down to this place that she'd never seen before. On the first day, any first day, we're expected to live by the rules and customs of the culture that we're entering. But we don't know those rules and customs just yet. It is a very particular time. And all the kids at the school that Tarpley was entering, they all already knew each other from the year before. She was the newcomer. I came up as the first day of the second day, but I remember the gut-wrenching moment was when I came to pick her up one day and we were walking home. And she started to cry and said that she wanted to go back to her other school. And the reason was that one of the little children there had told her that she couldn't play with them. That there was just this little group and my daughter wasn't invited to play with them because they didn't know her, and that she should stay away from them. She had never heard that expression or that idea in her life. And of course, what's interesting is that the person who made that remark to her is now one of her best friends. What do you make of that? Well, you know, I mean, I think that hazing is a natural part of defining any group. And I don't know why, but there's not a profession or career or a group out there that on some level doesn't have some ritual in which the new member is either tormented or tortured or beaten or humiliated. Jack is kind of collecting examples. When he was a freshman at a military boarding school, when he was a kid, the freshman would call rats. This is common. Upperclassmen would wake them up in the middle of the night, tell them to go warm the toilet seats for them. Jack's wife is a medical student and, you know, residents that work 40 hours without a break, taking the worst cases, doing the worst work, delirious from sleep deprivation. You have to do all that before the older doctors, welcome you into the club, give you the keys through Mercedes. The whole thing reminds me of the way gangs work here in Chicago, joining a gang here in Chicago, or really, a lot of places around the country, means that you get jumped in, you know, your future gang brothers or sisters, take you into an alley and beat the hell out of you. There is just something primal and intimate about the entire thing, as if the existence of the first day, the simple presence of an outsider who wants to be an insider, is so profound, so disturbing to any group, that they have to crush you, prove you harmless, before they welcome you into the family. This is the disturbing aura that surrounds the first day. Welcome to WB Easy Chicago, a public radio international, it's This American Life, Amara Glass. Today on our program, First Day, a story of outsiders who show up wanting to be insiders and what it takes to make the jump, act one, lost at sea, how cussing can get you through moments when reason fails. The story of a lowly dishwasher who gets a job on an oil rig off the Louisiana coast, act two, squirrel cop. The story of a rookie cop that is so, so pleasurable, that all week around the office, here at the radio station, we have been cracking each other up simply by walking up to each other and saying the words, squirrel cop, act three, bad sex with butt camp, Sandra Singla with a story about the first day of new love, well, an attempted new love. Act four, when businesses act like humans, the story of an entire corporation having its first day, and how it makes all the mistakes that any of us would make on our first day on the job, stay with us, you will not be disappointed. Act one, lost at sea. While regular listeners to our show may remember dishwasher Pete, he is an actual dishwasher who for over eight years has been pursuing his quest to wash dishes in every state of the Union, he is up to 33 states. To score Louisiana, he thought they would try to get a job on an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico, but there was one problem. It would mean breaking what Pete calls the fundamental rule. Basically, the rule is this, never work out a job where I can't quit and leave the moment the notions struck me. For ten years, ever since I had established the fundamental rule, I had never broken it. He wanted to try though, if he could handle two weeks on an oil rig, maybe, just maybe, he could dare to head off to a bigger dream of his, to wash dishes on a fishing boat for months off the coast of Alaska.
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