This is my first column. I need a second to adjust ...

THIS is my first column.

It feels like it’s my first day at a ‘job’. Figuratively speaking, I’m standing in the foyer, with my new pen and wearing a shirt that still has the shop creases in it. I’m slightly in the way. “Erm … hello ... yes ... hi … I’m supposed to start on a column this week? … What? ... Yes of course I’ll take a seat.”

A first day is a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Have I made the right decision? You watch your new colleagues for disturbing tics. Do they greet each other with silly handshakes? When they approach your cubicle, do they knock on the desk as if it were a door?

The stationery cupboard is a good bellwether for clues to the mood of a workplace: a nook full of highlighters, post-its, ring binders, inky pens, refill pads, hardback notebooks, shelves of printer cartridges that would have made Aengus O’Snodaigh drool. You could have your own stapler — heck, you could have two staplers, one in each hand, stapling like an office-bound, gun-toting John Wayne. You went in looking for a pencil and came out looking like a looter, clutching a ‘yoke’ whose function you still don’t know to this day. Because the economy has been stationary for so long, stationery cupboards are shadows of their former selves— empty apart from unwanted clippy things and one, topless whiteboard marker; desolate, like a drug-addict’s fridge. One other upside of your first days at work is that they are free of blame. You can’t be held responsible for anything, yet.

Even Kim Jong Un had a honeymoon period when the generals said “Look, we’ll do the sabre-rattling for a bit, while you’re getting your swipe card and email set up”.

The new head of the Irish Medical Organisation can reasonably say “Look, I’m just in the door. I’ve no idea why the previous CEO was given a bigger salary than Cristiano Ronaldo.” (The IMO should say no-one knows what happened with the contract negotiations, because the meeting minutes were handwritten and, well, have you ever seen a doctor’s handwriting?)

In the minty centre of the Central Bank there is recrimination about how a James Joyce coin was cast with a misquote. The blame will fall on experienced staff. Somewhere in there is a newbie, thanking their lucky stars they didn’t start a year earlier. It was right that a coin commemorate Joyce, because most people’s copies of Ulysses are in mint condition. The coinsmiths and the proofreaders should be consoled that most people who see the coin will give up reading the quote from Ulysses halfway through. The coin has sold out and it’s likely its popularity will lead to more being minted (a process known as ‘ReJoycing’).

As for me, the first day’s nearly over. And I think I need a new pen. Now, where is that cupboard?