I always liked the excitement and anticipation of getting hired for a new job … and I always hated that first day on the job. I have never really done well with things that I wasn’t familiar with. I like already knowing what I’m doing so that I can feel confident in my abilities. And of course, you never know what you are doing at a new place on the first day of a new job.

I used to just try to fake it a lot. I remember one time when a new boss asked me to head over to the local office supply store to research the prices of guillotine cutters. (This was back in the days before you could just do that type of research on the Internet.) I had no idea what a guillotine cutter was but I figured that I’d figure it out when I got there.

I wandered the aisles for nearly an hour passing through rotary paper trimmers and commercial shredders and all sorts of equipment that I’d never seen before. Finally, I had to ask for help. It turns out that guillotine cutters are just paper cutters (the manual kind as opposed to electric paper cutters). Who knew?

When I got back to the office, the boss asked what had taken so long. Did I fess up? Of course not. I pretended that I knew exactly what I was doing until I had the hang of the job down pat!

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