Daniel Orozco Orientation Summary

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For most people, the first day of work can be quiet a catastrophe. In fact, standing in a new office can be reminiscent of the first day of kindergarten waiting at the front gate with our hands glued to our mom’s hands unable to let go and take another step. At least during those days, we had teachers to depend on and to show us around the school. In a new office, however, everyone is pre-occupied with work so more often than not, a piece of paper is the only source of guideline to turn to in order to survive the rest of the day. Oftentimes, these orientation guidelines are misleading and contain unnecessary or inadequate information about the job, so they intimidate employees instead of welcoming them. This is seen in the first few paragraphs of “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco when a new employee is introduced to a new job in a new office. The employee is greeted with a bombardment of what to do and what not to do commands followed by unusual and disturbingly personal characteristics, relationships, and background information of most of the workers in the office. …show more content…
Daniel Orozco portrays this orientation paper as a narrator of the short story and uses literary devices such as patterns, symbolism, and imagery to support his theme that orientation plays a big part in welcoming a new member to the workforce yet modern offices tend to disregard its significance. Just as the short story begins, Orozco introduces short, simple sentence structures beginning with a subject/verb and ending with a predicate such as “This is your phone.” These sentences individually seem like average sentences a grade schooler would write, but the art of these sentences is seen when they are observed as a whole forming a repeating pattern. Orozco incorporates pattern in his short story to give the reader a sense of mood of to how new workers are welcomed as soon as the story starts. “Those are the offices and these are the cubicles.” With just the first sentence, the reader could already feel the isolation and unwelcoming of the orienteer to the new personnel. The same sentence structure is used throughout the first four paragraphs and then suddenly changes to more complex sentences in the fifth paragraph where the narrator begins to talk about the personal lives of the co-workers. “Russell Nash has put on forty pounds and grows fatter with each passing month, nibbling on chips and cookies while peeking glumly over the partitions at Amanda Pierce and gorging himself at home on cold pizza and ice cream while watching adult videos on TV.” Perhaps Orozco increased the complexity of the sentences because he values the personal lives of the co-workers more than standard procedures of what to do and what not to do that could be stated in simple grammatical sentences. As soon as Orozco starts to describe the weird and unusual relationships of the employees, the reader immediately starts to feel a small humorous tone in the story. Maybe Orozco believes that an orientation should be more detailed, descriptive, and especially entertaining than normal, simple directions. Throughout the story, Orozco also incorporates symbolism to develop his theme. The biggest and most mysterious symbolism is the narrator itself. The story does not give the narrator a name, a role in the workplace, or if they are even connected to the office at all. However, it can be concluded that the narrator symbolizes the orientation paper given by many modern offices today. When a new employee receives this guideline, there is no name written on there, nor there is any mention of …show more content…
He uses simple patterns in the first four paragraphs of the story to show what modern orientations at offices are like and also shifted his style to a more elaborative and descriptive style to show what orientation should be like. Orozco wants an orientation to show all of the diversity of the office including its employees and their characters. He does not want an orientation to be just a jumble of procedural sentences printed from a printer for every new employee to read as if there is nothing interesting in the office. He is saying that an orientation should be weird and strange so that the new employee is interested in the job and is excited to work along with some of the weirdest people they have ever

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