Neal’s first days on the job

At the end of my story Choirboy Caffrey and at the start of By the Book, Neal is making the adjustment to a job in what could be the ultimate bureaucracy: a government agency. It’s a big change from his prior experience. In many ways his adjustment to working for the FBI in our AU mirrors what we saw in canon, with the challenges of being accepted and trusted by his peers, but I threw in a few extra elements.

Warning for spoilers for Caffrey Conversation stories.

One element I played with is the reality of forms and regulations that are common to jobs in large companies, and which I assumed would hold true in a government job. Watching Neal deal with benefits enrollments and with the fact that his employer is tracking everything he does on his computer makes him a little more relatable to me, as I went to work for a massive corporation right out of college. I thought that for the readers who are still in college themselves, my description of Neal’s experiences could provide some insight into what to expect if they go the corporate route. Starting a new job recently reinforced for me the drudgery that happens before you can get into the stuff you were actually hired to do. There were forms galore, and online training with tests that must be passed. Patience is key, as I learned during the three-week wait for a background check to clear. I’m grateful for a manager who kept raising the issue of the delays to HR. It reminds me a little of the efforts on Peter’s part to get Neal a job on his team.

Another element I addressed is what it’s like for Neal to be the newest, youngest member of the team. Some of this reflects my first job out of college. I was assigned to a group where I was younger than anyone else. Privately I referred to them as “the group of old men.” They were polite, but difficult for me to identify with, and one in particular didn’t trust me with any assignments due to my lack of experience. His annoying tendency to make phone calls on the speakerphone in his cubicle was rewarded when we all heard a group ask him if I could be their point of contact instead of him, because I was easier to work with. In Neal’s case, he’s surrounded by people who have several years of experience, who followed a different path to get their jobs, and who simply don’t have much in common with him. Jones befriends him because until Neal joined the team, Jones had been the youngest and the new guy, and he could empathize with some of what Neal was going through.

The manager of “the group of old men” was a woman who had a plan in mind for my career. In my first career planning session, she outlined for me the experiences she thought I needed to have, which would lead to me eventually having a job at her level. It was hard for me to imagine how that was all going to work, or to picture myself in her role. And yet, she was right. Like Peter supporting Neal, she was a mentor who envisioned how I could fit in even when I couldn’t see it, and she was determined to help me take the next steps while I still struggled to grasp where those steps would take me.

And the last element I’ll mention is humor. A sense of humor is something that helps me get through challenges, such as being assigned to a curmudgeonly “group of old men,” and it’s something that helps Neal, too. When he learns that his colleagues distrust him so much that they decided to tail him over his lunch hours, he turns it into a game. Eventually it becomes an acknowledged training exercise, called Tuesday Tails, and which Neal describes as recess for adults.

Neal's first days at the FBI - AO3
Neal's first days at the FBI - FF.net