Want to think about something? No need to look for it.

Reading the 2009 John Grisham novel, “The Associates,” rang a bell as to how employers sometime prepare, or don’t prepare, their new hires for the job.

The Grisham novel tells how a young, hotshot law school graduate finds himself blackmailed into a joining a huge law firm so that the attorney can sneak secrets out from litigation involving two of the world’s top defense contractors. Attorney Kyle McAvoy spends a week at his new firm lost in mind-numbing classes on subjects ranging from their computer programs to a specially-made BlackBerry-like device the attorneys must have on and with them at all times.

When I started serious jobs after college I usually found any type of detailed or formal training lacking when it came to various procedures or any other pieces of information that made my life easier or better adapted to the job at hand.

Perhaps one problem I had is that in my two previous jobs — the Navy and five years as a firefighter — an abundance of training was provided to help one sort out where to go or what to do in the case of A, B or C.

Later I noticed that pretty much every job I had as a journalist started out with a guessing games as to locating everything from paper clips to the various forms required for leave or travel reimbursement. How funny, I thought, and not in a “ha ha” way that the biggest obstacle in my job in the field of communication was itself the lack of communication.

Eventually I discovered that to obtain the tools of the trade it was every man, or woman, for themselves. If someone left or was about to leave, you would ask or just take a tape dispenser or a pair of scissors or a better desk, saying, “You won’t be needing that anymore.” A friend and co-worker at a paper for which I once labored wrote a touching column upon my departure and included a line in which Beth said I was laughing and saying: “I’m not gone yet and they are already dividing up my empire.” But we had learned and Beth was more or less my protege so by that time she was grabbing what goodies I did not appear to be leaving behind.

Although I don’t work, per se, in the communication business full time any more I still see the lack of giving workers the information need to do their jobs. This is especially true in my part-time job, where the people who are most likely to have the answers are full-time and often do not see your needs as a part-timer quite as clearly. There are plenty of Web sites and manuals from where I can gather all the rules and regulations but there is no time to extensively study them during work time. Then, you are not allowed to work on your time off which is what boning up by using the work computer would be considered. Catch-22? At least.

Surely some good can emerge when you are left alone to find things for one’s self. I would like to think this is why these jobs I had left no master plan for finding the things and information you need to know to do your job. I think the major reason was, however, work for many people runs at such a high speed today that those little snippets of information the boss intended to provide the new hire just slipped the Big Guy’s mind. Or else the boss said: “Let the new guy find it like I had to find it when I was the new guy.”

It would definitely interest me to see a study, if one has been done, of those organizations that prepare new employees to a T as opposed to those that make the new guy fend for themselves. Just thinking about the subject, one can imagine writing up the positives on one side and the negatives on the other and delivering a pretty good list.

Why is this important? In the grand scheme of things, I don’t suppose it is. Ruminating over this will not make your laundry whiter, will not cure erectile dysfunction and likely not put you on the hot list for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is just something to think about. We’re always in need of something to think about. So here this something is, for what it’s worth.  At least a search isn’t necessary to find it.