Norstar and Montmartre

Guess what happened at work a couple weeks ago? I got mail. Real live mail with my name on top and the company address beneath. The day after that? My first phone call. Having only worked from home until last fall, I didn’t exactly have an established presence at work. Even once I started going to the office, I barely had a desk. I took one artificial bouquet from home so that it sort of felt like mine. But I’m only there two hours; so each morning I would come in and find the flowers shifted and boxes and things dumped onto the desk like that table in the storage room where you put things for which you don’t have any other place.

I’ve since moved to a more permanent desk, and I got a project that involves people outside of the company and thus the mail and the phone call. Receiving my first phone call of course necessitated the recording of an actual voice mail message, which quickly snowballed into assigning me an extension, adding my name to the company directory, and conducting a Google search that now qualifies me to find my way in and out of the system administration on a Norstar company phone in like ten seconds flat. I can even tell you how to change the digital display so it actually says your name. Though, I’m probably going to have to Google it again if you ask.

Do you see this pretty picture? This is the kind of stuff I do at work. I write about places like that. It’s why on a bad day once, my twitter/facebook status read, “I’m writing about places I’d rather be.” It’s not that I’d rather be there than at home so much as I’d rather be there than be writing about it. That’s not always true, either. Some days it thrills me right to my toes that I can write about the white church on this hill in Paris while Jake runs between the dinosaurs in his very own bedroom and my chair where he asks me to turn various and sundry costumes right side out before he puts them on. And if I was actually on the hill, Montmartre, which I’m not even sure how to pronounce, then I wouldn’t be able to pick up the other two at 3 either, and I do like that 3 o’clock return to everything right with the world.

But I think this is what I like: If at this time last year there were people at work who didn’t even know I was an actual coworker instead of some stock video the IT guy uploaded onto the homepage and now I have my own extension, voice mail, and digital name display…then who knows what could change by this time next year. Just the thought that something within my job or outside of it could one day necessitate a reason to brush up my eighth grade French, makes me happy.

I don’t know for sure when I switched from a girl who never wanted to go anywhere or experience any change at all to this girl who kind of craves it. But I’m thinking it was somewhere between getting to marry my childhood sweetheart and the day I enjoyed learning the Norstar code for logging into the System Administration so I could change “Shane” to “Serenity”. And it might also have been after The Year when I wondered if I’d never get to see anything change again.

In eighth grade my French name, by the way, was Nicole.

(Photo by http2007 on Flickr.)