Anyway, my office just moved into downtown Seattle and I am totally ‘naming.¹

I worked in this area twenty years ago and, well, it was not a Mary “We’re Gonna Make It After All” Richards experience. I wore the pantyhose, but there was no joyful tossing of hats in the air. No grump-with-a-heart-of-gold Mr. Grant to whine to. No Rhoda.

When I worked downtown, I was paying my way through college, mostly through office jobs. I did spend 6 months cashiering at a bookstore which I enjoyed because employees could borrow any of the books for free.  Oh, there was that one shift as a waitress which ended abruptly when my would-be boss mentioned that she wouldn’t be paying me for my first few days’ worth of work “until she knew if I’d be a good fit.” Other than that, I was an office drone because it paid marginally better than washing dishes.

But honestly, the 4-6 hours a day I spent filing and answering phones wasn’t the hardest part of life back then. The hardest part was being surrounded at school by students who seemed to live astonishingly care-free lives.²

These other students got to live in a campus dorm with their peers instead of a shitty apartment. They got to participate in sports and other extracurricular activities because they had actual free time. They got internships doing things they enjoyed because it didn’t matter that they were paid little or nothing, and hence got a huge head start on their future careers. They got to worry about their grades instead of their rent, food, and grades.  They had health insurance.

Even at the time, I knew I couldn’t hold those kids’ good fortune against them. But the experience taught me that the other half – the “have-not-quite-as-much half”, if you will – does indeed often have to work harder for the same things.

It’s been an interesting few days, remembering that other time. I’m proud of Younger Uppity for sticking it out and getting that degree. Happy she didn’t let the hardness of it harden her heart, too. Glad she made it, after all.

1. Does one get to say ‘naming if they didn’t serve in Vietnam?
2. Well, that and having to be at work at the ass-crack of dawn.

Much progress was made on the novel.  I had a dream last night that someone gave me 1.8 million dollars, which I was going to use to quit my job and write. Never one to miss an opportunity to feel guilty, I immediately started calling people I thought I should share it with.

The stretch of hot weather we’re having here is supposed to last a week. Temps will get into the 100′s.  Naturally I’ll need to bring a sweater and gloves to work because they’ll have the a/c turned up to Subarctic.

Image from Failblog via Feministing.

Uppity Rib, Technical Writer and Jedi Master

Thanks, Lachlan, and may the force be with you.

T’is the usual excuses¹ what keep me from blogging. But I will be back soon, I promise – please don’t delete me from your feed reader!   I need a certain amount of subscribers to feel my life is not a total waste.

Now back to the exciting world of a technical writer, where the program manager‘s lack of planning becomes your emergency.

1. Too much work, on a roll with my own writing, and house guests.

This morning there was an article in our internal newsletter announcing that we would not be relocating our offices due to the “recent economic downturn.” Instead we’d be expanding into the abandoned building across the street, a spooky Art Deco-era hotel I’ve always liked.

Sweet! says I.

Psych! says The Man.

Thanks a lot for ruining my day, dude.

Oh well. Maybe it will be some consolation if I can ride the SLUT every morning.

Comic by the ever-hilarious xkcd.

Savage Chickens make life bearable.

Like the one by the guy who was nodded at in a store by someone he recognized but couldn’t place, and then after a torturous night of trying to remember who she was and feeling like an asshole, he finally concluded she must be an old flame because he could just barely remember being in love with her…And then realized the next morning that she’s the lady at Starbucks who gives him his coffee every day.

That one in particular made me think that these TAL stories are like blog posts: they’re short (because who has time for a blog post that takes an hour to read?) yet show how slices of the storyteller’s everyday life are actually interesting. And then I wondered if, on any given day, the average person had at least one thing that had happened to them that, if Ira Glass happened to call, they could turn into a short-short story.

You’ll never guess where I’m going with this.

This is the inaugural post for a new category on the Rib: Storytime. It’s kind of an experiment to see if there really is at least one thing in my average day that I can turn into a little story that others would find worth reading. The fact that “short” is a requirement makes the idea much less intimidating. I probably can’t do one every day due to time constraints, but several times a week is the goal.

Here goes nothing…

——–

Most days of the week, my office mate Shelby, who is also my mentor, and I meet for half an hour to discuss my projects. Lately we’ve taken to having this “meeting” outside, chatting as we walk around the neighborhood.

We work downtown in the International District which has everything in it from office workers like ourselves to shopkeepers to train travellers to the homeless. No one ever talks to us as we walk and we don’t talk to them.

Except today, as we were walking past an office building, someone yelled out “Obama!” We looked up from our conversation to see a black man crouching in the planter box in front of a window. He was looking straight at us, grinning from ear to ear.

It took me a second to realize the guy was washing the windows, not just crouching in the planter in order to shout at unsuspecting passers-by. “Obama!” he said again, and gave us the thumbs up.

We kept walking, but Shelby returned the thumbs up. “Obama!” she said to him, grinning just as widely.

“Obama!” I heard him say behind us. I swear I thought he would break into song.

I waited until we got all the way back to the office to check out the front of Shelby’s baseball hat. I was sure it had an Obama logo on it, but no. The window washer was just bursting with joy and couldn’t keep it to himself.

[tags]This American Life, NPR, writing[/tags]