settled

It's winter again. Outside it's cold and snowing, and on my walk to the post office to get the office mail I realized that I really need warmer shoes, so, despite my renewed hatred of shopping, particularly at this time of year, it looks like a trip to Ye Olde Malle looms inevitably in my immediate future.

I enjoy the cold. I love the briskness of the stark clear nights when every wisp of humidity has evaporated into the freezing atmosphere and you can see every star. I love the heavy snowfalling air on the swirl days, when visibility retreats shivering to the end of your nose. I really love that I live less than five minutes away from my job -- though I don't love the nagging knowledge that I'll have to shovel a path across the yard to my car in the mornings. But it's winter, it's snowing, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, and it's so much better this year than last year when we were wearing T-shirts until January. This feels normal. It feels right.

It also reminds me that I've been at this job for just over sixteen months, and it's hard for me to believe I've ever worked anywhere else. I came in this morning after our Thanksgiving break ready to rock and roll, and I've already accomplished a bunch of little things around the office, and I'm preparing to roll up my sleeves and dig into the paperwork. I like getting up in the morning and coming to work. The office is always fast-paced, the clients are usually irritating, a lot of the attorneys are rude, but the fly-around stress is enjoyable for all of that. When I go home at the end of the day, I feel that I've done something.

I have grown up with the knowledge that I never wanted to enter the business world. I don't like all the phone calls and the emails, the ladder climbing and the futile ambition -- I don't like career. My bent has always been toward writing and the arts, which, sadly, no longer pay the bills. When I decided against teaching and decided against grad school, I felt a little lost, a little desperate -- I knew I didn't belong in the fields I had rejected, but I knew also that I didn't want a business career, and I didn't know where that left me.

So I bounced around just paying the bills. Looking back, I can't quite believe I did what I did, working nine months doing two part-time jobs in basic retail without health insurance -- I would never, ever do that again. But I learned so much, and really came into my own then, and I'm glad I chose it, and glad too that God was so vigilant and gracious during that year, and the years that followed.

I was so unhappy in my job doing events at the Center. It was everything I hated about business, combined with a whole lotta other crap I've blogged about before. But even without the negative environment and the nastiness and the conniving and the politics, I just didn't like the job. But I felt well and truly stuck -- what else was I supposed to do?

And now I'm here. I do secretarial work, sure, and it's not glamorous and there's no ladder-climbing, which matters to some people, but it's important work, it's stable, and I love it, and I love my bosses. I can't imagine doing anything else. I am fairly certain, as certain as one can be in life, that I'm going to be here for a long number of years, and that thought energizes me.

The bottom line is, I'm proud of my job. I hear people sneer at it when they think I can't hear, or demean other people in secretarial positions in my presence ("so-and-so is only a secretary"), and I know plenty of others who hold back the criticisms like levvies hold back the sea even if they don't say anything, who think I'm wasting my time and talents doing menial labor when I could be doing something so much better. These people don't have to say anything; their opinion comes screaming across the emotional barometer like a hurricane-force wind, even as they say faintly, "Well, I'm glad you're happy..." while their eyebrows contradict the idea that my happiness in such a job is even possible, any more than my happiness as a prostitute would be possible.

But I'm proud of my job. It takes a lot of mental acuity to do it well, and a great deal of attentiveness to someone else's style and someone else's needs, and a knowledge of someone else's habits to the point where I can know what he's going to need, whether a document or a file or a cup of coffee or someone on the telephone, before he knows it himself. It takes a tremendous amount of skill, a deft application of known factors and creativity, to make oneself an invisible presence of crucial importance for the smooth functioning of an office. And I can do just that. I can be there at his elbow with a cup of my excellent coffee just when he's becoming cognisant that he wants some, I can put the files for his next appointment on his desk and he never notices, I can have received a telephone call from some company we subpoenaed saying one little phrase was wrong and have it corrected and ready for him to sign before he even gets the message, I can receive entered orders back from the Court and have them served on all the interested parties before he's even seen the mail.

I can also get away with a lot. I know how he works, and so I know how to interrupt him when he's busy with something important. I can bug him about certain phone calls or documents that need to be made. I can make suggestions that he ordinarily wouldn't consider, and he'll consider them. In short, we work well together, and it's usually fun, and almost always rewarding.

If he were a horrible boss, the job would be thankless and wretched. But he notices, he always thanks me for everything, so my bid to be invisible never quite works -- which makes it, therefore, a challenge, a goal...and a cheerfully sneaky one.

And I'm smart. There are a lot of dumb secretaries out there. I've met them. Dumb and drab. But he's leaving more and more of the documents in my hands, giving me less and less instruction, and it's because, as he told me early on in the job, "You have a brain and you use it."

I'm no lawyer, but I'm getting snatches of the law, and it's fun and interesting, though nothing I'd choose for my own career. I like where I am, much as I liked chiefing makeup crew in my college theater days -- it's background work, but it's no less important for all that. And I prefer making others' performances possible.

I also have the opportunity to connect with other background workers like myself. Some of them are truly fantastic, and the ones who aren't make themselves the butt of good jokes. The really good ones know their place, know that they're not the lawyer or the judge, but know even better that the lawyer or the judge couldn't do his/her job without that competent, friendly secretary taking care of the small stuff.

So where I am is perfect for me. I'm paying the bills doing work I enjoy and believe in. And meanwhile I have plans for my computer and my fingers and the words and stories that flashpoint through my busy brain, and those aren't career goals; they're Alpine ambitions, divine callings, and I do keep the two separate, and they fit interestingly well together, like pieces of an insane puzzle that match just as your head is starting to ache and your eyes begin to cross.

So for the time being, here I stay, well and proudly.