The weblogs of Beth, Christian, and the cat: updated daily, weekly, or occasionally.
Friday, 28 July 2006
Beth: Committing
Well, I've done it.
I'm kind of weird about affixing semi-permanent things to my car; I only put bumper stickers on Jigglypuff when I was quite certain that I would be her last real owner. I held my high school parking sticker in place on the inside of the windshield using saran wrap during junior year, and I only peeled off the adhesive and stuck my Calvin parking sticker on after I received a parking ticket a short ways into freshman year.
My previous two crappy jobs necessitated cards to access their respective parking lots. One needed to be swiped every day and not attached to anything, but the second one came with adhesive strips. They wanted me to stick those giant ugly strips on my windshield and have them be stuck there forever. No thank you, I said. For almost 8 months, I drove around with that parking card precariously perched at the front of my dashboard, with nothing to secure it. I know it drove Christian nuts to turn corners and have that thing slide all over the dash.
But peeling off that adhesive strip felt like it would be committing permanently to the job, and something in me just couldn't bring myself to do that. Somewhere deep down I knew that it wasn't going to be a place for me long-term. (Perhaps that ultimately doomed me at that job; who knows.)
Today was one of my fellow reporters' last day on the job. He's moving to a different state to get his master's degree and a sweet internship on the precise beat he wants to pursue. He and I hit it off pretty well when I started - with us both having led a college newspaper, we shared similar ideas and frustrations about how our employer's paper was run. It was nice to have someone to run ideas by and commiserate with. So it's sad to see him go.
At his going-away lunch, I looked around the table and realized that it had been seven months since I joined this group, and that I really had a place within the newsroom. It reaffirmed to me that I'm not going anywhere - that this is really the place for me right now. Even with weeks like last week's 55 hours, or the upcoming major festival that is going to have us running around like madmen. And so I realized that if I cared enough about this job to be sad when a really good employee leaves the group, then it was time to make a committment.
So when I got home, I fished around my car for the parking sticker they gave me my first week. It took me about 10 minutes to find it among the random junk in my car, but I found it nonetheless. I peeled off the adhesive backing, and stuck it on my windshield. I'm in it for the long haul.
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