19 Years Ago Today September 5, 2008

I started my first “real job”. What that meant to me at the time was that I got to wear pantyhose and sign up for medical insurance. Typing had been one of the only classes in high school I had a) regularly attended and b) received a pretty good grade in, so taking an administrative job made perfect sense. My previous experience had been several years in a pet store, but now I was moving up from catching feeder fish to inside sales for an electronics manufacturer. Laid off a couple years later in one of aerospace’s waning years, I moved on to another administrative job, and then another and another. Over the years, my salary got higher, my benefits got better, my offices cushier. I had some great jobs in those days, and some super shitty ones.

At one time, I was going to write a book about my adventures as a personal assistant, but then I decided just living through it once was more than enough.

After nearly a decade and a half of jobs that made me feel less-than because I didn’t have a degree and had to be a secretary instead (no one ever stated or implied such a thing to me, that was my own angry and informed-by-my-own-inferiority-complex assessment back then), I quit my last job in that field and went in search of greener pastures. Literally, I moved over to the green industry. That was five years ago, and this fall is my last term of school towards earning my bachelor’s degree. In January, I start graduate school.

It’s a singular experience to have now worked as both the secretary and the not-secretary – working anywhere and not being an administrative person. So many of the tasks of that job were just a complete pain in the ass, and I don’t have to do them anymore. Someone else has to. It’s quite delightful.

The admin staff where I work is helpful and professional, but also so familiar: they have that suppressed irritation thing going and desks decorated with mementos of their past or planned escapes. I’m probably projecting, but it looks absolutely miserable. Of course, not everyone hates it like I did, and anyway, I didn’t always hate it. That profession took good care of me and I made friends and learned things I wouldn’t have otherwise. But JesusMaryandJoseph am I glad I don’t have to do it anymore.