I always get a bit melancholic this time of year. The twinkling magic of the holidays behind me, New Year’s Eve not quite close enough to plan the night’s wardrobe. In my less-responsible years, I surfed through this week oblivious, stretching out the celebration and pouring shots of Bailey’s or Amaretto into my evening decaf, sleeping late and watching stupid TV in my pajamas, going to the mall by day and the movies by night. But as I got older I developed another ritual: tidying up all loose ends. It was a kind of superstition with me. Some people made resolutions. Some partied the time away. I filled my days with errands: picking up the dry-cleaning, returning the library books, paying bills. Like some bad juju from the existing year would come back to bite me if I still had somebody’s lasagna pan in my house, if I’d left a coat at the tailors’ to be mended or a necklace at a jeweler’s to be repaired or hadn’t balanced my checkbook.
Damn sure I don’t want any ghosts from 2005 still lurking in my house come January 1.
So I’ve started early. And this morning I started with the mother lode: three cartons of personal items my boss found in my office, packaged up and dropped in my car the day we had lunch last week.
Fortified with a hearty breakfast and extra vitamins, I opened the first box. The contents seemed harmless enough - the typical things a professional woman might hide in her desk drawer: one of those invisible shoe-shine sponges for touch ups after a walk through the gravel parking lot or the dusty factory floor, a lint roller for that quick roll-over before being called downstairs to give a presentation, sun block for those spontaneous lunchtime strolls, a can of Static Guard, miscellaneous female unmentionables and for some reason, a package of birthday candles (hey, you never know when an unlit birthday cake might fly by your office).
No problem, I thought, I can handle this. I kept what was still useful and chucked the rest. But it was the second carton that did me in. After opening the flap I realized in one visual grab that this one contained the personal mementos – the company coffee mug that I'd designed, the little do-dads and toys that went on and around my computer and shelves. Every item had a story. There was the gargoyle statuette our 17-year-old intern, Erik, had named “Irving,” which had broken its toe when he fell from the top of the computer onto the keyboard. He became our mascot the summer Erik and I worked together to create our company’s first web site. The summer he turned me on to Propellerhead and found a new respect for me when I told him I was a huge Brian Eno fan. There were the various penguin statuettes and beanie babies people had given me throughout the years. The Louis Prima and Rhapsody in Blue CDs I played on my computer when I came in to do extra work on Saturday mornings. And the hardest of all, the business card holder and the stack of business cards for the position that no longer existed.
Which made it all too real that I’m never coming back.
Perhaps I’ll leave the third box for later. Like, never.
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4 comments:
Super Drama Teen is also into penguins. Oddly, I'd forgotten you were, as well, over the years.
As a temp of over a decade's vintage in one work place or another, I tend not to decorate my workspace too much. I had a lot of HeroClix up on my monitor at my current position, but I've taken them all down. It's the sad fact that I will probably get no warning at all when this assignment is over; I'll just get a phone call in the morning, before I leave for work, telling me not to go in. It's how employers handle it more and more when dealing with temps; who wants the drama of looking someone in the face when you yank their livelihood out from under their feet?
I have no End Year rituals as such, since I don't drink, and so many of them seem to revolve around alcohol. Still, I respect your efforts to tidy up one annum before plunging into the other one. I could never do that, though; my whole life, it sometimes seems, is lose ends.
I keep the good toys at the home workplace (doubt anyone's going to fire me here): Superman, Storm, Xeno, various penguins and Barbies, and my absolute favorite, a Tom Seaver bobble-head doll.
Sometimes warning is worse than no warning...two weeks to think, "they don't want me here, they don't want me here..."
I'm getting all shivery, thinking of the havoc I could put on time delay with two weeks notice. Oooohhhhhh.... that's nearly a chocolatey endorphin rush, there.
So far, I've been lucky, in a manner of speaking. Every job I've ever worked before has been one I loathed, or put me in close contact with people I loathed, or, more usually, both at once. That has made leaving those jobs far easier than it would noramlly be.
If anything happened to this job, I would take it pretty hard. I love the people, I love the work, I love the fact that what I do is good for the environment, economy, and screws the Oil companies (boo hiss!).
Still, I know that sooner or later I will have to move on. I just don't want to think about it right now.
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