Finally, finally done with temp work for the summer. It wasn't half bad, honestly, and now I have a printer and a MacBook Pro to show for it, plus a little stash of money to hide away to fund trips to Omaha or Portland or Sao Paulo --- if nothing else, it's a few dollars towards my dream house on the corner of 16th and Riggs.
And I'm actually a great receptionist, it turns out. Towards the last few weeks, I really started to enjoy being the girl that made the announcements, that made interviewees comfortable in their chairs and that kept the candy jar filled. It was fun giving the lobby a little bit of an edge, too --- playing Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead every once in a while, instead of the light ambient music that the office was used to hearing.
Washington is a nice city to feel competent in, to wake up too early and stride around in high heels before settling in your seat outside at Au Bon Pain and enjoying a last gasp of sunlight before settling in at the reception desk. I could never keep up with the Hill staffers, I'm sure, but sitting and watching those out-of-town interns race around with their watches perfectly set and attache cases firmly in hand, I wasn't jealous, either. Strange summer contentment is easy enough to find when you've got the nicest sunglasses five dollars could buy and the Decemberists singing you through the early Thursday humidity. Pretending to be a low-rent Sophia Loren of the people. It's a fantasy that soon falls to pieces when your days are spent responding like Pavlov's dogs to a phone that doesn't ring but rather wails impatiently with calls from Mozambique (did you they speak Portuguese there? Bom dia, senhor! Como vai a senhora? I'm learning so much this summer!) and demands from ill-tempered patrons of the arts.
But, like dear Pam Beesley on The Office, I had friendly faces to look forward to, and the satisfaction of watching people enjoy whatever confection I kept in the candy jar (chocolate only when morale was really low, gum drops when people were generally unpleasant). And, as always, I had the Metro for comfort. That's the one thing I'm not looking forward to about going back to New York in a few weeks: the shrieking trains that are never local when you want them to be, never express when you need them to be. I'm a Red Line girl through and through, it seems, though I'll always have a soft spot for the pilgrimage from Union Square through Brooklyn to Coney Island one makes on the Q. You'll have to make the trip with me sometime!
August 12, 2007
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