Early one cold January morning, almost one year ago to this day, I traveled almost thirty miles to get an occupational physical. It was an inconvenience at the time because the office had only daytime hours and I had small children who I did not want to take along. For that reason, I left early in the morning so I could be seen soon after the office opened, and my husband could stay with the boys.
Sitting in my car, immediately after the physical, which lasted all of three minutes, I asked myself, “Is this job really worth the hassle? ”
I hadn’t even been officially hired yet, and this job had already caused a measure of inconvenience in my life.
For example, a month earlier, on the day of the job interview, my future boss’s assistant called late in the morning on the day of the interview to cancel. As in, I had my babysitter lined up and my clothes laid out and I was about to pick my son up from school and get dressed for the interview, last minute. I later found out that my future boss had a medical emergency, and the cancelation was unavoidable.
In general, though, everything about job interviewing takes some doing when your children are not yet school age. I needed to line up childcare so I could go to the interview and needed to do my superstitious, pre-interview preparations with my sons following me around. Superstitious because I always tell myself that I won’t be offered a job unless I put clear nail polish on my nails.
After the interview, I was contacted by the Human Resources Department and asked to fill out forms for a private background check and asked to go to my local Fed Ex store to get an FBI Fingerprint check. I also provided my potential new employer a form listing the addresses of every residence I had lived in since 1978, which if you have ever tried is no easy feat to remember.
By the time the occupational physical was finished, my thought was, “This better be the last step, I hope they hire me now.”
Luckily, I held it together and did not voice any of this frustration to the Human Resources representative who offered me the job several days later. This was a wonderful thing because that position, as a solo library assistant in the information commons, a library with a computer lab and few books, at the small community college branch campus, turned out to be a great situation for me.
It payed off more than I could have ever known while I was sitting in my car after the occupational physical.
Though I am still employed that college technically, even by the most generous of estimates, I only ended up working on-campus for seven weeks before the pandemic started. Currently, I am furloughed because students are not allowed on campus right now. The college moved to a virtual format in mid-March of 2020. Every semester, the college takes some time to re-evaluate whether they should move back to in-person instruction and they have not moved back to in-person instruction yet.
It is a shame too, because I enjoyed my job while I had it. My branch campus’s information commons was noticeably quiet and the staff and students who asked me for assistance there were pleasant and even a little deferential to me. I enjoyed chatting with the library co-workers that I would see at the beginning of my shift, when I would relieve them for the evening. I also enjoyed talking to the security guard who worked nights and would stop by my desk every hour or so to give me the updates on how he thought the evening was going on campus. He was chatty but pleasantly so and I never felt like our chats cut too much into my quiet, time.
I worked there two nights a week for a total of seven hours a week. At the time, when I was still reporting to work twice a week, I thought the best advantage was the seven hours of mostly uninterrupted time that I could use to work on my blog or write trivia questions. I wasn’t doing something unethical, the staff who trained me in my new position advised me to bring something to do.
Just writing about it now makes me anticipate the days when the campus reopens again because having that amount of personal time to work on my projects sounds luxurious.
What I am finding though, is that the best advantage that I am still receiving from this little job, that I have not been at since mid-March of last year, is my very own, personal Microsoft Office 365 account. It is something that I didn’t know that I needed until I had one.
I know what you are thinking, woo and whoop-de-doo, that doesn’t seem that amazing. I, too, didn’t immediately recognize what a gift this was when I logged onto my new college’s employer portal for the first time either.
However, to me, as a wannabe writer this feels so essential right now. It gives me a space of my own.
I have a history of destroying journals and notebook where I have written my thoughts. I always used to blame this on the fact that I grew up with three sisters and we used to read each other’s diaries and tease each other about crushes or fights with our friends. Really, I think that my phobia of someone reading my thoughts comes from inside. I am sometimes afraid of my own thoughts and perhaps my blogging is an attempt to legitimize my thoughts in a public way. I am still shy about uncooked thoughts though and having a place to store my Microsoft word documents privately is so important to me.
My husband had given me his work login for his Microsoft 365 account years ago. I used it occasionally before I got my own. While that was very generous of him, I could see his file folders and he could see mine. Let me say, for being a librarian, I am very unorganized with my online file folders. The bookmark situation that I used to have on my computer was ridiculous. It was just a long, long list of websites without any organization whatsoever.
I thought that what I needed to do to really dive into writing, was to clean up the office room that my husband and I share. I also told myself that if we moved my desk up to our bedroom that I would be more likely to write.
We did straighten up our room this weekend and make a space for my desk. Once I clean out my desk, it will be ready to go upstairs.
Even so, I think what is propelling me to write right now is not that I now have a physical space to write, but that I decided that I was going to do it. I credit that to my dinky community college job with its quiet writing time and free Microsoft 365 account. I also credit my husband for being very supportive of my blog and blogging time and for encouraging me in this undertaking.
It turns out I don’t need a “room of one’s own” to write. What I need is the kitchen table, a laptop, and a Microsoft Office 365 account of one’s own.
