What started it

I’ve always assumed that eventually I would join PC, since I first heard about it when I was a kid. I’ve even sent away for the application packet before, at least once, but always chickened out before I finished and sent it in.

But I got started applying this time around because of AS, who sat in the adjacent cubes at work.

I was so impressed when I first met her because she seemed to effortlessly elegant and perfect, this California girl with blonde hair and expensive-looking clothes like a wrap dress that draped exactly right. On me it would have gaped open and showed my ratty old bra.
She had three framed pictures above her computer of her and her husband outside the hut where they lived while they were in Kyrgistan. They had just gotten back. Amy had been working in the office just a few months and probably already had another job lined up when I met her, though I didn’t know that at the time.

She had a fascinating resume, too, at glossy magazines. She was freelancing, too, and I could never figure out how the hell she had time for that plus grad school plus a full-time job plus going to the gym regularly (as she clearly did) plus making these amazing gourmet lunches that I would gaze upon covetously as I shoved my generic diet soda and PB&J into the office mini-fridge.

Just like with the cool kids in junior high, I was always a little sad that she would ask our other coworkers to get coffee and never me, though later I realized it was because she was already starting to disassociate with the job, which also explains why she didn’t pounce on my marginally better cube when she had the chance.

AS planted in me the seeds of dissatisfaction with my job, right from my first weeks in the office. She hated our boss; she wasn’t even planning on putting the job on her resume. Of course because she was so glamorous and cool and because I was new and soaking in everything, I too started to see the chinks in the armor and the stains on the carpet.

But it wasn’t until after she took another job and moved on that a bunch of us were having falafel at the International Café, sitting outside on a gorgeous spring day, and I mentioned again that I had always thought about doing PC and she said, “If you’re thinking about it, you should just do it. Don’t think.”

It was in the elevator going back up to the office that I thought, “Yeah, I should.” And when I got back to my desk, I went online and started working on my application.