Author's Note

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I have written 9 more chapters. If you would like to read them, just email me at: andy.collins.carreno@gmail.com and I'll email you a copy! andy

1. Just another morning

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Corporate Life Lesson #1: Priorities change.

Subject: Congratulations
I just read your blog about the new house. It is beautiful and I can't wait until you and Edward are settled into your new home. You both should be very proud of yourselves. I can't wait to see the new house. All my love, Kathleen

That was the first email I read that morning. The year before, when Eddie and I got married, I had never thought that my relationship with his mother would be as great as it was now. Kathleen is by any objective standards a woman who has overcome tremendous hardships and challenges in her life, and that has given her a strong sense of right and wrong (which usually means she's right and you're wrong). Her new profession as a clinical therapist has entitled her to claim complete open-mindedness and non-judgemental character traits for the past five years, which, more often than not, fail to show in her rants on how "they must be crazy to do it that way" or how "any reasonable person would apologize when you call them on their mistakes." For some reason people seem to be getting crazier and less reasonable around her by the day. I always feared my name would yet again make a starring appearance in one of her "life lessons," as I politely like to call them, but ever since the last time several years ago, I have been careful to stay in her good graces: I email her regularly with news (she loves that), and constantly ask what I can do to help her. It is not in my nature to be this agreeable. In fact, I don't have a very good track record of keeping my cool when facing other strong-minded people of a different mindset; however, it's something I have learned to control from Eddie, and in this case, for him as well. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to live in a household of nine people and try to preserve the harmony, and I was not about to throw decades of perfecting the art of keeping Kathleen content out the window. Her email struck a soft cord with me, and I smiled even through my grogginess.

I still tell people that I wake up at 5 am every day, but that has not been the case lately. For the past couple of months I have been staying up until midnight or 1 am to spend more time with Eddie. Lately I have been feeling as though I don't see him much because of my obsessive compulsive inclination to stay busy every day. For some reason that I cannot put my finger on, I have a deadly fear of an empty schedule. Should I have a few minutes to ponder, I start facing questions such as why am I not out there saving the world? Why am I not out curing cancer? A good pair of hands is a terrible thing to waste, considering that labor is the most expensive commodity in this country. Ever since I got out of college, I have felt like going to work every day is not enough to fill my days, so I have done it all: took violin lessons, joined the French Alliance downtown to practice my French, played tennis at a sporadic league, volunteered at multiple emergency rooms, took Portuguese classes, taught Spanish to little kids at the YMCA for Junior Achievement, practiced gymnastics, joined a softball league, organized a full blown curriculum of Spanish classes for my coworkers, joined a book club, moved six times in five years (twice within the same city, just for something to do), volunteered at a suicide hotline, and finally decided to go for my Masters in Business Administration (MBA) in the evenings at a local (prestigious) university a couple of years ago. I have one year left to go in the program, and I have accomplished to completely fill my calendar. Now that I am married, I am starting to feel the toll of not spending enough time at home. It didn't matter when it was just me, my futon and TV set. Now I have someone I would much rather spend my time with waiting for me at home.

This morning I did get up at 5 am. I had been procrastinating from doing my homework (due tonight, of course) and it was now or never. I still managed to check my email, Facebook, and write an entry on my personal blog, which I use to keep my family in the US and overseas appraised of what is going on in our lives, all before 6 am. I can always find ways to procrastinate from doing actual work, and usually email and Facebook are great outlets; except when nobody is messaging me on Facebook and I have zero notifications pending, although that doesn't stop me from hitting the refresh button every 5 minutes, even if it has been hours since the last notification was received.

After rushing through doing homework, procrastinating, having cereal, showering, blow-drying, moisturizing from head to toe, getting dressed and giving a goodbye kiss to my still-sleeping husband, I bolted out the door to catch the 6:45 am 59 bus from my apartment in Newton to Watertown Yard. The next bus wouldn't come until 7:15 am, and I had a 7:30 am meeting scheduled with my counterparts in India, which I should not be late for. I ran down my perfectly suburban street, passing some of the most expensive middle-class houses in the Greater Boston area, and ran out of air before reaching the corner and switching to a brisk walk. I am definitely not in the best shape of my life and running is one of those things that I just can't do. Finally bent the corner to keep my eyes on the intersection half a mile away where 2 buses were expected to pass at around this time. The 558 bus could take me straight to Newton Corner, and the 59 bus (my usual) could take me to Watertown Yard. On either stop I could hop on the 502 express to Copley Square, which only took 15 min to get to Back Bay. Jogging now, I saw the 558 pass right by. Don't fret yet, the 59 has not passed. I was close to the intersection now, when I saw the 59 bus through a clearing between two buildings on the street ahead. Too late. It was off. If I had been just 30 seconds earlier... alright, time to walk.

It was 6:47 am, so I still had plenty of time to walk 1 mile down to Watertown Yard and catch the next 502 bus to Copley Square and still make it in time for my meeting. I was sweating so much that it forced my mind to remember that I forgot to bring a hair band with me. Drat. Panting from what seemed like a running marathon for my standards, I could feel the sweat stick to the back of my shirt and underarms. I was almost thankful that my office is so small that wearing jeans and a top are not frowned upon. I guess that's what you get when you work at a satellite office where only two people are in your team, and you don't even work with them anyway. I kept walking past the small businesses that were still closed. Even the Quick Mart store was closed; weren't they supposed to be open for coffee or something? I only noticed because I was keeping my eye open for places that would sell hair bands. No such luck on this street. I even started staring at the moving ground in front of me to see if anybody had lost one lately that I could pick up and use. Gross, I know. I did find a bobby pin and picked it up, but it was rusted past recognition, so I let it be and wiped my hand off on my jeans, while thinking that someone may have urinated in that corner. I have issues.

As I looked past the businesses that were actually open, like the fabrics and sewing store with a conspicuous sign that read "NO SOLICITORS," I let my mind wander and thought about people who worked inside and could see me walk by in my plain orange top, my worn out jeans and long brown hair. Did they give me as much thought as I was giving them? I got a quick glimpse at the arm of someone who seemed to be sitting at a desk right by the big window, which seemed better suited as a retail display window than an office window, and I think I saw a hand staple something. Was that person happy to be working right there right now? Were they the owners of this small business? Did they get much street traffic? Did anybody even know they were there? As I wondered how a physically-static small business would succeed in attracting clients, I spotted a shopping cart on a grassy area right off the sidewalk. Someone must have taken a walk home with their groceries from the Stop & Shop down the street and decided to abandon it and run. I figured I would do my good deed for the day and pushed it down a couple of blocks to the store's parking lot. I felt a little silly especially because I was now passing through a residential stretch of the street, and the wheels in the cart were making a really loud noise, like the entire metal cage the cart is made of was shaking with every microscopic pebble on the ground. I try not to get self-conscious when I know I'm doing something that has to be done, even if it puts the spotlight on me, but I was suddenly aware that the average American would feel a certain level of embarrassment right about now. I immediately thought of Eddie: he would have expected this from me, even as he disapproved. He's the kind of man who would do anything for his family and friends, stress on the anything. He prides himself on being the one who always says "Yes." Anything short of that would make him feel unhappy with himself. On the other hand, he runs away from anything that will draw attention to himself, including doing something like lifting a knocked-down curbside garbage can upright if you were walking right by it (on an empty street), or stopping the car in the middle of the street to get the box that is blocking traffic off the road, or to loudly push an abadoned shopping cart to where it belongs. We often joke about how opposites we are in every sense.

I finally got to the parking lot of Stop & Shop after what seemed like the longest and loudest 4 minutes of my life, and let the cart slide downhill on the empty parking lot without thinking about it. As it started to gain speed I realized that the cart will probably hit the next cement island it found, and knock itself over, which is not much better than being stranded two blocks away. So I ran after it and parked it safely in one of the many empty spots. I kept on walking while patting myself on the back for a good deed accomplished before 7 am. A few blocks down past the grocery store, as I wondered how many people would have done what I just did, and feeling pretty good about it, I started thinking of other ways to help. A couple of nights before, I had found a questions and answers site online called Aardvark (vark.com), and I had signed up to answer questions, but none were coming my way. Finally the previous night I got a question on using Excel -- "AHA! that is right up my alley," I thought then, and I answered the question and started thinking that maybe I could answer that type of questions every night. As I walked, I got the idea that maybe I should start documenting my answers so that I could just give people the link to the answers knowledgebase, and store the information on my home Verizon account, or maybe my university FTP account. I stopped myself at that thought realizing that my work life was spilling into my leisure time. I spend day after day documenting information technology (IT) processes and making it easy for users (employees) to find the answers they need regarding the areas I own. What I do can be quite complex, and I am not convinced that a single one of my friends or family members would be able to explain with any kind of clarity or conviction what it is that I do for a living. All they know is that I am "rich;" which I'm not, but that's what they have convinced themselves of. As my thoughts continued to flow down Excel spreadsheets and Word document questions, I saw another shopping cart by the side of the road. My face dropped. "Come on, people" I said out loud to nobody in particular, and walked right past it on my way toward the bus stop.

I made it to Copley at 7:21 am. As I walked to work, I found myself in the glorious presence of the Prudential Building. I never got tired of greeting my good friend on my way into work every morning. The warm summer breeze blew my hair away from my face and I realized that my sweat spots had dried in the cool air on the bus. I passed by Shaws supermarket thinking of running in for some hair bands and looked at my watch: 7:25 am. Just enough time to get to my desk and call into my meeting by the usual teleconference method. Hair bands will have to wait.

I made it to my desk at 7:28 am, called into the meeting at 7:30 am and heard the friendly voice of the operator in a British accent "The leada has knot aCtivaTed this khon-frence; please stand by until your coll begins." My computer took 5 whole minutes to make itself useful, as I listened to the elevator music on the other side of the line. I opened Microsoft Outlook and entered my password. I dreaded this particular minute of the day - the moment when the flood of emails would come crashing down from top to bottom onto my other unanswered emails from the day before on my inbox. It was almost like a forewarned execution where clicking on the OK button after typing in the password triggers the "FIRE" shout. I pressed "Ctrl 2" to view my calendar for the day. It had been 8 minutes and nobody had joined the phone call yet. No wonder: it got canceled. So I guess it's going to be one of those days. Welcome to my world.