I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(18)

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Our project group—a mix of consultants from my company and financial specialists from SuperBank—occupied the thirty-seventh floor of the SuperBank office tower. Nose-high cubicle walls divided the floor into modular quadrants. I had to memorize people’s cube decorations to find my way to and from the elevators. There was Stephanie’s red college pennant; there was Derek’s little bendy horse he’d gotten as a Happy Meal prize because we were all in our early twenties and still often ate like children; there was the clip-on fan Adam had rigged up over his desk; turn left; there was my cube. The size of your cube indicated your station in this professional society: tiny for an analyst; less tiny for a consultant; even less tiny for a manager, plus a small extra chair for cubicle guests.

Our team was charged with testing the software that would go into all the new SuperBank ATM machines. Kicking the technological tires, so to speak. The elder consultants explained to us newbies what software testing entailed: writing scripts for scenarios wherein you imagine how a person might use the software—in our case, scripts for how a person would use an ATM machine. Then another team would use those scripts to test the ATMs, making sure everything worked, and fixing what didn’t.

I couldn’t even think of more than maybe four scenarios for what could happen at an ATM. Get money. Don’t get money. Check your balance. Deposit a check? What else was there? I tried very hard to write good scripts—I asked my coworkers to sit down and show me, time and again, how to come up with different plots for this ATM story—but I flailed helplessly when I got back to my cube. I’d stare at the phone on my desk, willing it to light up with a call from someone a few cubes away wanting to take a break and get coffee. I loved coffee breaks, but even with enough breaks to sip more caffeine than it could possibly have been healthy to consume, every workday felt sixty hours long.

I loved my coworkers, but I hated my job. Putting together outfits wasn’t enough, and often, when I got back to my little apartment each night to boil my pasta and watch Ally McBeal, I wondered, How much longer can I fake this? I suspected not much longer, but I couldn’t imagine the next page in my own script either.



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I stuck with the consulting company for a few years, transferring from Charlotte to the Atlanta office when John and I got married, but I never did feel like I fit in, which is why I developed a lunchtime habit of scrolling through online job postings. I was looking at jobs over a bowl of soup one day when I saw a listing for a copywriter. Copywriter? That’s a thing? Like, a writer, but not novels or journalism? Perfect! I looked it up, and sure enough, this was a real job you could get paid for. A local hospital was looking for a writer to join their in-house communications team, to craft ads making their hospital sound better than other hospitals, write brochures about various diseases, and report heartstring-yanking stories about sick children to use in fundraising campaigns. I drafted a cover letter explaining why this job was my true calling (“Having grown up in a medical household but majoring in English . . .”) and attached copies of emails I’d written at Accenture as writing samples. They hired me. I took a big pay cut, and an even bigger leap of faith, when I accepted the job.

As soon as I finished filling out my new-employee paperwork and had a moment of quiet in my tiny new office at the hospital, I opened up my box of business cards. I marveled at the title under my name: Writer.

Had I done it? Was this my destiny? Could Cheerios boxes be far away? Other questions bubbled in the back of my mind. If I were taking a class called “Career,” would this change be considered a bad grade because my salary went backward? Or a good grade, because I was doing something more aligned with my real interests? I couldn’t be sure, so I decided to grade this choice on courage and gave myself an A for bravery.

This job is where my writing career began, and it firmly fits into the category of paying one’s dues. I learned to manage an editorial calendar, to write fast on demand, and to stick to word limits. I also learned to tolerate an erratic editor prone to striking red slashes across whole pages, to throw away and rewrite copy again and again after the scope or messaging got changed by someone else, and to meet deadlines that mysteriously bounced around the calendar. (I also learned to avoid being alone in the break room with a male colleague who once looked at my wrap blouse and asked, “If I pull that string, will your shirt come off?”) I believe every working writer needs a starter job like this. Minus the asshole.

Unfortunately, our departmental budget got cut after I’d been there about a year, and after that our boss’s boss left and the resulting backlogs made productivity a joke. People started quitting and not being replaced. Overwork led to disorganization. Chaos.

I developed a rash on my neck, and my dermatologist asked, “Are you often around sources of irritation?” Yes, I was.

I knew I had to leave, but I was disappointed to have to change jobs again. I wanted to get somewhere and stay. I wanted to run right up to some final prize and touch it and hear a ding! for done. I just didn’t know what the prize was.



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When I joined the national home office of the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, I thought, This is it. Finally. In my role there, I wrote the first company-wide editorial style guide, which meant I got to tell people, We use apostrophes like this, not like that These are the rules. I wrote speeches about the fight against cancer that were then spoken from the mouths of CEOs and celebrities. I met President George H. W. Bush when he received a medal of honor for his work promoting research. I worked on ad campaigns that played on the radio and aired on TV and won awards. (Awards!)