First impressions...

This blog has taken more turns than a pretzel and I haven't even written it yet! I think I have settled on a theme but bear with me if it goes a little sideways...I am trying to blend two stories into one...

I have told you about the last place I worked before going back to school. And I mentioned how lovely most everyone was that worked there (by the end). And by lovely I don't mean just wonderful nice people though they were, but truly lovely women. When prospective clients would come into the office you could almost see them wondering if they were being set up. And for a long stretch it wasn't just that the women were lovely, they all shared a look. Not exact, but enough if everyone was out to lunch together more than one person wondered if it might be a family meal instead of a work gathering.

It probably should have been a harder ride on my ego than it was; being over a decade older and a few sizes bigger than they were could have been very hard, but as I said, they were all really lovely people as well so most days I didn't really notice. Most days...

Today I am going to tell you about Jenn. The first time any of us saw Jenn she was a recent college graduate and was coming in for an informational interview with my boss. We had just moved into a new office space and hadn't finished building out the waiting area. There was a couch and a couple of chairs in the middle of the space, a small conference room table and chairs to the left as you first entered and a low table for placing out going mail and such things to the right. As Jenn waited for her interview time she had a seat. On the table. Now to be fair, Jenn was not the first nor the last person to mistake the table for a bench, but it never failed to make me laugh when someone did it and it stuck in my head.

Fast forward, I want to say maybe a year, and one of our AEs is leaving for greener pastures and Jenn is going to come work with us. Now my boss has already started earning his reputation for his unusual hiring practices (remember I was hired by the old boss, it's how I snuck in!) so we were all a little skeptical as to why exactly he was hiring Jenn. Jenn is that impossible combination of pretty you get when excellent gene pools collide. She is tall and thin, but with a cute figure. She has curly hair, but it's still soft and silky to the touch, she has an almost elfin quality to her face with the sweetest smile. The kind of person that you are either instantly drawn to, or you instantly hate. Really depends on where your mind is as an individual.

Jenn's first day in the office happened to be a party day. It was my 37th birthday and our bookkeeper's 36th. So we started the day with drinks and never stopped. I can remember sitting over by Jenn's desk getting the "Welcome to the Company" talk going and staring at my feet, my toes had been recently polished and were very shiny in the light over by the window. I at least had the good graces to fully admit I was drunk and would be spending the day that way. :-) That evening we went out to a bar after work to continue the festivities and Jenn joined us for a while. She fit right in, I thought, she shared some stories, made some jokes then she had to leave. I was thinking, I really like this girl and the person sitting next to me said, "I think I hate her" and she wasn't kidding. So you see, it depends on who you are as a person on how you respond to others.

Jenn coming to work for us was the turning point for me during my hell years at the Agency. I had had Jenny as my refuge, her Switzerland stance helped out so much, but Jenn was where the shift in tone started. After she had been at work a few weeks as the senior AE in the agency I felt I really needed to take her to lunch and see how she was holding up. Our boss was great with clients, tons of knowledge in his head he could have shared to make someone a great AE, but he was a lousy mentor, so it was always good to keep tabs on the new kids and see how they were holding up.

Jenn and I visited through lunch and I became more and more impressed with her. Her parents owned their own company and she had been working since she was a young kid. She found a scholarship for her college tuition that paid full ride for her for four years for basically hanging out at a golf course for a few summers during high school. This girl had some serious brains in that pretty little noggin of hers! But the most important part of the meal came for me towards the end. I have a freakish memory, so this will surprise everyone that knows me, but I cannot for the life of me remember the words she said. It was that much of an emotional kick for me. But basically she let me know that she knew about the tensions in the office, knew about parts of what had been said about me, knew where it was coming from and just wanted to let me know that she formed her own opinions about people and she thought we were going to be great friends. And we have been. Through Jenn we hired Becky and then Danyel. Sheila and Megan had joined the crew as well and before you knew it, it was a brand new ball game. But for me, that lunch meant I had a life line to a normal work life.

So after all of that glowing review do you want to know what I like best about Jenn? She has a series of scars on her back. Big scars. Those scars mean the world to me. Living in the Pacific Northwest we get greedy about our summers. We want to spend as much time as possible in the sun, on the river, in a lake, at the beach. Just soaking it up as much as possible while it is here. Jenn is no exception and spent many hours outside. Shortly after starting at L/N Jenn went into the dermatologist to get a mole screened. That screening led to numerous removals and tests. When they take a mole they suspect might be cancerous, they send it in for testing, if the tests come back with abnormalities they call you back in and take another sample, widening the borders of the incision until they get a test back that shows only normal tissue. For a stretch Jenn was in the dermatologist's office every few weeks. It was a pretty scary time. She was in a lot of pain from where they had taken samples and a few of the incisions didn't heal as cleanly as they needed to and had to be treated again. You just ached for her.

But the part that makes those scars truly beautiful is that they not only saved her life, but saved others as well. When you see a 23 year old girl going through the extensive tests she was going through it makes you think twice about ignoring your own odd moles. There were at least 3 of us in the office that went in for testing, and then friends of each of ours went as well. Jenn actually went with me to my first screening. She had an incision that needed checked so we went in together. You know when the doctor looks at a mole and says, "Do you have time to get this removed today?" you should pay attention. So I have a scar on my hip, two on my arm and a really good sized one on my rib cage. The one on my rib cage was the repeat tester for me. It took three times getting re-cut before the edges were clean and the precancerous cells were gone.

Jenn, like most of my friends, is also a client of mine and as I worked on her back this week, I looked at those scars, and was once again so grateful for everything she has done for me.

But I still tease her about sitting on the table. ;-)