Brown Water

Once upon a time I was turned down for a job because the interviewer told me I was too nice. "They're idiots," my dad responded when I called him afterwards from the parking lot. At the time, I didn’t know how I came across as too nice, and I replayed my two forty-five-minute interviews over and over in my head, quite literally, for years.

Instead, I was hired by a reputable company with amazing benefits and strong ethics. When I arrived on my first day the company was in an HR crisis. My two interviewers had been caught in an extra-marital affair a day earlier, and I was completely clueless of what was happening behind closed doors. I sat in the office manager’s office while she set up my company email, parking pass, and security entrance keys, but she didn’t seem happy to see me, or even care that I was there. Her face swollen from crying, mascara had dried around her eyes like a racoon, and her voice quivered as she spoke. My first day was her last. I never saw her again.

In four years of working for this company, I met incredible people, and not so incredible people. I saw people lose their jobs, their tempers, their money, their judgement. I saw one woman take the helm of one division of the company, annihilate everyone in her path, then rebuild that division bigger and better. Then I heard what people called her behind her back. I toured the White House. I rode around Chicago in a black limousine one beautiful October day. I met professional athletes who wore the largest diamond earrings I’d ever seen. I hate flying, and yet I flew on tiny six-seater airplanes to visit building sites.

Flying back to Atlanta late one evening, midtown looked stunning in the night sky. The buildings looked like little glass castles just under our plane, almost as if I could reach out and touch them. A coworker sat across from me, knee to knee, drinking out of a brown paper bag. Brown water he called it, in his Texas accent. Whiskey, in case there is any confusion. He kept talking louder and louder but I didn’t care. I was glued to the window and mesmerized by the city lights below.

When I think back to my days in an office, I don’t remember the projects or the work itself. I remember the experiences and the people. I remember the coworker who was an opera singer by night and sang happy birthday in Italian for each birthday, the flowers the office sent to my grandfather’s funeral, and our boss taking us to his favorite Texas BBQ restaurant for lunch.

With age comes wisdom, and cynicism, and I’ve realized that the interviewer who told me I was too nice, just didn’t like me. And that’s fine, not everyone will. But those words were heavy to hear, especially at twenty-three years old, because “too nice” actually meant naïve, simple, and, in my interpretation, incompetent. It was for the best, as they say, but working well with others for the next four years proved I was both nice and competent; nice and authentic. It was not the first time someone else’s words were unhelpful (see Voice post) nor will it be the last I am sure, but I learned that words and how we say them- those are ways we will be remembered.