claudiajean's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- you learn- WW The first thing you learn when you come to work at the white house is that you don’t get very many chances. If you screw up, it’s not like other government jobs. When you screw up, you’re out on the sidewalk with the rest of the tourists. The second thing you pick up after a week of wearing your best clothes and blow drying your hair every morning is that you don’t actually interact with the President. You’ll see him walking in the halls maybe once in a while, if you’re in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you be in his way and you’ll get to utter an “excuse me, sir.” and he’ll say in a rather booming voice for a suddenly narrow hall,
“Oh, that’s ok.” and wink. And even if you weren’t a democrat, it wasn’t very long until you became one, convinced by his pure charm alone. You learn to get up early and go to bed late. You learn to wear flat shoes and small earrings because you’ll be standing for most of the day with a phone to your ear. Depending on your job, you’ll start to lose or gain weight at a frightful pace. You don’t even get a lunch hour, or your desk happens to sit right next to that grease stained pink box you swore you’d never touch. You learn to keep your mouth closed. You learn to shut your ears when senior staff is around because if you say the right thing to the wrong person, you can shift an entire election, or in some cases, re-election. It’s kind of a powerful feeling, but when he winks at you, you don’t even want to date that up and coming congressman. People will order you around. It took you the longest to learn that one. Everyone, from disgruntled Toby Zeigler, to Leo’s secretary, to the security guard who never did like the looks of you. And sometimes you order people around yourself. The interns are expected to empty your garbage can and make more coffee at your immediate request. You love to stand in the Roosevelt room in the two minutes between meetings. You call your mother from your cell phone from inside the dank room just to tell her where you are. She never gets tired of hearing about where you work, and pretends to really understand what the bullpen is. She’s older, she had you at 43, and her minds is going quicker these days. You tell her that you talk to the President at least weekly, and that he knows your name. She lives in Nevada, and couldn’t possibly make it out to D.C. so there is no danger of her knowing the truth. It makes her happy to hear and she tells her friends at Bingo that her daughter has the ear of the President. She’s telling that the doctor said to start taking cholesterol lowering pills and she tells you this as you’re licking the custard out of a doughnut. And even when your standing in the Wal-Mart checkout line with toilet paper and control top panty hose, you decided that you love your job all the same. Because you learn to refer to it as the freshman 15 even after you’re been working there for two years and it’s far more than 15 pounds. If everything could be this good forever. He’s not re-elected and within the month, you’ve got to decide whether you’re going to fly back to Nevada or stay in D.C. You’d end up living with your mother for longer than you can endure, but you can’t really afford the city, let alone the borderline Georgetown apartment you inhabit. You keep waiting for someone to offer you a job, even a demeaning one. You watch where the senior staff goes, you watch their assistants go with them. You watch the administration leave the white house, and you watch your bank account drain. You send out about five resumes, but you’re already putting your knickknacks and your pots and pans into boxes. The new president is a republican like you used to be, and you’re on an airplane to Nevada. Your mother, at the airport, says she’s sorry you got fired. And even though you didn’t get fired, you held on to the bitter end, it does feel that way. Like you weren’t good enough for such a good job. You learn to move on. You don’t really though, because you’re used to rising at 5:00 in the morning, and going to bed well past Letterman. You find yourself standing in front of the doughnuts in the grocery store, not because you ever really enjoyed them, but for the nostalgia they cause. You watch CNN between your soap operas and primetime. You have your own apartment in Reno and you’re training to be a paralegal. You have lunch with your mother. You buy his memoirs and scan the pages for any reference of the years you spent at his house. Of course, he talks about his speechwriters, and his press secretary, and chief of staff, he even mentions his assistant and his secretary who died in a car accident. He didn’t even know you. That hurts the most. He didn’t even know you. You learn that the hard way. After lying to your mother for song long, you start to believe it. It was a good job, you decide, even though it had a lot of lessons. 4:26 p.m. - 2002-01-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||