I am a drone in an invisible sea of drones.  I’m perfectly happy being invisible and getting my work done and being left alone to do it.  Evidently I do something right because people come to me and ask me how to do xyz or abc.  I find that pretty flattering, but also a little disconcerting, because I’ve tried to not let anyone know I know anything.

What I have made abundantly clear is I have a life on the outside.  Kinda sounds like prison, sorta…  But, my point is I’m the office do-gooder, cheerleader, and work-life balancer.  I’ve encouraged people to work on Rebuilding Together, to walk with us for a cure and most recently I got us an inner-office art show.  It is this, that I am most proud.

It began a year ago when we moved into a new space.  Bare walls begging for art. And they go to posters .com to fill the walls!!  WTF?!  We have however many floors of worker bees and without hesitation I could name half a dozen co-worker artists whose work should grace that space.

We have an annual survey of stupid shit like are there enough beatings, is moral low enough, should the beatings increase, and how can we possibly make your time here suck more?  After we complete the survey, uppers review our “anonymous” answers and we have a meeting to discuss what we are going to do to improve this.  After the posters incident, I said in a meeting, I wanted to see an exhibit of our collective creativity.  It has taken a year, a few “surveys of interest” and a couple of presentations to make this happen.  The little mouse’s voice was finally heard.

While our artist participation wasn’t great in numbers (I’m sure that had nothing to do with the fact we got this together in 2 weeks after a year of feet dragging), it was great in creativity and enthusiasm.  We had someone bring in fimo beads with faces and flowers, a cast bronze bowl, gorgeous photos, lots of drawings, a dream catcher repurposed from a tomato cage (brilliant!), poems, a glass mosaic, and a rag rug made from old mis-matched socks.  I am like a proud parent that we got this off the ground and that an office overflowing with apathy and indifference gave this the slightest nod.

I’ve had several people come by my desk and tell me how good everything is and how happy they are folks brought stuff in.  I guess the invisible shield is coming down.  I suppose it’s ok when I’m known for working to live and not living to work.