Patience is a Virtue

Yesterday wasn’t all that interesting. Julia had no voice and she brought her dog to work. If no one minds, I’d rather not post my attempt to stretch that information into a full length journal entry. (Oh and I talked about my fight with the printer. I think he’s cheating on me with the computers.) So I’ll just skip on to my lovely Wednesday.

Ashley was my mentor today, haha. Basically, she’s really swamped right now and Julia isn’t so except for a couple quick things, I was helping Ashley out today. I really like working with Ashley, for all that I was basically doing the really time consuming but easily explained (and therefore not all too challenging) work. First I stuffed a bunch of envelopes with invitations to Artist Circle and put postage on them. Then I went back to printing the letters from yesterday. The bonus to envelope stuffing today was that I was also given the list of invites to check off who was being sent an invitation and make sure no one was missed. It was kind of interesting because the list was broken up into the board of trustees and then donors to ProMusica, further broken up by the range of money donated. So while I of course couldn’t go listing off all the trustees, I could recognize names I might have heard in conversation. Also, many of the donors had a business listed with them so if I was paying attention I could notice what businesses sponsor ProMusica. (Incidentally, I went to the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra’s concert Sunday night and I was suddenly curious to read all the ads in the program just to see who’s supporting the symphony. I never would have done that before my Walkabout at ProMusica.)

Printing went slowly. My computer was moving at a particularly crawling pace, taking as long thirty seconds or so, at least, just to load the print menu. And I couldn’t just click print and send fifty copies to be printed. Every letter is, of course, personalized. Then, I also had to figure out to whom I should address about two thirds of the letters because most of the businesses on the asks list didn’t have a contact listed. The… internet… was… painful… to… use… I think I spend thirty minutes trying to navigate three pages of one website. As it happens, that was a pretty cool website. You learn some pretty cool, little known, history lessons if you visit Aspen Ski and Board’s website and find either the “about us” or “history” or something like that. Eventually, it occurred to me that I could switch to Yvette’s computer, but that was close to three o’clock. The frustrating part wasn’t so much that the computer was moving so slowly; on its own, I could tolerate that without a fuss. But Ashley asked me yesterday if I would be able to finish printing today and I thought I would. I didn’t at all. It kind of made me sad.

There was at least one moment today when I was just struck by how happy I was to be there. It wasn’t anything so much about what I was doing—I was sitting at the computer waiting for some website to load—but Ashley found a dead mouse at her house this morning and Joe was making fun of her… I don’t know it was just really hilarious and I realized how much I like all these people. In general, the staff is pretty awesome and in that regard I really like it here.