Things We'll Miss About DC, Part 5

My last day at work was Wednesday. My last day being a book editor. (cue tears)

I am really, really going to miss my office and the people I work with.

I've loved working at this publishing company. I've loved reading all these interesting books, polishing up my grammar, and learning how a book goes from a manuscript in Microsoft Word to a beautifully bound hardcover masterpiece.

Most of all I've loved the people I've worked with.

Let me introduce you to just one of them. 

This is my officemate.

I'm not even going to write her name, because she doesn't know I have a blog, and I try not to write about people without their permission.

But man, have I loved working with this girl.

It's rare to find someone who is as much of a grammar nerd as I am. It's even rarer to find someone who shares my dorky sense of humor. This girl and I were the perfect duo of grammar nerds and dorky comedians. We had such a great time sharing an office.

We called our little office "the sorority" and laughed about how all the guys in the company somehow found a reason to stop by every few days.

We created a bunch of awesome traditions. On Friday afternoons at 3:00, I would put on my Pandora station and we would groove to the likes of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. "Pandora Fridays" were a classic.

We also both signed up for the Godiva Rewards Club—you should sign up, by the way. There's no cost to join and you get a free truffle every month. Once a month we would walk to the Godiva store in Union Station and take a loooong time to pick out our truffles. My favorite is Creme Brulee, while her favorite is Chocolate Raspberry.

^^A picture she took of her chocolate raspberry truffle, after our final "truffle of the month" run last week.

Every day at 2:00 p.m., she went to get her coffee so she could get through the afternoon. If she didn't go at 2:00, I would remind her—another tradition.

We are both obsessed with Trader Joe's and every time one of us went there, we would report back and tell the other all about it the next day. I introduced her to the amazing honey Greek yogurt, and she introduced me to the salted almonds (such a good snack).

Our conversations about Trader Joe's prompted me to put up this Facebook status three weeks ago:

My officemate and I constantly talk about our love for Trader Joe's. Today I overheard the lady who works next to us asking another co-worker, "Who is this Trader Joe's everyone keeps talking about? Oh, it's a supermarket? I thought they were talking about their boyfriends or something!"

True life. :)

She introduced me to my favorite salad—spinach, craisins, and feta cheese with raspberry viniagrette dressing. Delicious! For a while, we both ate that for lunch every day. She also goes running every evening, inspiring me to get more active too.

Besides our love for truffles and Trader Joe's, our friendship was based on our shared nerdy obsession with grammar. This website became our best friend. We joked about our good friend "Merriam" and the need to "check with Merriam" in our editing decisions. One day we discovered that you can press a little audio button on the Merriam-Webster website to hear words spoken aloud. Our lives were changed. From then on, every chance we got we would listen to how a word is pronounced. Everything from "debacle" to "bourgeois" was solved that way.

Occasionally we used the Photobooth app on my computer to fix our hair of an evening. Once she left me this:

I died laughing and then couldn't delete it. I'm going to miss that girl.

There are also so, so many other amazing people at my old office who I'm really going to miss. They saw me off so sweetly.

^^My dear sweet boss brought me an entire box of Godiva truffles. Can you guess she's my favorite? 

That woman has been such an example to me of good leadership. She works harder than anybody, always takes the blame when things go wrong, and does everything she can to make our lives better. I want to be a manager like she is.

My other co-workers signed a card, hilariously addressed by one of the guys at the company:

^^The card cracked me up. Well done, co-workers!

^^They all signed the sweetest notes.

^^In addition to the truffles, they brought me a giant red velvet cupcake. I'm still polishing that thing off!

You can see the giant Chicago Manual of Style in this picture—we called that thing "our Bible" for how often we had to consult it.

Of course, there are some things I will not miss about my old job. If I never have to make an index or edit footnotes or do quality control again, I will be happy.

But the good so far outweighed the bad. What a great office, and what a great job. I sure will miss it.