“I never set out to have a nail file company,” says Colleen, the entrepreneur and visionary behind Top Notch Nail Files. “It was totally women’s intuition.” After spying glass nail files for sale, Colleen figured that crystal, being stronger than glass, would make the files even more durable. She promptly went home, came up with a design, located a crystal manufacturer, and spent her rent money on a stash of them.
Odd Jobs After 13 years as an academic librarian, Jeri is an expert at finding the answer to just about any question. Need a comprehensive comparison of similar products on the market? She’s your girl. Spending a week in Florence for work, and want to maximize your small amount of time for sight-seeing? Jeri will create and produce a custom guide for you, down to the tiniest details.
A native of Charlotte, Tracy loves his city. And luckily for his city, as the president and principal consultant at Russ Communications, he gets to choose the projects his company takes on, most often working with corporations, non-profit organizations and community initiatives that want to make themselves—and their community—better. “The work is who I am,” he says.
My work: I write and produce mostly short-form videos and do some studio directing.
I am most proud of: I learned to run a studio camera when I was 14. More than 30 years later, television lets me work in a way that I'm able to inform, educate, and entertain audiences of all ages.
I am guilty of: procrastination.
The one item that has changed my life: television. I was awed by a TV studio when I was two, the scoop lights, huge cameras, the magic they illuminated and communicated.
The palm reader giggled as he ran a finger over my hand. “You’ll be poor and you’ll be rich, but you’ll always be bad with money. Fortunately, you’ll also always have someone to take care of you.” I rolled my eyes. I just wasn’t that kind of girl.
We were waitresses, all of us, with different stash spots for tips. Mine was a tattered old envelope in my underwear drawer. I kept the amount written on the front, scratched out and rewritten over and over, to keep myself in the know and to protect from unlikely thievery.
I got my first clue things were shifting when they changed the name of the Personnel Department to Human Resources. That title brought to mind bodies wearing pressed suits and hanging from huge hooks, cycling around on a motorized rack like the one in the dry cleaners. A neat filing system, it displayed unlimited selections to replace the used-up models that had been piled into the roll-off dumpster in the alley. My second clue arrived the morning after the merger papers were signed.
Her words stop me cold, freeze my deep and purposeful breathing.
“What,” I think, “did that crazy hippie lady just say?”
I try to resume the assigned task, mindfully inhaling the chilled air of the fitness center and balancing my sharp sitz bones on a borrowed blue cushion. I will my swirling mind to settle softly like a leaf to the ground. But Mary Love continues to hijack my piss-poor attempts at being in the now.
By Skirt.com, Tuesday, December 01, 2009, 13 comments
moved from one end of the office building to the other, everyone jockeyed to get a desk near the windows. Not me. I chose the desk no one wanted way back in the corner. I preferred privacy to a view.
Not that I got much privacy. My micro-managing supervisor invaded my personal space daily. He peered over my shoulder watching my keystrokes, wanted to know my every move, called me into his office constantly to question my actions. Once I got dragged back to his lair from in front of the elevator at 5pm on a Friday.
“Come to my office,” he ordered. “I want to discuss next week’s objectives.” Talk about feeling like a caged wild animal. I daydreamed of escape.
Unfortunately, the career ladder I counted on climbing kept losing rungs. Government cuts reduced the number of available statistics positions and I faced a shrinking pool of jobs in a bumpy economy. I wasn’t married. No opportunities existed for me to quit and fall back on a mate’s salary until the job market picked up. Yet, I feared for my mental health if I didn’t get out of this soul-stifling environment.
moved from one end of the office building to the other, everyone jockeyed to get a desk near the windows. Not me. I chose the desk no one wanted way back in the corner. I preferred privacy to a view.
