Origin Story: A Tale Of Two Emails (And Also Some Other Emails)

It’s Better to Give Than To Receptionist

Like every story, mine began with a call to adventure. Actually, it was many calls that had nothing to do with adventure, because I was the receptionist, at a small ad agency in Culver City.

Besides answering calls and cleaning things, part of my job was to write emails to everyone in the agency so they’d know stuff like when to clean old food out of the fridge or what was for lunch.

Even though those are kind of boring things to write about, I wanted people to read them. Partly because I wanted them to clean their old food out of the fridge and partly because I wanted them to eat lunch. But I also wanted to make people happy instead of bored. Work can be very boring sometimes, so it’s like, who needs more of that?

So I started to write emails I hoped would be whatever the opposite of boring might be. Like if boring had an evil twin. It was nice because people enjoyed them instead of leaving egg salad over the weekend or becoming nutrient deficient.

Eventually, some people at the agency asked me if I’d like to write about other things too. I started doing that and soon I was writing about other things more than I was writing things a receptionist would write.

Then one day, they asked me if I wanted to just write other things instead of being the receptionist, which made me really happy because I wasn’t a very good receptionist.

I’m really grateful for those emails. They helped me become a real writer for the first time. That was a very special moment for me.

I put some of them here if you’d like to read them.