Ringing the changes for Marcia

Today marks a major turning point in my friend Marcia’s life: she’s decided to pack in her job as personal administrative assistant to an IT exec for a major US automaker’s UK division. The corporation is making all kinds of cutbacks & when they offered her a severance package, she weighed up the options & decided that not working for them would be better for her in the long run than continuing down the path she could see before her.

Well, hell—I’m about 8000 miles away & I can see that that particular path doesn’t lead anywhere you want to be, & I’m not talking about the expected office relocation to Luton.

Marcia’s been with the company for just gone ten years, sorting out calendars, travel, frozen BlackBerries & I don’t know what all. I’ve got to hear about some of it, & all I’m going to say is that I’m surprised the company is still actually selling cars at all.

I’m kind of sad about it, because when she turns off her company laptop for the last time, I lose about 50% of my regular readership. (I'm the comic relief in her workday.) But you would not believe the load of crap (a word she would not stoop to use, but I’m an American & you expect that sort of thing from us) she’s been managing, & I’m so relieved & happy that she’s had the courage to recognize when she’s looking at “that’s enough” in her rear view mirror, & to walk away. This past year in particular has just been beyond the beyond—every time you thought you’d reached the absolute pinnacle of corporate idiocy, you realized you were only at the base camp & had another 4000-foot climb to go.

I’ve known Marcia since my days at Newbridge Networks in the UK. She was PA to the European GM (then the CEO), & I was on the same floor. Not sure how it is that we connected, but we did, for which I’m truly thankful. When the bottom fell out of my world in September 2001, she was one of the friends who helped prop it up. & then again in 2003, 2009, 2011 &…well, you get the drift.

Marcia’s my friend who’s a bell ringer. I’ve had the spectacular pleasure of climbing into bell towers (some centuries old) to watch her band ring a couple of times. Through her, I even got to go into the tower of the Washington National Cathedral, because it turns out there’s this global confraternity of ringers, & we went up one Sunday afternoon for a practice. Beat that with a stick, why don’t you?

Here’s Marcia at Mount Vernon, from that same trip she took over here:

Ringing is so complex, so involved—watching it done on both church bells & hand bells, I kind of understand how Marcia’s had the ability to manage all that corporate nonsense for all these years—you concentrate on what’s needed & ignore the external noise. Peals can go on for hours & you have to be on top of where you are & where you need to be for all that time.

Marcia came back over a few years later & I had one of the best Thanksgiving celebrations in my life in her honor. I brought out the good china (which hasn’t actually been used in the seven years since), did the turkey with stuffing (my great-grandmother’s recipe), mashed potatoes, pumpkin & pecan pies, the whole nine yards. I even toyed with the idea of that green bean casserole (you know the one I mean), but since it wasn’t part of my childhood holidays, I bagged it right away. (Another friend from the Newbridge time told me that if I really wanted to provide the ultimate middle-class American Thanksgiving experience, I should have Cool Whip with the pies, but I went with whipped cream. &, for the record, I don’t like either pumpkin or pecan pie; but it was fun to watch Marcia try them.) Marcia & two other friends were there & it was absolutely stellar.

Even though the kitchen sink backed up. But that happens to be a holiday tradition for me, so that’s okay.

Well, anyhow, Marcia’s going to spend time with her grandchildren, maybe work on the cross stitch project I’ve been hearing about for around eight-nine years, hack at the hedge in the back garden & possibly get in some more ringing. She won’t be fighting with archaic IT systems, German admins with BSE, execs thinking she can suspend the laws of physics with respect to time/space or the rest of that crap.

I don’t have any recordings of Marcia’s band, but I’ll send her on with this:

&, my sistah—I think you’ve earned a glass of rioja.