I was on the forums today and came across a post asking if people had ever met their soulmate. Here's a story I posted 'on the other side' a year or so ago about the moment when I met my soulmate.
I was still pretty new at L & B and hadn't been there more than a couple of weeks. I was busy learning the ropes and there was a report that I would be required to prepare each week listing the marketing projections for the upcoming weeks and whether we had reached our target the previous weeks.
This was back in the day when the office PC was a rareity and most of the secretaries used those old dinosaur word processors. I was lucky and had a brand spanking new IBM PC sitting in my office... dual floppy drives and a whopping 128K of ram or something near to that.
As my new boss, Chuck was out of town and I had even yet to actually meet the guy, Frank, our Product Manager, was showing me what I had to do to get this report done. It involved a monstrosity of a lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, a few well placed macros with some x-commands, and compiling a report that was way too big for the system to handle. The report couldn't be saved, so it was printed as it was being compiled. It took that little machine almost three hours to get it done, but it actually worked, much to my amazement.
We had gotten a little bit of a late start, so unfortunately, and it certainly wouldn't be the last time, I was asked to stay past the normal 4:30 quitting time. The huge old building was always like a ghost town down on the executive end of the building where my office was. Most of them were travelling constantly, and if anything, the other secretaries left early rather than late.
I was sitting there babysitting this report as it came off the printer when mother nature called. Frank had warned me not to leave the report unattended because if the printer jammed up it just took a whole lot of time to redo everything and they wanted it for a meeting early the next morning. I quickly ran off to the bathroom, really trying to hurry so that I could get back to my office and keep an eye on that printer.
I flung the bathroom door open, hitting something pretty hard in the process. With a huge clatter and some choice expletives coming from within, I discovered this electrician, who had been on these stilt like things in front of the door apparently changing a light fixture, layed over on top of one of the bathroom stalls groaning in pain.
I felt absolutely terrible! I apologized profusely and helped him out of his predicament, while introducing myself to this guy. He explained that he really didn't think that anyone (female) was left in our part of the building and that everyone had gone home so he never bothered to 'flag' the door.
From time to time I would run into Don when there was work to be done on our part of the building. At that time I had no clue just how much a part of my life this person would become.
A few years later, when I switched jobs and went to work in M.E., the maintenance staff, including the electricians, were a division of our department. Don and I became the very best of --- whitewater canoeing buddies, fly-fishing friends, musical afficianados, woodland partners in crime, listeners to each others woes, personal confidantes, "help me my faucet fell apart and water is spewing all over my kitchen" friends, a great excuse to ditch a date gone bad, my mentor and the one who helped me through my tears during an ugly divorce.
We were inseperable and remained so until he passed away in December 1997 at the young age of 45. Those years of true friendship and comraderie, were ones that I will always cherish. Yeah, he was most definitely my soulmate.
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