It was my own damn fault. I moved out to Salem so I could avoid paying over 2 grand a month for the privilege of living in a closet. New Englanders love to complain and, being a "regional immigrant", naturally I wanted to blend in. It was becoming a favourite topic of conversation at my husband's family get togethers. "It takes me an hour and a half one way and yesterday there was a fender bender so Route 1 was shut down on both sides..." I started to get sick of always bitching about the same old thing. Also, I would finally reach my desk after another epic journey only to hear my former boss tearing me a new one via voicemail about some task that I hadn't been able to get to after completing the 60 other things he had asked for.
Things finally came to a head on a Wednesday morning when I had gotten up, tried to get a very sleepy and cranky toddler into the car by 7:30, sat in inexplicable traffic for 50 minutes, gotten to my mother in law's, and dropped off Chloe in the midst of a tantrum. As my mother in law said for what felt like the 300th time: "Oh it's too bad you have to work in Boston, I don't know how you deal with the rat race!" I realized that she was right. I knew that I still had a drive to a garage and then the trip on the Orange Line to go before I showed up to a desk that was one giant inbox and an office full of disgruntled, bitter co-workers. When I finally got to my desk about an hour later, I hit Craig's List and started looking.
I kept looking until I saw a job as an Office Manager in Salem. I went to the interview hoping that they would see that I made up with charm what I lacked in actual office and manager experience. My career has been such a non-linear, chaotic crapshoot that I totally ignore trying to show any kind of trajectory and just hope that I can keep the interviewer amused with film set stories.
Unbelievably, my approached worked and seeing that email with a job offer was a great moment. I had decided to check my online account one more time before I rushed out the door and as I read the words "we are pleased to offer you..." while listening to my boss scream at both a vendor and his Outlook inbox at the same time, I could feel perma-grin coming on.
It's been 3 and a half months now and my commute is a 20 minute stroll from my front door. As an added bonus, the Office Manager title was a little bit of a misnomer since they were actually looking for a graphics and web person! I could descend into a bunch of cliches right here but if you have read this far, you deserve better than that. In a nutshell, long commutes suck. They suck for the environment, since it forces millions of people to sit in idling cars for hundreds of hours. They suck for the people in the cars because humans are (for the most part) a fairly mobile and dynamic species and don't like just sitting there unless there's possible nudity or some variety of athletic activity involved. They suck for companies because there are thousands of hours wasted each year over phone calls like "We're on our way for the meeting, but a student tried driving a box truck under Storrow Drive again and it's shut down." So my advice is, don't put up with it because everyone else does. Find something closer to home. Figure out a way to work from home. If those aren't options, take public transportation. The only reason it sucks now is because anyone with sufficient self-esteem to still complain to the MBTA, has either already given up and gone back to their car, or they have opted for the first two solutions.
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