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MARSIE WAS CLEANING off her desktop before leaving work for the weekend when her email dinged. She straightened the stack of papers that she would need on Monday and filed some of the other pieces that she was done with. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught that the email was from the granting organization. She started to lean closer to her computer, then leveled herself back with the papers she needed to pick up.
One of the organizational and time-management rules she held to was not letting her email interrupt her other work. There was time for email and there was time for cleaning and there was time for running reports. Trying to do all of them at once was a recipe for inefficiency.
And Marsie hated inefficiencies. Perhaps it was an economist thing. Perhaps it was a neatness thing. The why didn’t bother her. It meant she could get more work done in a couple days than most people did in a week.
Being a female in a male-dominated job, she had to be able to do twice the work if she wanted to get half the credit.
Plus, in this case, the desk was a bigger priority than the email, even if it was grant news. She had a date tonight and wanted to go home to change for it. No matter what the grant needed, it was five o’clock on Friday. Any email she sent would likely sit—unresponded to and probably unread—until Monday morning.
Once the surface of her desk was cleaned off, she spun her chair back around to her computer and clicked on the email.
Dear Marsie Penny, the beginning of the email read. She skimmed the rest and hit the close button before she realized what the email said. Please return the attached documents by May 15 to be considered for the next step in the grant process.
Before she read the rest of the message, she glanced out the window to clear her head. Parked almost directly under her window was Jason’s beat-up truck, long pieces of wood sticking out the back, an orange flag tied to the end of them. She was about to look back at her email when he came out the service door. She leaned against the back of her chair, watching him heft some of the boards onto his shoulder. She was too far up to make out much detail, but she knew what he looked like well enough to imagine his muscles moving and the tendons in his neck straining.
She watched him until he and his boards disappeared back through the service door.
“Well, I wanted to think about something else,” she said to herself as she turned back to her computer. Thinking about Jason could clear her mind from work—in the best possible way. When she started reading the first line of the email again, she was ready to read every word.
When she got to the end, she still wasn’t sure she believed it.
Her grant application was being moved to the next step in the process—fully funded.
She said those words to herself again. Fully funded.
The next step wasn’t a guarantee. The granting organization could still turn her down. She could mess up some of the details in the hundreds of pages of information and detail she would need to turn into them. They could decide to change their funding priorities. The world could end. Stuff could happen.
But usually getting to this stage in the application was as close to a yes as possible without the organization using a Y, an E and an S.
She glanced out the window again. Jason’s truck was still there, though she couldn’t see him out working any longer.
Fully funded. The third time she said the words to herself, her heart started to flutter. And the muscles in her legs started to twitch. They wanted her to get up, jump around and cheer.
And she would, if she could find someone to cheer with.
Roberto was on vacation. The grant news wasn’t supposed to be announced for another couple weeks. This was good news, but she wasn’t going to interrupt his cruise for this, even if she did know how to get in touch with him. She reached for her phone to call Beck, then pulled her hand back. Beck would be happy for her. There was no doubt about that. But Beck was also struggling with, well, everything right now and sometimes her friend needed time to get her mind straight before they talked.
All Beck’s positive energy was being spent to keep her moving forward at work, which was good, because it kept her friend getting out of bed every day, but it also meant she didn’t often have anything left. Marsie sent Beck a quick text about the news. She’d let her friend decide what she had the emotional energy for.
