I’m not about to tell you anything you haven’t heard before. Clearly, we love our jobs. Let’s get real, we have a slide and food trucks grace our presence on the regular. Who doesn’t love that? As a Racker, we all have an emotional connection to this place…bordering on creepy, but like any relationship, it isn’t always rainbows and daisies. It’s work.
Like every girl in her honeymoon stage, when Rackspace and I first started this journey, I laid in bed every night picking out my perfect outfit for the next day, hoping to impress it just one more time. I did the obligatory desk straightening daily so it didn’t think I was a slob, and may have even doodled our names together on my notebook during a meeting or two. Katie Hosting. I can get behind that.
Wooing aside, I am now in what I like to call the Sweat Pants Stage. Hair up, glasses on, we enjoy each other’s company in a subdued silence, able to take in the subtle nuances of one another, rather than getting caught up in the mystique of the slide, escalators and glittering lights of helicopters flying overhead. It’s seen me without my metaphorical make-up.
Since it had become a comfortable mate, I thought I knew what I needed to about this place, but after several late nights finishing up campaigns, I realized that there is a depth to its soul that I had missed before.
I work in an education-centric environment. Focused on understanding and digging deeper, rather than executing on half-baked ideas, I have seen mediocrity not only avoided, but shunned like the vegetable tray at a kegger.
It’s easy to wish for an easy job full of mindless tasks, finding comfort in the monotony is a condition that every relationship must work though. Eating at the burger joint down the street for the third time that week, rather than venturing to the French bistro that just opened is the easy and safe way to live.
Just “living” isn’t enough for my co-workers and their zeal makes me unable to fall into the trap of cutting corners. I am pushed daily to be better than I was the day before, until I am either banging my head on my desk because of a creative mental block, or high-fiving across the cubicle because our campaign is more than just words on a page. It is something we believe in. It is something we can be proud of.
Like any relationship worth its salt, we make one another better. We are achievers; we are strivers; we are willing to fail, but we are not willing to give up.
