Someone here reached out about this old post showing up as [removed], so I’m reposting it.
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This happened a couple years ago, at my previous job, when I was just short of 40. This was a big ad agency, and since we ran a lot of global business, we didn’t just have creative types there but also lots of more admin type staff. I was not in a management position at this time, but was more of a “make things happen” type guy, the kind that took up a lot of space in discussions about work.
There were two fairly distinct groups at the agency, those who made, and those who forwarded emails. Among those who forwarded emails there was a particularly annoying girl, Emily. She’d been hired straight out of business school, and looked after accounting with one of our bigger clients. As I think back, “uptight” is the best word I can think of to describe her. A daddy’s girl through and through, he’d coached her through elite level gymnastics her entire life, and had bought and renovated her and her boyfriend’s last three apartments (since uni), so that she now lived the perfect middle class life at 27. Thick blonde hair in a tight, strict bob, often tied in a ponytail, and oh-so-boring clothes, maybe a blouse and a pair of jeans, at most a funny color on an accessory like a pair of earrings. We made fun of her, called her “applecheeks”, because of her aggressively healthy, always-happy-but-not-too-much, look. And yeah, she had high and full cheekbones, always rosy.