Tracey

At work there is a woman. Let us call her Tracey, because that is her name. No thinly-veiled references here. Just outright ones. I doubt Tracey will ever come across my blog.

Tracey is one of the oldies, but goldies. By oldie I mean she has been at the company for 25 years, as opposed to myself, who has only been there for one year and 3 months. Also, she is a grandmother, although that does not make her old. In fact, she is quite spritely and has an active mind. Also, the people she tends to hang out with are in their twenties, indicating that she likes to hang around with younger folk. By goldie, I mean that she sticks out as a person. Her personality wears a gold cloak, and one can forget about her, but one is not inclined to, because she inserts herself into an alcove in one’s mind, even though there is nothing distinct about her. How can that be?

Tracey is a woman of many words, but she is picky about who she shares them with. She sits diagonally opposite to me, but we have probably exchanged a maximum of 56 words. That is a rough estimate, to give you an example of how often we speak to each other. We became ‘pod mates’ on the 16th of October, you see, and I am a very quiet person at work, which is not like me at all, because at home and with my friends I am a chatterbox and sometimes a little deranged. Rather like a pigeon who has stumbled upon a state of being ruffled and confused.

Anyway. Tracey picks up the phone a lot at work, and has terribly long conversations with colleagues who either work in a different city at another branch, or on a different floor, or just even way across the office on the same floor. She even has long chats with colleagues at our branches in America. But those only start at 3pm, which is around 10am on the West Coast. We have a pretty big office. And because she has been here for 25 years, she is very well acquainted with a lot of people.

I like when Tracey picks up the phone. We generally do not pick up the phone. I only use my work desk phone to call companies abroad, or to ask IT to sort something out for me. Tracey uses it to catch up with people, while simultaneously carrying out work.

For this reason, I have learnt a lot about Tracey. She is now living alone with her husband, as her kids have all left. They drive a range rover. She lives across the field from work, so she walks in when it is not raining. Her son is getting a divorce. So they have to split their Christmas between her daughter who lives in Canada, and her son who lives with his only child two hours away.

When her husband calls, she picks up the phone, and says ‘Hey sweetie,’ without pronouncing the ‘t’, so it sounds like ‘sweedie’, which makes her sound like she is saying it with an American accent. The rest of her accent is distinctly northern.

Her husband calls between 5:00 and 5:30PM daily. He picks her up from work and they go out for meals, or dancing, or to the big city for some drinking. Sometimes they just go home and have a glass of wine together. Sometimes she ditches him to go to the gym with one of her buddies. I like when he calls, she seems very comfortable chatting with him in public and does not run off to a corner to chat with him, like I do when my husband calls. She doesn’t mind if we hear their conversation. She talks to him like she talks to her friends.

I silently tap away at my computer, while her conversations and her life sail around my head. I drop a lot of eaves, I have to say, but how can one help it?

Anyway. That is Tracey.

A very average woman, no? And yet, she has her very own post.

Grazyna Adamska-Jarecka