Here comes a spider...

The office was absolutely amazing. A stream of sunshine was coming through the two large windows and brightly lit a dark wooden desk in the middle of the room. Rows of book cases of the same dark wood made the room look like an old-fashioned library. I glanced at the books’ titles: “A Jet to Success,” “Better Business Boom,” “A Day in the Life of a CEO,” “I, Me, and My Company.” They were pretty modern, just like the office equipment placed all over this library-looking room. A fax machine, a scanner, a printer, and a copier stood in a row by the desk; a laptop and a phone were on the desk, and a huge flat-screen TV was mounted to the wall. On the desk, I also saw a peculiar rectangular golden piece with a slot on the top. It was a holder for my business cards! I saw a few of them in other cubicles. Linda wished me a wonderful first day of work and left.

I sat on a big leather armchair behind the desk, then leaned back on a cool head cushion and closed my eyes. That felt so relaxing that I almost drifted off to sleep.

 “Come on, Liza! No time to rest!!” I patted myself on both cheeks and immediately woke up.  I could barely believe that this day was really happening in my life! I felt like a princess in a modern-day fairy tale: only instead of a beautiful castle, I had a beautiful company. I pulled out a massive desk drawer on the right. Wow! A real treasure – multicolored pens, pencils, markers, glistening staples and pushpins, post-it notes, stamps, rolls of scotch tape, labels, a glue stick, a pencil-sharpener – everything was neatly organized in separate small containers inside the drawer. This was something I always wanted to have in my own desk at home in order not to upset Mom with broken pencils and rumpled pieces of paper scattered all over the house.

In another drawer on the left I found a neat stack of envelopes with the company’s official logo: a smiley face with “Association of Fun Manufacturers” spelled out in a circle.

The third drawer contained a stack of folders overflowing with documents left behind by Mr. Glater, my predecessor. Pooh. There was so much I had to go over. I knew I would have to become as knowledgeable as Mr. Glater had been and even better. I knew I would be able too, of course, well, maybe. I felt that something like a cold spider with its sharp legs crawled onto my back. It was fear. Yes, I was scared to death. “What if I fail?”