And as awful as that phone call and that whole weekend was, after my first day at NorthStar, I can confidently say that it was totally, completely worth it.
I had an incredible afternoon. First of all, right when I got there, Mr. Willette showed me the desk where I’ll be working, which is in a corner of the reception area outside his and Ms. Rinaldi’s offices, and which is dark mahogany wood grain with a padded, light blue office chair, a desktop computer, and a combination scanner/printer/fax machine I’ll use to assist with NorthStar Enterprises’ corporate communications. There’s a locked drawer in the desk for me to keep my personal belongings in when I’m not in the office, and Mr. Willette gave me the tiny key to it to take with me on my key ring.
Then he took me on a tour of the entire space. It’s a pretty quiet, serious workplace, not loud and friendly like my dad’s office at Independent Fiduciary Research and Management, where all of the offices are arranged around one big open area, and some of the investment managers have TVs on in their offices to keep track of the markets, and the secretaries all listen to different light FM stations on radios under their desks and yell to each other across the room whenever they see something funny on the Internet.
The NorthStar office is way smaller, first of all—only about twenty-five people work there total—and it feels more like an underground den, with long, dim, carpeted corridors leading to more long, dim, carpeted corridors and offices and restrooms and supply closets coming off them, and a break room and a conference room with frosted-glass walls. I didn’t get to see inside the conference room because they were having a meeting when we passed it, but Mr. Willette showed me all around the break room. I can put any personal perishables I bring with me in a designated area of the fridge, and they have unlimited coffee, tea, and snacks for the employees, which I’m more than welcome to help myself to anytime I’d like. I didn’t really get time to see what kinds of snacks there were in the little basket on the counter, but I’ll go back on Thursday and check it out—if I can find my way back there! All the corridors at NorthStar look almost exactly the same, and I would have been so lost getting back to my desk from the break room if Mr. Willette hadn’t personally led me there himself.
The whole office is decorated with this series of beautiful framed posters with photographs of tranquil nature scenes above poetic messages about doing your best work and making the most of your opportunities. The one right above my desk has a picture of three flying geese silhouetted against this huge, violet-colored moon rising over a lake, and underneath the picture it says YOU CAN SOAR ONLY AS HIGH AS YOU BELIEVE THE SKY TO BE. I wrote this down on a Post-it note and stuck it on the inside cover of my homework journal for inspiration.
It was really just an introductory day for me to get to get my feet wet and start meeting people, Mr. Willette said. Ms. Rinaldi did train me on the large-scale photocopier—which is huger and more complicated than any copier I’ve ever seen, it’s like a tank or a robot hippopotamus or something—and she left me in charge of running off a series of reports in time for a late afternoon meeting, which stressed me out for a second, but which I managed to accomplish just fine. But other than that I didn’t do any real work.
Still. Even though I wasn’t completing any specific tasks, just being there I felt like I was doing something real. I don’t even know how to explain it, but everywhere you go in that office, even when you can’t see anyone working, you can feel that people are getting things done. People are making decisions. They’re making things happen. Mr. Willette reminded me today that it may look like a small operation over there, but I am now working at the regional corporate headquarters of the third-largest retail company in the world. The mission of the company is to bring affordable, high-quality products to people who might not otherwise be able to get them, all over the planet. Every day, 163 million people from all different faiths, nationalities, creeds, and colors walk through the doors of a NorthStar Enterprises store. The decisions people make in this one office, in this one town, in this one state, could go on to affect 163 million people. It’s so overwhelming, I can barely get my mind around it. It fills me with a crazy kind of pride.
Not that it’s the same, but it reminds me a little bit of the time when I proposed the format change at the student council meetings. Before the change, there wasn’t any kind of order for how the meetings ran, people just raised their hands and brought up whatever topics occurred to them—complaints or proposals or comments or whatever. It was fine, but it felt like we could never tackle anything big, because as soon as we’d start to really dig into a problem, someone would raise their hand and take us off on some random tangent and we’d never get back to the issue we started with. I proposed a new system where we began every meeting with a typed-up agenda of action items, so that we could go down the list in order and really make sure every item got addressed before we moved on to the next one. It seems like such a simple thing, but that small change made such a huge difference in the way student council meetings ran. The energy got totally efficient, and even though we were getting way more things done, our meetings actually went down from two hours to an hour and a half, on average. And every minute we were in that room together, it felt like something was actually happening. It feels like that in the NorthStar offices, but, like, 163 million times more.