Where were you?

This job is making me feel something I have not felt in a while. I feel really young. Young as in the oposite been around for a while, not necessarily as the opposite of old. Work makes me feel this way. I think it never really hit me before that the people I work with are sometimes much older than I am. I think of them as my peers, even if they happen to be close to retirement age. Even when I hear about one of my unit-mate's getting an honor for being here for 30+ years, it doesn't really sink in.

Working on this project makes it sink in a bit better though. I have to sort through one of the spill sites to organize the file. The file was started in 1968, when the agency opened. It's still going. Even this doesn't really sink in. I don't so much think "this file has been going since more than a decade before I was born" as, "there is way too much of this file, and it's going to take forever to organize...Why didn't someone do this earlier".

What hits me is that today I came across some spills for the site that happened on my birthday when I was 7. Some of my coworkers now were the ones who responded to the spill. That got me to thinking, what was I doing on that day? I was celebrating being 7. I probably had a birthday party of some sort. I would have been in second grade. That's the year I got glasses. I had my neighbor for a teacher. And we had these horrible, horrible math assignments EVERY NIGHT! I probably did my math homework, and read a book. Probably some of my aunts and uncles came for dinner. I maybe played with my friends, Katie or Jenni or Beth or Melissa or Jenny.

Wow. See, now that makes me put things in perspective. Some of the same people I greet everyday, were responding to spills when I was playing 'my little pony' or some such with friends. And the best part is, even though they probably realize this, I'm treated as an adult--my opinions matter. Maybe 20 or 30 years from now, someone else will realize all this about me.