History will be kind to me—for I intend to write it

1 Has a chance encounter ever changed the course of your life? What was it? 

    while wandering the administration building on campus during law school, I ran into someone I'd known at the library when I'd been working a temporary job. She asked if I was planning to apply for the job that was open in the department I'd liked the best—technical services—when the manager left. I hadn't known it was open, and said I'd think about it. I applied the next day, got an interview later in the week, and was hired during the interview. I stayed in that role, through its expansion, for the next decade and a half. 

    I don't know if I ever had a chance to thank her for that question, or to let her know that it really did change my life. 

 

2 If a year of your life could be traded for $25,000, how many years would you trade in?  

    a past year, or a generic future year? I would trade 2004, 2007, 2015, and 2022 for a nickel, in a heartbeat.  

 

3 Do you believe that no one is indispensable in the workplace? 

    that is correct. What happens if you get hit by a bus? You get replaced. What happens if you get fired, downsized, move to a new town, win the lottery? You get replaced. It is possible to be valued, but 'indispensable' implies that the [work] world ends when you leave. Unless you're the only employee, that's not gonna happen.

 

4 Do you ever drink iced coffee or tea in the winter? 

    I drink iced tea at least every Saturday morning, throughout the year. And if I'm getting coffee it's going to be a "coffee drink" and thus served cold.

 

5 What smells do you find relaxing? 

    in small quantity, I like lemon, mint, or vanilla. Too much of even a good thing is a bad thing, though—pretty often, my migraine headaches arise from nothing so much as they do from a strong scent.

 

6 Have you toasted marshmallows on an open fire?

    I'm not an "open fire" sort of person, but I do have a couple of marshmallow tidbits:

    • my boss at the educational company made s'mores for a group of us while on a weekend at a cabin ... only he'd never made s'mores before, and was very much A City Kid. He understood them in principle but not in practice. He went outside with the proper ingredients, but came inside with what can only be described as grilled s'mores. As in, he'd assembled them like grilled cheese sandwiches, and then placed them on the grill. The graham crackers had grill marks (delicately turned mid-way so they were "done" on both sides). I laughed through tears at his adorableness, and am doing the same as I write this.

    • my mom is a big marshmallow fan, which is pretty weird because she's not one for sweet things generally. As the youngest child in my family, I enjoyed a "different family" than my siblings had, with a sort of focused attention that was both gratifying and highly annoying at times. One of those gratifying moments came when I walked into our kitchen to see my mom roasting a marshmallow on the (electric) stove. She'd speared it with a regular dinner fork and was gently rotating it above the burner. A quick, slightly guilty glance was followed by a big laugh and the two of us, forks in hand, giggling over our toasted marshmallow treat. That experience was never repeated but remains a funny, happy memory.

 

7 In what general knowledge quiz category is your knowledge generally not that great? 

    history 

 

[from 3000 Unique Questions about Me; the title quotation is Winston S. Churchill]