It wasn't a company thing and honestly, nobody told her to. She'd just started doing it, because the front desk of a busy office is the first face everyone hits when their printer's jammed or their invoice is wrong or their whole day is already going sideways before nine, and she liked being the person who made that first thirty seconds a bit softer for someone.
She once talked me through one of her Tuesdays in so much detail I haven't stopped thinking about it, so I'm going to walk you through it too.
7:52am, she's at her desk before she's technically rostered on, because the phones start early and she can't stand the thought of someone getting the engaged tone. First call is a supplier chasing a payment that isn't even late, he's just wrong about the date, and he's short with her about it, properly short, in a kind of tone that makes your stomach drop a bit even when you know you haven't done anything wrong.
She stays warm anyway. Explains it clearly, twice, without a flicker of the sting she actually felt at being spoken to like that over an error that was never hers.
Hangs up. Breathes out. Picks up the next call like nothing happened.
9:30am, a colleague plants herself at the desk and vents for eleven minutes about something in another department that has nothing to do with either of them. She listens properly, asks a real follow-up question, does not once check the clock even though there's a stack of invoices behind her that isn't going anywhere.
This is the third time this month this particular colleague has chosen her desk to do this at. She's never said so. Not once. Wouldn't want to make it awkward, of course.
11:15am, an email lands from a client written in that special tone people use when they've decided rudeness is the same thing as being taken seriously. She reads it twice.
Feels it land somewhere private, somewhere that actually stings, and then replies within the hour, calm, professional, unbothered on the page, using the word happy to describe how willing she is to sort it out.
She was not happy. She typed 'happy' anyway.
1:00pm, lunch, if you can call eating a sandwich at your desk with one eye on the phone lunch, because someone's out sick and the calls don't know that.
2:40pm, the coffee run. She remembers that one person takes soy, one wants his extra hot because he complained once about lukewarm, and one never says thank you and she stopped expecting it a long time ago.
None of this is her job. Nobody assigned it to her. It just became hers, the way the lollies became hers, the way remembering everyone's moods and everyone's due dates and everyone's small preferences became hers, all on top of the actual job she's actually paid for.
3:50pm, a second hard call, except this one's someone genuinely upset, not rude, just overwhelmed, and she gives real patience because the job asks for it and because she's the kind of person who'd give it anyway, unpaid, off the clock, out of habit. This one costs her something different from the rude call earlier.
Rudeness she can shake off by five. Someone else's real distress, held carefully and handed back to them gently, does not shake off the same way. It sits. It hangs around and overstays its welcome, not too dissimilarly to her venting colleague from earlier.
5:02pm, she leaves on time for once, gets to the car, and just sits there for four minutes before she turns the key.
You could say she's not doing anything. Not even scrolling her phone. She's just... there, I guess.
6:15pm, home. Her partner asks how her day was. Fine, she says, busy, and she means it, because nothing that happened today was actually a crisis.
Not one thing on that list would sound like much written down on its own. A call, a vent, an email, a coffee order, another call.
That's not a bad day by any normal measure.
That's just Tuesday, she'd tell you, and shrug.
Except by 6:20pm, when her own kid wants to tell her something that matters completely, the way things matter completely when you're seven, she catches herself nodding along on the last fumes of a patience tank that filled up fresh at 7:52am that morning and has been draining, quietly, unnoticed, one call and one favour and one carefully managed tone at a time, ever since.
She hates that she notices it. She hates it more that she can't stop it.
Nobody at that office asked her to hold everyone's day together the way she does. Nobody's going to thank her for it either, because none of it looks like tangible effort from the outside.
It looks like she's just good at her job. Which she is. That's exactly what makes it so easy to miss.
Being good at holding things steady for other people doesn't make it cost less. Someone still pays for it. For my colleague, it's usually whoever is tenderly waiting for her at 6:20pm.
But that's just Tuesdays, right?
