Definitely NOT Fred Armisen
When you answer phones for a living, you begin to base your work day on silences. If there are none, which is often the case, it is a rough day. If there are too many, it could also be a bad shift, as there are only so many sites on the Internet. And last Tuesday, I was worried about my work load.
My company had set aside the hours of 10:00 a.m. and noon for all employees to watch newly elected President Obama’s inauguration speech. The large, flat-screen television in our lobby was tuned to CNN and our largest conference room had the channel projected onto the far wall. My company, an architecture firm, is a pretty laid back environment on a typical day. For those two hours on Tuesday, there wasn’t a single person at their desk and thus, no one to transfer my flood of calls to. And the phones kept ringing.
By 9:30, people had begun taking their seats on the couches in front of the lobby’s flat-screen. By 9:45 they were rolling their chairs from their desks, filling every available space within view of the screen. I could hear them between the constant rings of the phone.
One of my coworkers was already crying as he positioned his chair between the stairs and a credenza.
“My mother passed in December, and I just wish she could’ve seen this,” he said, “This would have meant the world to her.”
I began to realize this was less an inauguration and more an event.
As the proceedings began, and the swearings-in had started, I struggled to listen to the television, which was out of my view. The phone was typically busy, with calls coming in every 15 seconds or so. But in the rare silences, I heard words like “momentous”, “emotional” and “life-changing”. I saw women clutching Kleenex and men looking stoic, poker-faced. For the first time in my life, I wanted to hear a new president speak to his nation.
I felt for the first time that this man deserved to be listened to, that a man who had this type of power with words deserved a moment of silence. But the phones just kept ringing. One caller even said to me that he and his problems were “more important than anything that man has to say.” I abruptly “lost” the call.
But just as the newly sworn-in president began his speech, the phones went eerily silent. Not one call came in during the entire address. I heard the whole thing, accented by the sniffles and applause of my coworkers.
Immediately after the speech, my phone lit up with four incoming calls and it was business as usual. But during that speech, President Obama got the respect that he deserved. He got his moment of silence. In fact, he got 19.
