If you would have asked me a year ago where I thought I would be on my birthday I probably could have literally guessed a thousand times without getting the correct answer.

If you would have asked me a year ago what I thought I’d be doing on my birthday, I probably could have guessed ten thousand times without getting the correct answer.

And yet, here I am.

My birthday is just a little over a week past, and that means I’m on day eight of my new job at the Creation Museum. I’ve been in complete awe every single day at how much I’m enjoying it. You see, I seriously thought I wouldn’t like the job for at least a month. I gave myself a full six weeks to settle in, learn the tasks, and acclimate to the changes before I would even allow myself to entertain the idea that I’d made a bad decision when I changed departments.

Confusing, right? The thing is, I really liked being in the bookstore at the Museum. My days were filled with happiness, and I found extreme delight in the every-day tasks, my co-workers, and selling resources and stuffed animals to people. But, my bookstore job was a seasonal one, which meant I only had work there about nine months of the year.

The manager of the bookstore (who’s one of the big reasons I liked the bookstore so much) and I were talking one day and he brought up the idea of me getting a fulltime position somewhere at the Museum. (Full-time positions aren’t currently available in the bookstore.) The manager is a very fatherly sort of man who’s advice and counsel I trust a lot, so after questioning him about why he said that (everything he brought up made a lot of sense), I started on my quest to find a full-time position.

The evening before I’d been talking to my mom on the phone I’d been telling her about SET – which stands for Service Excellence Team, commonly referred to the Red Shirts. They’re a very small department (at that time there were only five), and they’re trained to do pretty much everything. During my time at the bookstore, they’d been amazing with stopping by my station in Fair Trade to give me breaks when I needed them (because I worked by myself out there). Due to those breaks and short conversations as they passed by on slower days, I’d gotten to know most of the SET Members fairly well and always came to the conclusion that I could never do what they did because it would be far too overwhelming.

Well, when I was telling my mom about SET she randomly told me she thought I should one day apply to work with that team.

I laughed.

And then I informed her that was not going to happen.

My conversation with Mom was Sunday evening, my conversation with my manager was Tuesday afternoon, and since I can’t stand to sit around and just ponder something versus taking action, by Tuesday evening I was in an all-out quest to figure out what I needed to do to apply for a job on SET.

(Note I’d been praying about what I should do regarding my job for several months now since I wanted to stay at the Creation Museum indefinitely.)

That first night I didn’t get far in my questioning about SET except to find out that they did indeed have a couple of open positions, including a full-time one.

Later on that week I asked one of the SET Members what or where or how I should go about getting an interview (is that what I needed?), or who I should talk to, or??? (Pretty much I was freaking out and totally out of my comfort zone and completely unaware of the next steps I needed to take.) He off-handedly informed me that I’d have to talk to the Director of the Museum. (Gulp.) Then as the SET Member hurried off to continue working, he was like “I’ll just ask the director to come out to talk to you next time I see him.” (Double Gulp)

Sure enough a few minutes later I saw the director heading toward me. Mr. Director is a great guy – I’d had many short interactions with him and was always impressed by how he took time to talk to his employees and help guests. In fact, I’d seriously been planning on writing him a Thank-You letter earlier that week, thanking him for the time he took to keep things running so well. But, as I saw him striding toward me, I suddenly felt intimidated and wondered for probably the 745th time in the last 12 hours what I was doing.

I greeted him and informed him very ineloquently that I was interested in joining SET. He nodded and asked me what I thought it was that SET did. I yammered for a moment about how they helped everyone and did everything and were pretty much my heroes at the Museum because they gave me breaks. He nodded, said we’d talk about it more, and then hurried off.

And folks, this post is taking me far longer than I’d planned. In fact, this is Day Two of me writing it, and I’m about to head off to work. So, rather than continuing my saga in this post, I’m going to publish this as Part One, and hopefully, start writing Part Two tomorrow. 😉

Have a great day!