First Meeting Essay Sample

I had heard about Shoe Debbie before I ever actually met her. At that time, I was working at a very large corporation, and our department had close to one hundred employees divided into four teams of roughly twenty-five people each. It was impossible to meet everyone at once, and so the general method was to meet the people on your team first, get to know them, and then gradually meet people on other teams. One of my colleagues frequently complained about Shoe Debbie, saying that Shoe Debbie was never satisfied with anybody’s work and was extremely difficult to work with. When I was then assigned to a project that required me to work with Shoe Debbie, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, hearing negative comments about her predisposed me to dislike her. On the other hand, my colleague’s work was at best adequate and at worst sloppy and full of mistakes, based on my own observations of her work, and so I kept an open mind. To my colleague, Shoe Debbie seemed obnoxious but actually she simply had no tolerance for incompetence.
Shoe Debbie was short, blonde, and overweight. She dressed in expensive clothes, with very coordinated outfits up to and including matching nail polish on fingernails and toenails. We called her Shoe Debbie because the department had three other Debbies, and this one had a huge collection of shoes. When we had our first official meeting, she was blunt and to the point. She handed me a hard copy of some text and told me to spend five minutes reading it. Once I had finished, she began grilling me, speaking so fast it was like listening to a machine gun shoot words. What did I think of the text? What did I think of the organization of the text? How would I change the wording for this specific sentence, or would I leave it as is? Was the tone appropriate? Would the audience understand what was being said?
Her own tone was one of frustration and annoyance. While she had waited for me to finish reading, she had drummed her fingers on her desk and every time she looked at the pages, she scowled. I answered her questions very briefly, waited for her to stop talking, and then gave her an overall assessment. The text itself consisted of convoluted sentences, incomplete thoughts, jargon used incorrectly, and typo after typo. When I concluded by saying that the text both “sucked and blew simultaneously,” I thought for a minute I had gone too far. Then she began cackling, laughing so hard she doubled over and had tears running down her face. When she caught her breath, she said, “I love it. You didn’t give me a nice, safe answer; you told me how screwed up it was and why.”
Over the next ten minutes we bonded over our mutual hatred of bad writing. She was no longer someone who made me nervous; she was someone who could laugh with me at bad grammar and rant about people too lazy to run spell check. As we talked, it became clear her perfectionist streak would come across to some people, as it had to my colleague, as being hard to work with. Yet she also gave praise and admitted her own shortcomings. The text she had given to me for review was not her own text, but she was in charge of rewriting it. When I rewrote one paragraph completely, she said, “I knew there was a better way to say that; I just couldn’t figure out how, and you did it perfectly.”
As we got to know each other, my initial impression of her evolved. She no longer seemed intimidating, and in fact was much more approachable about work problems than many other people who were all smiles and no action. She also revealed some vulnerabilities; she was self-conscious about being overweight and openly admitted she overspent on clothes and shoes to make herself feel more confident. She had little use for people whose work was not up to her standards, but she did not attack them personally. She could point out, for example, that a certain colleague was a nice guy, but also describe in detail his work-related shortcomings. When I think back to my initial impression of Shoe Debbie, that impression was not false in the sense of being wrong. It was just incomplete, in that I only saw one aspect of her personality instead of the whole person. She was not comfortable opening up to most people immediately, and so when I think of her, I think of the comparison made that some people are like onions: layer after layer becomes apparent once you start peeling it.