Signing Off

I came into the office today to write my last post, and I’m not even kidding, one of my co-workers thought I’d been fired.

“Why’d they want to take you down?” she asked.

“Huh? Uh, no…this was actually my decision,” I said. But then it totally sounded like I had been fired but was trying to claim that I really wasn’t. I’m pretty sure she still thinks they canned me.

Here’s the thing, y’all…

Three and a half years ago I walked into my Boss James’ office and said, “I want to put a personal face on your business. And besides, nobody is going to read anything you write because it’ll be super boring. So could I have fifty bucks to start a blog? I want to call it Just the Assistant.” I also told him I wanted to teach people about mortgages in a way that anyone could understand.

And he gave me the fifty bucks.

After a while, I transitioned from being Just the Assistant, to being Just the Office Blogger, meaning that I no longer had to pretend to know how to work the copy machine and could focus solely on writing about my co-workers. (Full story here in case you’re in prison and they won’t let you go into the yard pen today and you’re going to lose it if you don’t find something to occupy your time.)

And while this blog never went viral, and I never made it onto the Ellen Show, and I’m pretty sure that my Boss questions his judgment anytime he sees me typing away on yet another aimless tangent, I think I’ve accomplished my original goals.

And so, dear readers, I have decided that it’s time for me to wrap this up…

Where I’m going from here…

While I will really miss hanging out in this office every week, I have some new writing projects on the horizon, and hopefully they will all place me one step closer to extreme famousness. While I’ve been a blogger for one particular branch of Envoy Mortgage for the past few years, Envoy has now agreed to hire me as their company blogger! The new blog will consist mostly of funny interviews (I mean, I hope they’re funny) with the people who keep the company moving along at the corporate office, much like this one. We are still ironing out the details (they have to write this huge contract because they say I’m likely to get them sued), but we hope to have the new blog up and running in the next few weeks.

As soon as I know the web address where I’ll be posting for Envoy, I will get the word out via Facebook (be my friend!), my personal blog (read it here and please subscribe!) and a link on this site instructing readers on how to follow my journey. Until then, I’m going to write some words for some other folks and keep chugging away at what I hope will become a book one day. (In the event that you are a powerful book agent or just a regular person who happens to be sleeping with a powerful book agent, please hook a sister up.)

So thank you all for following my silly mortgage blog. The fact that anyone would read my ramblings is humbling (Don’t laugh. Sometimes I feel humble. Well, like once I did.), and I could not have kept this gig if I had no readers. You have made my dream job possible.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

A final note to my ole Boss James Beaver:

Dear ole Boss,

Thank you for hiring me six years ago and teaching me all about the fascinating world of mortgages and how to properly order your lunch. And thank you for only laughing mildly when I didn’t know how to use the hole punch. Thank you for letting me start a blog in which the primary purpose was to constantly make fun of you on the Internet. And thanks for letting me continue writing it even when it didn’t bring flocks of borrowers like I told you it would.

Thank you for being kind, and being funny, and always trying to build people up. And thanks for not firing me when you realized I was afraid of talking on the phone. (Come to think of it, you should probably think through your decisions a little more thoroughly in the future.)

Thanks for agreeing to take me and the team out for pizza to send me off. If you wanted to throw in an Anthropologie gift card for like, a thousand dollars, that’d be cool too.

I cannot leave without mentioning that you’re still clearing your throat every nine seconds and you’ve been doing this for the entire six years we’ve worked together. Dude, take a sip of water. And for the record, I am fairly certain you’re allergic to cheese.

Lastly, thank you for always being in my corner.

Sincerely,

Just the Assistant