Ti Ti

Oh my gosh!

I’ve been very busy at my new job. It’s awesome, I’ve been working my tootie off and it’s already 4:34! Exactly!

Neato.

But we’ve all heard enough about my new job. Let’s move on to a much harder time that I had this weekend….

This weekend I had two tours, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. After the one on Sunday I was officially finished with my tours. I can give more and will give more, but I’m done with the tours I HAVE to do. And this is a big deal, cause I’ve been working really hard and as my brother said yesterday “When you started this thing I never really imagined that you would finish”.

And although it sounds snarky, it wasn’t. It was actually a nice thing to say.

Anyway, yesterday, if you live in the Midwest you know, was a really crappy day. It was really rainy, it was cold, it was a thoroughly unpleasant day. There were 3 docents ready to give tours, but since it’s my 1st year, I always have to give the tour if there are only a few people and the other docents can go home.

So we call the tour at 2:00, it’s pouring outside. And I go out into the lobby to see if there is actually anyone coming on this tour. And no one comes. And no one comes. And I figure I’m going home early to watch Season One of Homicide on DVD.

But alas, a tiny little Japanese girl comes out into the lobby. She’s the only one. She speaks very little English. She has no umbrella. I can feel the two other docents laughing it up cause they don’t have to take the Japanese girl out in the rain for a tour she’ll never understand.

Ti Ti, I think that was her name, stammers around, trying to tell me it’s okay if we don’t go. But that’s not the way of the Docent! We always go. So I get the poor thing an umbrella and I ask her how much she can understand. She somehow manages to convey she can understand more than she can speak. Great.

I manage to get out some sort of introduction where I talked about wheat a lot. Then we head out into the rain to go look at buildings. I basically told her what I thought was pretty, showed her the mosaic in Marshall Fields, showed her the Sears Tower. I wasn’t sure what else to do.

She took a lot of pictures, and after I brought her back 45 minutes early, she wanted a picture with me, which was just too cute, so we took a quick pic and off she went to go do what, I can’t imagine.

And although it was a pain and I was annoyed I had to go out in the rain, I was impressed with her courage (I tried to tell her so, she smiled and nodded) to be heading out alone with some weird tour guide, seeing and taking pictures of odd buildings that I showed her.

So I’m officially a docent, I only have a couple more little projects to take care of, my Art Deco tour to learn, and then I can sit back and enjoy the quiet coziness of winter with me man.

Could be worse.