Project #1

Day after day, I was surrounded by heaping piles of brown folders filled with life altering documents. Document’s that included information such as Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, and arrest records. These pieces of personal information surrounded me and seemed to nearly collapse in on me from the towering shelves on which they had been stacked and sorted for years.

This all started once my high school football days had ended, I decided to ask my American Government teacher, who was the Clerk of Court, for an internship at the county courthouse. To my surprise he said yes. I was ecstatic, for a high school student who had hopes of going to law school one day, a paid internship felt like my ticket into the world. I went out and bought dress clothes, got a haircut, and researched everything that the Clerk’s Office does for the community. I noticed myself dosing off in class and dreaming about my job as a public servant during the days leading up to my first day at work.

I started my job and I worked in the Traffic and Jury Departments, and the Records Storage Facility. I worked in Records Storage three days out of the week, while I completed clerical tasks in the traffic and jury departments two days out of the week. I was so happy even to perform the most basic tasks, such as answering the phone, or stuffing envelopes full of jury summons. In my mind, I had hit the absolute jackpot. I didn’t have to flip burgers or take breakfast orders like many of my friends were doing, and on top of that, I was getting paid more by the hour.

My favorite part of my job, however, was going on the mail run to Judge’s Assistants on the days I worked in Records Storage. This was the part of my job where I felt like I was really doing something substantial. The judges needed these documents to complete court cases, and I was the person delivering them. These were documents that decided the custody of children, whether someone got to keep their home, and sometimes decided prison time. I was in awe during my first few weeks that I was the person delivering such significant articles.

Although, as my days wore on, my fascination with these documents seemed to drain away. Going on the mail run became more of a chore than the adventure it once was, and answering the phone meant having to explain to someone how to turn in their jury duty excusal. I no longer woke up with same vigor each morning and drove to work with my windows down blasting music through the country roads that encompassed the courthouse. The Spanish moss hanging from the old established oak trees around the courthouse no longer had a mysteries beauty to them, rather the Spanish Moss looked sorrowful, as if they were confined to the branches of these oak trees for eternity.

As the weeks wore on, one specific task stuck out to me and irritated me more than anything else. Filing away these once so mesmerizing court documents. I would file documents for two hours some days, just shoving papers into big brown folders, sorted by the type of document and the date of the document. It was very tedious, and often left me with pounding headaches. I grew so frustrated and angered by sorting these files I would have to take a break every few minutes just to remind myself that I could overcome these inanimate pieces of paper, and eventually the mountain of files in front of me would be reduced to a few flimsy articles if I kept on filing them.

Eventually, I caught myself day dreaming while working. I would think back to the days where instead of having to go and file papers after school, I would go to football practice or watch a movie with my friends. It was as if I finally understood why growing everyone told me to savor my youth. I always thought that they were warning me about how your body begins to ache, and you have to start paying your own bills. I never imagined that filing papers would be a reason why I would find myself longing for days that had just recently expired. I was so immersed in my world of filing paper that I started thinking to myself what would happen to me if college didn’t work out the way I wanted to. I began to wonder if this could be the reality of the rest of my life. The thought of being surrounded by these heavy brown folders for the rest of my life became a terrifying thought.

While I never had a traumatic meltdown, and set the Records Storage Facility on fire. In a way, the thought of being stuck in the file room with the brown folders that I despised so deeply let me combat my fears of being trapped in the windowless, colorless file room for the remainder of my existence. I no longer let the files and their contents engulf who I was. I could draw a fine line between the reality of my job and who I was as a person and what the future had in store for me. The image of being in my 40’s and stuffing away court cases and arrest records aided in cementing in my mind that I was destined for more than this.

Ultimately, the brown folders that had once served as the tinder for a burning hatred within me grew to be just another part of life. I began to view the brown folders that fenced me in every day after school as a staple of my day. They lost their sense of claustrophobia and imprisonment. I viewed the file room as just another room in the Records Storage Facility, no different from the break room or supply room. The documents themselves returned to their original meaning as well. They were no longer the cause of paper cuts and boundless irritation, but just single sheets of white copy paper that had been stained with printer ink. The horror I once found in filing away these documents into their hideous brown homes melted down into an effortless task.