When I started working for the state of New York, way back in the summer of 2001, my office was located at the bottom of State Street in downtown Albany. As I sat in a meeting room on my very first day, I was indoctrinated to state service with a bewildering stack of documents and papers to sign, choices to make, and all sorts of spur-of-the-moment decisions to decide. The only one I really understood or took any active interest in was the parking situation. Forget the health benefits and insurance and deferred comp and retirement, I wanted to know about parking, because that was the only immediate concern I had in working downtown.
Eventually, the woman giving the run-down in my orientation reached the parking topic, and my ears perked up. I figured there might be a bit of a wait, since I was brand new to state service, and I didn’t know how much parking was actually available to all the state workers. She said I could put myself on a waitlist for parking downtown, but that it would probably be a while since spaces seemed to be opening up at a snail’s pace. Still, I had hope, so my next question was where they might be on the current list, and how many people were ahead of me.
While she didn’t know that exact answer, she did know that at the time, in late August of 2001, they were just getting parking spaces for employees who had started work in 1982. In that instant, any hopes, dreams or fantasies about pulling into my very own parking space in downtown Albany immediately dissipated. It wasn’t a big deal, as Andy was able to drive me to work, nor was it a big emotional blow, though the notion that they were only then getting to 1982 portended general state slowness in the years to come. In a weird way, I ended up being grateful for that bit of information, because I filed away the idea of available parking into a place so far into the future that I would probably retire before I was afforded a space. There the idea remained as some dim and elusive piece of paradise, purely fictional because the days ticked by so slowly back then.
I would move to other agencies, and find parking in the lots that were not in downtown Albany, but when I returned to Broadway, just a few blocks down from where I started, I didn’t even bother to check where I was on the parking list because it still felt far away. Our commute wasn’t bad, so having Andy drive me was a comfort and, quite frankly, an indulgence, as time with my husband usually calms me.
Last week, I got an e-mail at work saying that I was being offered a parking space in the covered garage adjacent to my office. Almost 22 years after beginning my state career, I had downtown parking, and this, more than any other promotion or accomplishment or anniversary, made me feel like I had finally arrived.
