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I've been a DJ, janitor, ditch digger, waitress, computer instructor, programmer, mechanic, web developer, clerk, manager, marketing director, tour guide and dorm manager, among other things.
I literally remember when I made my audition tape for 'Buffy'. I went to the Arsenal Mall. I got my outfit at Contempo Casuals in the Arsenal Mall and put some safety pins in my jeans. I remember telling whoever the clerk was that I was making a tape for 'Buffy', and they were so excited.
My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.
Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.
I did quite a lot of menial jobs. I was a waiter, an inventory clerk touring round properties listing cups and saucers, and a laserquest marshal.
I was born in a poor family, a lower middle class family. My father was a clerk in the forest department. I was very bad at studies. I was not very good at sports, also.
Perhaps my favourite story is 'Le Passe-Muraille' by Marcel Ayme. It's about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He's a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration.
There is no more moving a professional relationship than that between a law clerk and a Supreme Court justice. As a place to work, the court is unique in its intimacy and intensity.
Emotions are contagious. We've all known it experientially. You know after you have a really fun coffee with a friend, you feel good. When you have a rude clerk in a store, you walk away feeling bad.
And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack.
