[Adapted from email, sent last night at 9:30]

Monday, August 5, 2002

Ah, back when I still had almost no gray hair, and I still had thick enough hair to keep it long. I was also wearing dress pants here, which I did for only a week. It didn't take me long to clock how casually people at this office tended to dress, and after that first week, I've worn jeans (or, when it's warm enough, shorts) every work day since.

This was taken on my very first day of work at PCC. Look at all that prehistoric equipment on my desk. A manual calculator! What was this, the 19th century? Look at that phone. Multiple lines, fancy! (Want to see a photo of my big fat Dell computer there? Check this out. Side note: Elin Smith brought me those flowers from her garden.)

I've been at PCC so long now that countless beloved staff members have now shuffled off . . . if not this mortal coil, then this natural foods coil, I guess. Lots of retirees wandering around out there. The person who took this photo, for example, was then-Board Administrator Janice Parker. She used to take the photos of all the new staff on their first day at the office, and also took a lot of photos at company events.

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

Hey look, an early-days cell phone picture! These were all the pixels we got, the biggest size the photo could be. Elin took this photo of me sitting next to her in her office, with her cell phone. I was showing off my new "$5,000 smile"—it was the day after I had finally gotten my braces off, which I had been told in 1999 would be a two-year process but for me took three and a half years. Because my teeth had previously been very crooked.

Monday, July 4, 2005 / Saturday, July 9, 2005 / November 17, 2005

To this day one of my most beloved images from all of my time at PCC, for a multitude of reasons—even though every single person involved, besides myself, have since left PCC: George (left PCC 2007); Shauna (left PCC 2008); Stephanie (left PCC 2011); Kibby (left PCC 2020).

George, who worked in our Graphics department in 2005, took the photo, in the overflow parking lot of the PCC office, then located in the U District. There were a good sixty or so shots taken in this photo session, and literally only this one shot was perfect for the "Charlie's Angels Pose" I was going for, with us holding produce like guns.

Stephanie was my boss at the time, the Grocery Merchandiser. She and Jennifer Gordon had done the final interview and hired me in 2002. By 2005, I had this idea for a birthday gift for Stephanie, which involved a great deal of advanced planning. Her birthday was not until November, but I emailed Kibby and Shauna about my idea in May. At the time, Kibby and Shauna and I all had the title of "Merchandising Assistant" (Kibby for HABA; me for Grocery; Shauna for Deli and Meat)—you can see the phrase MERCHANDISING ASS in the "credits" at the top of the image because we once got mail with our title abbreviated that way. But, as the three of us sat in cubicles all in a row right outside Stephanie's office (mine directly across from her office door), we also eventually earned the nickname "Steiny's Angels," a take off of her last name, Steiner.

I chose the Fourth of July as the day of our photo shoot because all of the rest of us were working (we used excess vacation time for holidays back in those days, no holiday pay) but Stephanie was taking the day off, so we could do this out in the parking lot without her being privy to it. I asked George to take the photos because I knew he was a good photographer, and he had all the photos to me within days. I even had my own graphic design of this small "poster" finalized and uploaded to my Flickr account by the end of the week. And still, I held onto it and waited to have Kibby, Shauna and I all present it to Stephanie for her birthday together in November, printed as an 8 x 11 and framed.You can click here for a larger size of the image that's easier to read.

I kept a frame copy for myself, which hangs on my bedroom wall to this day.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Marianne hasn't left yet, at least! She's been at PCC longer than I have. She would have to have been, considering I literally would not have this job if it were not for her, from the earliest possible moment of making it possible: she forwarded me the online posting for the open position.

In one way or another, I have actually known Marianne since 2000, the year I joined the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus, of which she was also a member. We had a performance once in which we had to break out into freestyle dancing on the risers, and she cracked me up (and slightly embarrassed me) by shimmying up and down my whole body. And I had included the chorus email list in my attempt at networking to let people know I was unemployed in 2002, and that's how she knew I needed a job. She picked me up from my temp job and drove me to the office the day of my interview (July 18), and needed to stop at the Fremont store on the way there. While inside, a shopper asked me to pull down an item from a top shelf that she couldn’t reach. Marianne said, “That’s a sign if I ever saw one.”

Marianne even drove me all around the region to all the stores I had not yet been to, that we had operating at the time, in November of that year. This was far more easily done in 2002 than it would be now, as at the time we had only seven stores: the original Kirkland store; the old Seward Park store; View Ridge; the original West Seattle store; the original Fremont store; the Greenlake store on Aurora; and Issaquah. Even amongst those seven stores that existed in 2002, only three of them remain today as the same store in the same location they were then.

Anyway this photo was taken of us at the PCC Holiday Party, held that year at the Seattle Aquarium.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

I'd say the Zebra Printer is the stuff of legend, except that so few people are still around to appreciate how infamously janky it was, almost always refusing to work properly. It was used to print spice jar labels for stores and it never, ever worked. I'm sure Justin (pictured at left) remembers it though, and he's still here. We had a joint Merchandising and IT pizza party sometime after we'd finally got some improvements that rendered this dreaded printer obsolete, and Jennifer joked that we'd bring the Zebra printer to rip it apart.

Gary, then the Director of IT, even said he'd bring his sledgehammer for just that purpose. But then he forgot his sledgehammer at home. Something I have never forgotten: undeterred, he just went across the street to Hardwick's Hardware Store and bought a new one.

Gary had to make two attempts before he got the above shot, of me just posing like that with the sledgehammer. But we also actually did take the printer outside to the parking lot, and I got to literally smash it to pieces.

A cutout of the printed photo of the above image, as well as a photo of the pre-smashed Zebra Printer in a target sight, remain on the wall of my cubicle right now. In fact, earlier just this year, when I was invited to Mary's 20th anniversary lunch in April, this story came up and I learned for the first time that this so-called "IT SLEDGEHAMMER" has been kept around in the IT department all this time.

Monday, December 31, 2007

Another one for the ages, a photo which, in my mind at least, has long since become iconic—I just love the joy emanating from this picture, and the warm nostalgia that comes from it, its reference to a time at PCC that many people to this day look back on with fondness. This was taken at their desks at the back end of the old office location.

This is Angela (in the back), whose email signature at the time read "Community Relations Specialist | Donations Coordinator" and "environmentalist in training"; and Sara, then the Community Relations Manager. Angela left in 2009 but later returned to work in the stores; Sara left PCC in 2018 to move back to Denver to be closer to family. (I visited her in both 2019, and again only three weeks ago.)

Monday, April 28, 2008

No full retrospective of my twenty years at PCC would be complete without at least a mention of Hadley, who worked POS at the Greenlake Aurora store (back then it was just called . . . "Greenlake") in 2006, and soon became a big part of both my work and social lives in the mid- to late-aughts. She lives in Boise now with her own coffee shop but I have very fond memories of the few years she was around, including this shot from my "Birth Week" in 2008, when I met up with her for lunch during one of her shifts there. Hadley posed as a "person on her break" in the Greenlake break room.

For someone who has worked here for twenty years, I have spent extraordinarily little time in the back rooms of any of the stores. This was one of those rare moments.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

In this photo, only Jared still works at PCC . . . and damn, he looks young! He was eventually the position's permanent replacement, after a couple of other false starts, after Shauna left PCC in 2008. Everyone else has long since moved on, clockwise from top left: Elin (retired 2015); Kibby (left PCC 2020); and Stephanie (left PCC 2011). If I had a "core PCC crew" at the time, these people would have been it—it's very easy to assume this was taken at another holiday party, but actually, we had all just gone out for lunch after leaving work early on New Year's Eve, at Eastlake Bar & Grill, which was less than a mile south of our old office location on Roosevelt Way.

Right before we all left when we were done there, I said I wanted to get a picture. Immediately all four of them moved into this "family portrait" style pose, which cracked me up. It may be the opposite of a candid shot, but it's still a great one.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

This photo was kind of a delightful surprise, six years after the fact. It was taken by Ricardo, who managed PCC's social media at the time, at the 2010 Healthy Living Fair at the Edmonds store. (Side note: at that time—eight years into my time here—we still only had nine stores in operation.) I didn't see this shot, however, until Ricardo found it while searching for other photos and sent it to me in April of 2016.

It's not hard for me to love photos of myself, but I love the composition of this one, and how much it clearly represents how at home I have always felt here.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

This photo . . . will take some explaining. This looks like a bag of PCC Coffee, but it was actually packed with SunSpire Peanut Sundrops (a natural foods equivalent to peanut m&m's) from the bulk department at the Kirkland store. After I had complained to Elin that they were no longer available at the Fremont store, she had her daughter Jenn, who worked at Kirkland, send me some in the courier.

But there's even more to this photo! Jenn added some personal touches. Every time Jenn called me at the office at the time, she would address me as "Sexy Hot Pants." And I never even alerted HR! It's hard to see in the photo, but below that is written "187," which was my extension at the time—also a penal code for murder, so until she switched to "Sexy Hot Pants," every time Jenn called she would also say to me, "Murrrrderrrr!"

That was what I got after changing it from my first extension, 142, which became a frustration because every time anyone at the office tried to call a 1-425 area code number but without remembering to press the button for an outgoing line on their phone, they would wind up accidentally paging me instead. So I traded out constantly getting paged by accident for regularly hearing "Murrrrderrrr!"

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

With Elin at the 2012 PCC Annual Member Meeting, volunteering as "Co-Captain" of the table we sat at with member attendees. This spectacular photo was taken by someone with a far better camera than mine—I can't remember who, but probably either Janice or Ricardo. I don't have either that jacket or that shirt anymore and I loved them both. Dammit!

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

A day at work that I will never forget: since other employees who were about to get married had gotten parties, Jennifer declared it only fair that they throw a "wedding party" for Shobhit and me, three days before our actual wedding. We had officially been "engaged" for eight years at that point, but we had pointedly waited until we could get married legally—which Washington State made possible the previous fall (but we wanted to get married on the anniversary date we had already been celebrating).

People visible in this photo represent quite the cross section. Jennifer, in the pink and green to the right of Shobhit, was my boss at the time; Scott, at far left, was my boss 2015-2018; Eric, on the right with the glasses and who I barely knew at the time, is my boss now; Elin can be seen just to the left of me; Mimi, longtime beloved employee and then-Customer Service Manager, can be seen in the shadowed background at far right. It's hard to recognize him but Leon, who is still here at PCC, is to the right of Jennifer, with his head turned toward her; the other four people rounding the table within the shot have all since left PCC. In fact, of all the recognizable people in this shot, only three of us actually still work here.

Anyway. I mentioned in passing to Jennifer that Shobhit and I were going to be telling all the guests at our wedding not to bring any gifts because, after already having been together nine years, we really didn't need anything. And then I added, "although we could use some new pots and pans." So, that's what we got as our wedding gift from PCC. Hahaha my plan totally worked! (We still use those pots and pans regularly.)

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Even though she left PCC in 2008, I still see Shauna at least once a year, preferably more. On this occasion, we decided to take a day trip to Port Townsend, and maybe surprise Hadley, who happened to be working at the Port Townsend Co-op by then. (We did manage to get together for dinner—that was the last time I've seen Hadely, as it happens.) On the way, before catching the Kingston ferry from Edmonds, we stopped in at the Edmonds PCC store to pick up a picnic lunch. Here in my hand you see my longtime favorite dish at the PCC Deli: Smoked Mozzarella Pasta. I still love it, but it used to be better! When the smoked mozzarella was cubed it was delicious, as it retained the smoky-cheese flavor better than the current way, which is shredded. And Tracy, our Fresh Director, refuses to change it back. Something about the ergonomic safety of the staff chopping the cheese, or some such crap. As if that's important!

Monday, May 11, 2015

Self-portrait in my last desk location at the old office location on Roosevelt Way in the U District, what literally used to be a large storage closet and what I thus ultimately dubbed Narnia, because it was like being shifted to another world, back there beyond the recesses of the Accounting Department.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Arguably the most significant event for office staff in the 2010s was our office location move to our current spot on the waterfront, on Elliott Avenue, 5th floor. The central office had previously been on Roosevelt Way in the U District since 1989, and I had been working there since 2002. This was largely met with mixed reactions, a lot of it having to do with commute challenges that I did not face—the central office was now closer to my home than it had been before, and I have never driven to work anyway—and I was all about it, beyond thrilled. The last day on Roosevelt Way was July 29, and the first day on Elliott Avenue was August 1—four days before my 14th anniversary at PCC.

Our 5th floor balcony affords spectacular views of both Elliott Bay to the west, and downtown Seattle to the south, and of many a sunset—sometimes a beautiful combination—and sometimes, as in the above selfie with Claudia, beautiful light reflected on ourselves.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Another thing that thrilled me about the new office location—its warm, dry, perfectly good view of the New Year's fireworks at the Space Needle, seen from the opposite side of the building from which Elliott Bay can be seen. Six New Years have occurred since the office move, and I have rung in four of them from the PCC offices. I have always been the only staff person to do so—but, I did ring in 2017 with my parents, and one of my best friends, Danielle, in addition to Shobhit. Ringing in 2018, 2019 and 2022 was here with only Shobhit. (Shobhit and I switched to KOMO Plaza to ring in 2020, only to have the fireworks canceled by wind, and the still-raging pandemic canceled them for ringing in 2021.)

Tuesday, October 19, 2017

I have on just a few occasions over the years gotten the opportunity to take a work field trip, and this was a memorable one: a day drive on a bus to Lucky Hook Farm in Moses Lake, where we got to know their many goats, and I even held one. In this shot, you can see Justine and Scott to the far right. Aside from Noah, who also went, I didn't know most of the other people who went all that well, as the vast majority of them were store staff.

Friday, August 16, 2019

Here's me, photo bombing my own photo of the Merchandising Department on an afternoon team sailing trip in the middle of Elliott Bay—easily my favorite of the "team outings" we started to have that year, intended to be ongoing but . . . well, you know what happened in 2020. This day was a blast, though. What's not to love about day drinking and whale watching while on the clock on the water?

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

. . . And here we are, in a world forever changed by a viral pandemic, in this instance nine months into it, a now-normalized view of our work worlds through Zoom meetings from our homes, the office itself now largely abandoned. On the upside, some of the Zoom meetings—or, as in the case of this shot above, Zoom parties (this was from our 2020 "Merchandising Virtual Holiday Happy Hour")—yielded some quite nice screenshots.

Thursday, December 16, 2021

PCC is nothing if not a place where I have forged lasting friendships, even after they have come and gone from our little world of food cooperative-ness. Here I am with Tracy (different from the aforementioned Tracy), who lasted only two years here, having started while I was on vacation in Australia in early 2020, and thus having worked here only a couple of weeks before we were all sent to work from home.

I was able to shift back to working full time at the office at the end of June, 2021—after 15 months of working from home—and, by December, we actually had an in-person holiday season gathering again, a "PCC Ugly Holiday Sweater Brunch." When actually working at the office, Tracy sat at the desk directly behind mine (that spot having been previously occupied by the legendary food sorceress Chef Lynne). Now Tracy more typically occupies the seat next to me at movie theaters.

Monday, February 7, 2022

I was thinking I would share 20 photos for each of the 20 years I have worked here, and even that necessitated leaving a whole lot of significant details out. (I've passed out at work before. Twice! Nearly three times, actually. It's been a thing.) I wanted to include this bonus shot of our beautiful office view of Elliott Bay, though, so at least one photo of the work view I love so much would be included. So we'll say I included 21 photos for each calendar year with which my 20 years have overlapped.

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Bonus content! History of Matthew's Halloween Costumes at PCC History of PCC Halloween Group Shots History of November Holiday (Thanksgiving) Potlucks History of PCC Holiday Office Parties