When I was twenty years old, I moved to Indianapolis with two overstuffed suitcases, a fifteen-dollar van, and absolutely no idea what I was doing.
Through a temp agency, I landed a role at an environmental engineering firm, covering a maternity leave.
On paper, I had some relevant experience as an “engineering assistant,” which was really just resume-speak for an administrative assistant in an office where men in hard hats occasionally wandered through.
Industrial engineering, I understood.
Blueprints, machinery, processes, those made sense to me.
But environmental engineering?
I was completely out of my depth.
Soil samples, water levels, contamination testing, it all felt like a different language.
At twenty, my environmental expertise mostly consisted of watering plants occasionally, not littering, cutting up soda can rings to save the turtles, and fully believing the Dawn dish soap people were out there somewhere scrubbing oil off of ducks.
For the first few days, I managed to stay afloat.
Phones, filing, binders, those were familiar waters.
Then they handed me the monster.
A massive Excel spreadsheet, packed with formulas that might as well have been written in code.
“We need you to overhaul this,” they said.
Overhaul.
What did that even mean?
Alphabetize it?
Give it a pep talk?
Bedazzle it?
Add some clip art for morale?
I asked for help.
I tried to be honest.
“I’m not familiar with this. Could someone show me where to start?”
The response came quickly and without softness.
“We don’t have time to explain. Just do it.”
So I did what every desperate twenty-year-old with rent due and no safety net does.
I clicked around blindly.
I guessed.
I hoped, maybe irrationally, that something like divine inspiration or last-minute intervention might step in and rescue me from myself.
Then I submitted what I had done and tried not to think too hard about it.
The next day, my day off, the temp agency called.
The representative’s voice was overly sweet, the kind that tells you everything before the words even land.
“Rachel, you don’t need to go back. They’ve decided to go in a different direction.”
In other words, I had committed spreadsheet homicide.
I sat on the floor of my apartment and sobbed.
Two weeks in and already fired.
Rent was looming. The cupboards were nearly empty.
It was the kind of panic that flips your stomach inside out, the kind that makes you wonder if you’ve somehow managed to ruin your entire life before it even really started.
I cried hard.
My sobs echoed in a too-small room, where there was nowhere for the sound to go but back at you.
I must have sounded as pitiful as I felt, because when the woman from the temp agency spoke again, her voice softened.
“Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “This happens all the time. I’ve already got another job lined up for you.”
The temp agency moved quickly to place me again, this time at a financial firm I’ll politely call “XYZ Mafia Funding.”
I use that name partly to protect myself legally, and partly because “Loan Sharks R Us” felt a little too on-the-nose.
Let’s just say the clientele didn’t exactly resemble the buttoned-up, briefcase-carrying professionals you’d see in a Wells Fargo commercial.
Every phone call carried a certain edge, like it might end with cement shoes, and I was fairly certain Saul Goodman was on retainer somewhere behind the scenes.
On my very first day, they asked me to make coffee.
Here’s the problem.
I had never made a pot of coffee in my life.
Not once.
We were a sweet tea family.
I could brew six pitchers before you finished humming the chorus of “Bye Bye Bye.”
But coffee?
Complete mystery.
So I asked for help.
They rolled their eyes.
“Figure it out,” they said.
Alright then.
I read the back of the can like it was sacred text, poured some water, dumped in some grounds, pressed a few buttons, and stepped back with cautious confidence.
Done.
I thought I nailed it.
My boss poured himself a cup, took one sip, and immediately spit it straight into the sink.
Then he dumped the entire carafe and barked, “You are never to touch the coffee pot again!”
And just like that, I was permanently banned from caffeine production.
Another small humiliation added to the growing collection.
Twenty years old, one month into city life, and already exiled from the break room.
Not exactly resume material, but at least I could still answer phones and greet guests.
The coffee wasn’t really the problem.
And if I’m honest, the spreadsheet hadn’t been the problem either.
The problem was what happened when I asked for help.
It wasn’t that I expected someone to hand me the answers.
I genuinely wanted to learn.
But in those offices, curiosity felt like an inconvenience.
“Figure it out,” they said, again and again, like that was a sufficient training plan.
And when you’re new, that kind of response doesn’t build confidence.
It pushes you straight into the deep end and hopes you don’t drown.
We forget what it’s like to be new.
We forget how disorienting it is to walk into a job where you don’t even know where the bathroom is, let alone how to navigate a formula in Excel.
How it feels to operate without a map, relying on instinct and hope, trying not to make a mistake big enough to get noticed.
Sometimes, we treat it like a badge of honor.
No one helped me, so you don’t get help either.
Other times, it’s simpler than that.
We just forget.
We forget that the confidence we carry now was built piece by piece, stitched together through failure and the handful of people who did take the time to show us the ropes.
Because “common knowledge” isn’t always common.
Coffee-making wasn’t common knowledge to me at twenty.
Neither were pivot tables.
When someone asks for help, it doesn’t mean they’re lazy.
It doesn’t mean they’re incapable.
Most of the time, it means they care.
It means they’re trying.
And it costs nothing to pause, turn toward them, and show them where to begin.
A few weeks later, that job gave me a front-row seat to history.
The bosses came storming in, voices urgent, cutting through the usual office noise.
“Turn on the TV!” they shouted.
There was no context, no explanation, just a sense that something was very, very wrong.
We gathered around and watched as planes hit the Twin Towers in New York City.
It was September 11, 2001.
I was twenty years old, still fumbling my way into adulthood, standing in an unfamiliar office surrounded by strangers in suits, watching the world fracture in real time.
The room went quiet in a way I had never experienced before, heavy and disorienting, like the air itself had changed.
In that moment, everything else fell away.
The spreadsheet didn’t matter.
The coffee didn’t matter.
None of the small humiliations or anxieties that had felt so big just days before could hold their weight against what we were witnessing.
We just stood there, together and separate all at once, trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense at all.
That contract ended just a few weeks later, and I landed at a construction and architecture firm where, for the first time since arriving in the city, I felt something shift.
I found belonging.
The men there treated me like a kid sister.
They teased me, of course, but it came with something steadier underneath it.
They looked out for me.
They took the time to explain things no one else had been willing to slow down and teach.
And slowly, almost without realizing it, I stopped feeling like I was drowning.
Until The Beast gave its final roar.
A photo of The Beast being towed away in the Fall of 2001.
Next to it was my replacement car, a trusty Honda Civic.
The Beast was my 1973 Chevy full-sized conversion van, a fifteen-dollar purchase from a woman at church.
It had electric blue running lights, captain’s chairs, shag carpet, and an engine that had a tendency to belch thick black sludge onto my legs.
The muffler sagged constantly, and I had become very familiar with sliding underneath the van, sometimes in church clothes, to tie it back up with coat hangers.
It was equal parts humiliation and independence.
And I loved it.
Then, in the middle of a busy intersection during my lunch hour, the engine sputtered, coughed, and stopped.
Horns blared behind me.
Cars swerved around me.
I sat there, frozen for a split second, hands gripping the wheel, trying to will it back to life.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, my coworkers appeared a few vehicles back.
They dropped everything.
Literally.
They ran into the street, surrounded the van, and started pushing, guiding me out of traffic and into safety like it was the most natural thing in the world.
That was the end of The Beast.
When it became clear that my fifteen-dollar miracle had finally taken its last breath, they didn’t shrug it off or offer a casual “tough luck, kid.”
They stepped in.
They drove me to and from work while I figured things out without me even having to ask.
One afternoon, they all piled into a truck and took me car shopping on their lunch break, like it was just another item on the day’s agenda.
And then, in an act of trust and generosity that still stops me when I think about it, my boss co-signed on a loan so I could get a car.
Risky.
Generous.
Almost unthinkable now.
But he believed in me.
Those men gave me something the earlier offices hadn’t.
Time.
Patience.
A sense of protection that felt almost familial.
They didn’t just teach me how to read a blueprint or navigate a job.
They showed me what it looks like when people choose to help, when someone is new and unsure and just trying to find their footing.
They showed me what it means to be taken in, instead of left to figure it out alone.
I learned what it feels like to be new, truly new, in a way that unsettles you to your core.
And I learned that asking for help and being met with silence can feel even more isolating than not knowing at all.
I learned that some bosses will spit coffee into the sink and ban you from ever trying again, and others will quietly step in and put their name, their trust, and their reputation on the line for you.
The confidence we carry now was built piece by piece.
It was stitched together through failure and the handful of people who took the time to show us the ropes.
So when someone is standing in front of me, new and unsure, asking a question that seems obvious, I hope I remember the twenty-year-old girl staring at an Excel spreadsheet she didn’t understand.
I hope I remember the coffee pot.
I hope I remember the people who left me to figure it out.
But more than anything, I hope I remember the people who didn’t.
The people who turned toward me and showed me where to begin.
Rachel L. Richard is a small-town farm girl turned suburbanite, a delightfully irreverent optimist, Mrs & Mama, floppy dog ear scratcher, lifelong learner, channel surfer, wanderer, believer, occasional creative, out-of-practice musician, cupcake addict, book devourer, and lover of all people.
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