A Virtual Toast to 10 Years in Business

So Dan and I are celebrating 10 years in business this month. If you’d asked us last year how we’d be celebrating this momentous occasion, we’d have said “huge party at a swanky restaurant with all our clients, writers and friends. It will be sick!” (If we used words like “sick.”)

But instead, we got really busy with work and forgot about it. Which is not so bad as forgetting, say, your 10-year wedding anniversary, but still a little bit sad. So, although I’m not standing in front of you while toasting with champagne in a commemorative Hired Pens glass, here’s what I’d say if I were …

Hired Pens, you’ve come a long way. I remember when you were just two crazy kids with a dream, a couple of crappy laptops and cell phones that still had antennas. You were born in 2001, shortly before the world fell apart. But you didn’t complain or even feel sorry for yourself. You just wheeled your $99 Staples swivel chair up to your 2×3 wood composite desk (also from Staples) and got to work.

And as the world put itself back together, you began to find your own footing. Oh, the laughs we’ve shared, Hired Pens. Like the time we forgot to get a contract and then didn’t get paid. Or before we realized it was imperative to run everything through a professional proofreader or have to give all that money back, contract or not. Oh, did we laugh! But boy, we never made that mistake again, did we, HP.

Then there was the big move — remember that? When you were klonopin clonazepam medication tired of working in coffee shops and decided to get your own place? But all you could afford was the back of a woodshop studio, where it was either hot or freezing and you had to walk 500 yards to use a bathroom where the soap was perpetually cracked and those cracks, filled with black dirt.

Still, you powered through, Hired Pens, bringing in your own hand soap and trying not to stare when the woman across the hall, not to be outdone by her bare-chested, sawdust-covered coworkers, strolled into the bathroom stripped down to her industrial-strength bra.

You were just proud to have your own place, Hired Pens. And you trusted that if you kept working hard, making connections and not pissing off your clients, things would get better. And you were right. Soon you had your own office, a real professional office where you would not be ashamed to bring clients. Where the bathroom was not “your responsibility” and there were always new magazines in the waiting room.

So here’s to you, Hired Pens. You’ve made our lives way better than we ever could have imagined. Even on the days you drive us nuts. Where would be without you? Okay, we’d be unemployed. All the more reason to toast to your future!

And finally, a very sincere thank you to our clients who have become friends, our friends who have become clients and everyone else who encouraged us to keep going. Or at least didn’t make us feel crappy about still being in our pajamas at 2 in the afternoon back in the day.