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Story Notes:
This story deals with themes of complacency and disillusionment. We're meeting two people who think that they're where they want to be in their lives. Pam's career as an artist is on the rise, yet her personal life is beyond screwy (more on that to come). Jim's lack of ambition and penchant for inertia have seemingly served him well. But he has never asked the question of happiness. I can't tell you how much reviews fuel my writing. So please, review. Mind you, this one is going heavy on the angst...but I'm a big believer in happy endings. Especially when it comes to Jam. Will probably get steamy later on. For Now, it's just an M. 
Author's Chapter Notes:
We meet both halves of the OTP in this chapter. There may be a strong resemblance to Jim circa season 3. We also meet a couple of the main players in this story but not all. Please tell me what you think.

 

 

The Receptionist

One:

Announcements Are Very Official

 

Mr. J.D. Halpert &Ms. K.E Filippelli

Mr. Gerald Paul Halpert and Mrs. Elizabeth Marie Halpert of Philadelphia hereby announce the engagement of their son, James Duncan to Karen Elise Filippelli, daughter of Mr. Marco Filippelli and Mrs. Danielle Filippelli of Stamford.

Jim Halpert sat down the latest copy of The New York Times and sighed. "Wow, didn't think they would actually make an announcement," he told his oldest friend, Mark, as they sat in Bloc, a trendy but secluded café located on the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

"Really?" Mark asked with more than a touch of surprise in his voice. "Have you met your parents? Of course, they're going to make an announcement. I'm surprised they didn't commission a skywriter or a plaque or something. They're excited. Aren't you?"

Jim shrugged. "Yeah. I mean, of course I'm excited. I...love her. It's just...this is all a little much, you know."

"So is getting married," deadpanned Mark as he added a less than healthy spoonful of sugar to his coffee. Jim couldn't and didn't argue that point. He honestly didn't know why the announcement rattled his nerves. They'd been engaged nearly a month. They'd been together three years. But still, it all seemed too soon or too close or too...something.

"Did they have to use that picture? And my parents live in Scranton, not Philly," he complained dramatically as he inspected the announcement with a highly critical eye. He didn't know why he was trying to find a flaw with it, some sort of fatal singularity that would make it not invalid, just not so omnipresent.

Mark smiled. "You getting cold feet already?"

"It's not that. It's just we've been engaged, like, a month. Isn't it a little soon for announcements? What's next, setting a date?"

Mark raised an eyebrow at his friend. "Yes, actually," he said barely hiding his sardonic tone. "Jim, how long are you expecting your engagement to last? Because if I know Karen, it'll be a stretch if it makes a full year. You've been together for three years. I'm sure she's been planning this since you moved in together."

Had she? He and Karen had talked about marriage sparingly throughout their relationship. It had never appeared to be a priority to either one of them. It had come up as it did, surely, with most couples.

Most of the time, it seemed like a distant, albeit, forgone conclusion. They were good together. They worked together, they had fun together. He couldn't picture his life without her, possibly because she'd always been there. So proposing was the natural and logical thing to do.

As his mother so lovingly so put it, one could only play house for so long. So before long, he'd bought a ring, because that's what you do, right?

He shrugged again. "I don't know, I guess it's all becoming real...I'm getting married. It's a lot."

Mark nodded. "Well, it was your idea."

"It was," he said agreeing less forcefully that he possibly should have. It was his idea to get married. Correction, it was his idea to get engaged. He didn't know what was wrong with him. The idea of proposing to Karen came naturally, but the concept of marrying her seemed hard to wrap his head around.

"I guess I'm just...nervous. You know, the commitment issues I never had before are probably just manifesting. I'm fine," he concluded.

"Good, I think you're just overthinking things. And for what it's worth, I'm really happy for you."

"Thanks, man. I'm happy too."

"Of course you are," Mark said with a bright grin. "You're James Halpert, youngest VP in Dunder Mifflin history. You're the guy solely responsible for taking what was once a mid-size Northeastern paper company into a national brand. You're the guy who got this company into Fortune 500, you're the guy who got into every state and Canada. And you're the guy who came up with the slogan, what it is again, ah, ‘the everyman's paper. The billionaire's paper.' You had the idea to launch a line of luxury paper for the Wall Street billionaires. So let's recap: all before your 30th birthday, you have acclimated wealth and prestige and prominence and now you're marrying Karen Filippelli, right hand woman, all around bad ass and every bit as ambitious as you. You've got every reason to be happy, Mr. Vice President of Northeast Sales and Acquisitions. Me, I'm still slaving away on Madison Avenue as a lowly junior ad exec."

"You make me sound like a complete and total douche. Besides, it's not like I planned on any of that...it just happened. Believe me, I never planned on being ‘The Savior of Paper'," he said, drolly referencing a write up about him in The New Yorker. "It was mostly a series of happy accidents."

Mark scoffed. "I would kill for the accidents that befall you."

Jim smiled at his old friend and former college roommate. Maybe Mark was right, maybe he was just overthinking things. He had a tendency to do that. His work and home office was littered with pros and cons lists. He was thorough, some would argue, to a fault.

But he felt he had to do that in order to combat his innate slacker tendencies. Though naturally bright and talented, Jim was the definition of a slacker. His prosperity had not been the result of application and desire, but, as he owned without ostentation, accidental chances. Most of his endeavors, though successful, were halfhearted. The luxury paper idea had actually been a joke, but of course, that wasn't the story he'd told The New Yorker.

Straight out of college, he'd gotten hired at Dunder-Mifflin, Corporate as a salesman. His easygoing, engaging personality enabled him to hit and exceed his numbers early on. CFO David Wallace took an immediate liking to him. They were both avid sports fans and both had an instinctual disdain for the trappings of corporate executive life. Despite the high levels they had reached secularly, work, for them, was just work. They did it and they did it well, but it wasn't exactly a passion project.

Jim endeared himself to Wallace with an idea for a luxury brand of paper that had taken the company national. It hadn't been by design, Jim and David had been talking about the company on their way to a Yankees-Phillies game.

So at the ripe age of twenty-nine, he was a corporate VP for a national paper company. He had money, he had success, he had a great relationship. On paper, pun unintended, he had it all. He checked his watch. "I gotta go," he told Mark. "I'm meeting my new secretary today."

"What happened to Mrs. Doutbfire?"

Jim rolled her eyes. "For starters, her name is Mrs. McNeil and she retired after thirty-six years of loyal service to Dunder-Mifflin."

"So are you getting someone else who looks like they belong on the cover of Mother Goose Monthly?"

Jim shrugged. "No clue. Wallace hired her. I'm the youngest corporate VP, but apparently, I cannot pick who answers my phone."

Jim took a fifty-dollar bill out of his wallet. "I got this," he said.

"See you for a drink later on?"

"Can't, working late. And then Karen and I are having a late dinner with her sister in the Village. Maybe tomorrow?"

"Sure."

Jim finished his coffee and headed out the door. He hailed a cab and headed to his office. Time to make the doughnuts he thought, rather unexcitedly.

...........................................................................................................................

 

Pam Beesly bounded down the stairs. She was running late. On her first day. Fantastic. She grimaced at her own ineptitude. Clearly alarm clocks were not her friends. Neither were coffee pots or shower radios or hair dryers.

 This was further proof that she was not meant for a 9-5 job. But, she was not unrealistic in nature and had thus deemed employment necessary.

A graduate of Pratt Institute of Design, Pam had been something of a starving artist for the five years since her graduation. A painter and a sketch artist, she'd been selling paintings and sketches here and there and working odd jobs and shuffling from one artistic community to another since she was twenty two. But now things were looking up. One of her collections had been featured in the New York Journal Arts & Entertainment section under "Up & Coming."

A few of her paintings had been purchased by wealthy collectors. She had money in the bank and a few feathers in her cap. The iron was hot and it was time to strike. After a few months of back and forth, she'd made a decision. She was joining the New York art scene. If she ever wanted to make a living from her work, this was the time to do it.

A former professor of hers who was currently on sabbatical and running a modern art museum in France had offered to let Pam stay in her Brooklyn brownstone for a fraction of what New York rent normally went for.

Still, life in New York was nowhere near cheap and the money from her paintings wouldn't last forever. So she'd taken a job as administrative assistant to a VP of a paper company. She got to her use clerical skills and it paid better than most secretarial positions because it was directly for a corporate executive.

It wasn't exactly appealing, but hey, it would pay her bills and her student loans. She couldn't afford to be choosy. And maybe, just maybe, some of the corporate bigwigs were art fiends and would want to buy a sketch or two.

That is, if she ever got there. Though she had lived in Brooklyn for college, she'd been something of a gypsy the last few years and she still hadn't acclimated to New York traffic or time. She did not want to be late on her first day. No, she couldn't be late for her first day.

Pam knew absolutely nothing about the inner climate of corporate offices, but she was positive that being late on your first day was regarded as fairly unacceptable.

Thankfully, Prospect Heights was only a 30-minute subway ride away from Lower Manhattan. Dunder-Mifflin's headquarters were in One Liberty Plaza, right in the heart of the financial district. When she was in college, she had hardly ever came that far downtown. Now, she suddenly realized she was going to be seeing a lot more of chrome, glass and steel.

She'd been to the office twice before, both for interviews and she hadn't yet the man who she was going to work for. She knew his name, James Halpert.

The logical side of her wanted to pull out her phone and Google him, scope out his Facebook or his LinkedIn or his page on the Dunder-Mifflin website. Part of her just wanted to wait and see. She valued a first impression. There was something about meeting a person for the first time, shaking their hand and deciding what they were.

Of course, in her mind, she was already picturing a Steve Jobs type. Middle-aged, chained to their desk, wife and kids in Connecticut or Westchester, Rolexes or Piaget watches, handmade cufflinks etc.

She hoped he wouldn't be too demanding or too type-A. She honestly hoped she could just do her job in the day and focus on her art.

The good news about the New York artistic community: it was an afterhours kind of thing. All the really trendy art galleries didn't open until midnight. She had a showing later on that night. She'd spent most of the weekend getting it ready.

As she sipped her coffee from her monogrammed thermos, her cell phone rang: ALEX. That struck her. She had no idea why he would be calling, nor was she was interested in whatever he imagined there was left to say. She quickly ignored the call. She didn't have time for that. That was a part of her past she had irrevocably shut the door on. 

Onward and upward, she thought. The train approached her stop and she checked the time, she still had fifteen minutes. She sighed a small sigh of relief. She took one last look at her reflection in the train window. Her black skirt was neatly pressed, her Keds were white and spotless, her blue cardigan was buttoned and her collared blouse was crisp and neat. She'd pinned her hair back with her favorite clip and smiled to herself.

Here goes nothing.

She walked out of the subway and stepped into whatever passed in New York as fresh air. She would've been lying, if she said she didn't miss her smallish hometown in Pennsylvania. But there was no such thing as an art scene there. This is where the action was. This is where she knew she needed to be. 

She made her way quickly to One Liberty Plaza, the place was of course, bustling with people. Everyone rushing because New Yorkers did not take slow paces. Everyone seemed to be either dressed in black or grey and she could hear many a high heel clacking against the polished floors.

Dunder-Mifflin was on the 52nd, floor so Pam had a bit of an elevator ride. It gave her a moment to compose her thoughts. It was then she recognized a few charcoal stains remaining on her fingers. She sighed, at least she didn't have paint on her anywhere.

When she finally reached her floor, she straightened her shoulders and tried to walk tall. Or as tall as she could with her petite frame. The doors opened to reveal a large, open-concept lobby with tall windows overlooking Manhattan's famed skyline.

For a moment, she got caught up in the view. She would love to sketch it sometimes.

"Can I help you?" a stern voice brought her back to her senses. At the front desk, there were two women, one seated with curly braids and a friendly, but curious smile. The other was standing on the outside of the desk. She had long straight chestnut hair, intense hazel eyes and an olive complexion that spoke to something of the exotic. She wore a gray pantsuit that Pam would've bet was custom tailored for her, a face full of tasteful, expertly applied makeup and high heels that made Pam's feet hurt at the very sight of them.

"I'm Pam, I'm starting here today. I'm supposed to meet with David Wallace and Jim Halpert."

The brunette in the suit raised an eyebrow, but she didn't reply. "Nice to meet you, Pam," the front desk receptionist said with a smile. "I'm Grace Davenport. Please have a seat and I will let them know that you're here."

Pam sat down by the window and turned her attention back to the skyline. "It's so beautiful," she said, in a half whisper. She had a thousand sketches in mind already.

 

Meanwhile, Jim had been in his office for all of twenty minutes and he was already stressed out. There were so many things that had to get done and he honestly didn't want to do any of them. How, how had he ever been promoted is what he wanted to know, how? The inanity of it all was enough to make him want to scream and it was his battle to deal with.

Apparently, the Scranton branch (the most profitable and the most likely to get the company sued) had had another diversity issue...their fifth in six months.

The Stamford branch sales were way, way down. Utica had more personnel turnover than a Wal-Mart, Albany had customer complaints pouring in by the hundreds, Nashua's entire sales staff had caught some type of debilitating stomach virus, leaving hundreds of orders backed up and clients going through the roof. The regional manager of Rochester was involved in some seedy sex scandal with the mayor of Rochester which sounded freakier and freakier as more information poured in.

To top it all off, he was supposed to fly to Canada in a month to see if he could do in Ontario what he had done in Toronto (which was convince them that they needed foreign, expensive, overrated paper which they would pay for twice when counting the import tax). He sighed.

The intricacies and intimacies of paper products were not the kind of information he wanted to be second-nature to him. Who the hell cared about tonnage prices of manila folders?

"I need a drink," he said aloud.

"Well, if you're really good, I'll buy you one," said Karen Filippelli as she stepped into his office with a smile. He smiled back. He was glad to see her, not ecstatic, not thrilled...glad.

"Rough morning already?" she asked as she shut the door behind her and approached him. "You took off this morning," she placing a hand on his chest as he stood out of his chair.

"Yeah, I had to meet Mark."

She grinned expectantly and he suddenly knew she wanted something.

"What?" he finally asked.

"Did you see it?"

"See what?"

"The announcement, genius," she said pulling a copy of The Times from behind her back. "It's completely official now!" she beamed radiantly and he tried to return her enthusiasm.

"Yeah, it's completely official." They kissed briefly as neither of them were keen on PDA at work and he smiled down at her. Karen was the Director of Marketing which technically made Jim her superior, though not her direct superior. That title belonged to the VP of Marketing, Daniel Harrison Corday, with whom Jim shared an equally passionate loathing.

"I keep looking down at my ring," Karen said. "Like I can't believe it's real. I can't believe it's happening."

Jim was about to profess an agreement, but then realized that probably wasn't the smartest thing to say. "Yeah," was his only reply. "Uh, Karen, I'm kind of swamped-,"

"Say no more. Danny wants to see me about something anyway. But hopefully, you're swamped days are over. Your new secretary's here. I think Wallace will bring her in a second. Though I'm not sure how long she'll last."

Jim raised an eyebrow. "Why not?"

"She was wearing Keds, Jim, Keds."

"You have something against Keds?"

"They're tennis shoes, Jim. It's so unprofessional. Anyway, I gotta go. See you for lunch? And we're still having dinner with Katia right?"

"Right. OH, but I can't make lunch. I'm supposed to take my new assistant to lunch. I was thinking Kellari."

"Something tells me she's not the foodie type, especially not the Greek alchemy they serve there. You might be better off at Bill's."

Jim shrugged and flashed her his signature smirk. "Works for me, as I said, a beer wouldn't be too bad right now."

Karen turned to head out of his office. "Halpert, it's almost time for another haircut. You're getting that hobo look again. Swing by my office if you get a sec."

He laughed and then looked reflection. His hair wasn't that long. Besides, he kind of missed it being longer. He liked being able to not do anything with it. Getting it cut all the time made it impossible for him just to roll out of bed in the morning. He actually had to take the time to style it. It was all part and parcel of the corporate gig, he guessed. Karen loved for him to keep it short and neat and "presentable."

He kind of hated it because in the winter his head was entirely too cold, but he didn't argue. He'd stopped arguing about a lot over the years.

Before he could get back to work (not that he wanted to), David Wallace knocked on his office door.

"Jim, got a sec?" the older man asked with a friendly smile.

"Yeah, David, what's up?"

"Your new assistant is here. Time to show her the ropes."

"I doubt she'll be as good as Mrs. McNeil."

"No one will ever be, especially when it comes to brownies. But she makes a great impression. She'll do well, I think. Oh and I saw the announcement. Congratulations!"

Jim smiled. "Thanks. We're both really excited." Inwardly, he groaned. Was he going to have to field questions and compliments about that fucking thing all day long? They were engaged, it wasn't a big deal. That's what people who had been dating for extended people of time did. They got engaged. Why was everyone making such a big deal about it?

Jim didn't have time to mull over it, it was time to meet the new girl. Nanoseconds later, David walked back into Jim's office, a redheaded young woman in tow.

Jim took in the sight of her and all he could think was Oh, boy.

Meanwhile Pam, stood there, waiting to be introduced, couldn't help but think that he was certainly no Steve Jobs.

Chapter End Notes:
So what do you think? In our next chapter, lunch goes well. Too well. Almost like a...well I won't give anything away. Please review.


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