Ms. Downsized

It was a sad, if brief, story on the Associate Press wire about Ms. Downsize, the perfect employee.
For years Downsize faithfully served the No Longer Great Department Store in Richmond, Va. She began her career with NLGD as a model showing off the changing fashions of the seasons. She was there every day and did whatever the store management needed her to do. But, when NLGD closed, no one had any use for Ms. Downsize.
She couldn’t find another job in modeling – she was beginning to show her age – fashion conscious stores wanted slimmer, sexier models. Even though she was about to be put out to pasture – as they say – she maintained a stiff upper lip and kept her chin up.
Then, a couple Richmond, Va. city architects discovered Downsize and said she be perfect as their receptionist. They had lost their receptionist to another department. The two men gave Ms. Downsize a seat in the foyer.
Serving in City Hall was not the same as the prestige of Downsize’s years at the No Longer Great Department Store. As a model she had scornfully stared beyond the covetous eyes of young and old. Women gazed at the holiday gowns she wore with envy and wished they too had rail-thin figure. Children turned their heads upside down trying to figure out if she was real. Teenagers mocked her stance, but girls in dirty blue jeans surreptitiously brushed at the dirt as they walked away.
In spite of her step down in the world to City Hall, Ms. Downsize served as faithfully as she had at the No Longer Great Department Store.
“She has been a great employee. She never complains. She’s always on time,” said Richard C. Morse, a senior city architect.
Perfect strangers have found a good listener in Ms. Downsize. “I’ve watched some rather fascinating dialogue,” said Don Charles, a former administrator of architecture and engineering for the city and now the executive director of the Historic Richmond Foundation.
When delivery men bring architectural drawings to her, she carefully guards them in her lap until the architects pick them up from her.
Not everyone is pleased with her performance. One bureaucrat blasted her for loafing in Room 602 of City Hall, according to the AP. Another city worker asked why no one was helping the customer who was patiently waiting in the foyer for what seemed like forever.
Considering her laughable salary, she has performed without a complaint – as is to be expected from one with her background. Okay, so she had never made millions, she did make it to the front store window. She wore some fine clothes and was seen by hundreds, even thousands of people. When store closed, in the 1990s, she had to take the what she could get. So there she sits with her model perfect posture in the Richmond City Hall, day after day.
To maintain her role in the work-a-day world, Downsize would sit there all day with her legs crossed and one hand tied behind her back – if the architects insisted.
She is after all a store mannequin and even if she isn’t a warm body, she delivers what the architects wanted. She provides the appearance of a someone waiting to greet those who stop by the architectural department of city hall.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)