It’s hard for me (Marie) to believe that it’s been a year since Cara started working at Southgate Coins. Last September Cara joined our team just one week after another girl got hired. She was one of three new girls at our store.
Due to her classes at UNR, Cara has had limited hours available for work and last September was no exception. Just as with every girl, we gave Cara as much training as we could in the limited schedule she had available.
Cara learned how to label coins in 2X2 holders, beginning with statehood quarters, and advancing later to type coins. Her accurate and legible handwriting greatly helped her to learn that task. Answering phones and waiting on customers has brought her a whole other set of challenges. Nevertheless, she’s worked hard to remember all the different instructions she’s learned this past year and how to apply them to every situation.
One thing I appreciated about Cara right off was her cheerful greetings and her sweet smile. All of us are familiar with her signature lines, “Got it,” and “No worries.” She’s eager to lend a helping hand and is always friendly to the customers and to Rusty, me, and her co-workers. I don’t believe Cara has ever spoken a cross word while she’s worked for us.
We were very proud of her when she played the golf match for Southgate Coins against Paul Sudmeier last May. It was a lot of fun for all of us to watch, since we were only spectators. We rooted for our girl, even though winning or losing didn’t matter much to us. We just wanted to have a good time.
Cara has participated in many company events over the year, and she lent her support at the shop during two coin shows. We really appreciated it when she volunteered to help us this semester for a few hours on Thursdays when we’re short-staffed. It means a lot to us when our girls make sure that we have the help we need during school. They realize that it’s a challenge for us to accommodate their school schedules and that our flexibility can sometimes put us in a bind.
It’s a priority for Rusty and me to teach life skills along with technical skills to all our employees. When it’s time for Cara to move on after she graduates, we hope that she will not only have great memories of her time with us, but that she will also have learned many things that will help to enrich her life and give her more understanding of the world around her.
Congratulations Cara, for completing your first year with us at Southgate Coins. Hooray!!
Now here’s Rusty to wrap things up.
We hired Cara a couple weeks after the fall semester started in 2008. She told us that she won a golf championship in high school and that she had a form of attention deficit disorder. I plotted how I could turn her golfing experience into a fun event and how we could compensate for her attention disability during her training period. Over the past year, we have accomplished both goals and in the process, Cara has become a welcome face around here.
She’s seen other employees come and go, and she’s experienced many fun traditions at Southgate Coins: Halloween dress-up day, birthdays, a company Christmas dinner, with an exchange of gifts, Kentucky Derby day, and other girls’ milestone-achieving celebrations. All along, she’s done her best to learn the “millions” of things she needs to know to be a good employee here. One thing, which is sort of inside humor between her and me, is the importance of not making “half moons” with the three-hole punch.
Two characteristics that Cara displays, which help overcome any mistakes she might make, are a sweet, gentle spirit, and a humble attitude. These traits make it difficult for her to disappoint us. After all, it’s hard to get mad at a genuinely kindhearted person who is contrite.
One experience that Marie and I, and Cara’s coworkers will always remember about Cara is her remarkable performance in Southgate Coins’ First Annual Golf Tournament. Marie and I never had an employee who had a golf championship to her credit. And since I’m always looking for ways to incorporate our employees’ non-job-related interests with special company events, I thought a golf tournament was in order.
I scheduled a day off on a Saturday after the spring semester in 2009, so everyone at Southgate Coins could participate in a golf tournament between Cara and one of our longtime friends and fellow C4OA member Paul Sudmeier. Since there was not only a gender difference between Cara and Paul, but also an approximate 47-year age gap, I viewed it as sort of a reincarnation of the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs back in the 1970s. Our Battle between the Sexes proved to be a fun day for us all. Well, maybe not for Paul, since, thanks to a late rally by Cara, he lost. Still, the event gave the Southgate crew a good excuse to spend a day in the sunshine at the glorious Montreux golf course in Reno—not to mention a pleasant after-tournament dinner at Claim Jumper restaurant. None of it would have happened if Cara hadn’t started working for us.
Marie and I are proud of Cara for reaching the one-year mark with our company, and we’ll always remember her after she moves on to the next step in her career.
Best wishes to you always Cara,
Rusty and Marie