In 2010, I hit the reset button on my life.
I had been an entrepreneur for ten years.
I'd been in the same relationship for that decade,
and I had an 18-month-old son.
But that relationship wasn't working.
It wasn't a good fit, and it hadn't been for a long time,
and I finally decided we needed to break up.
But we owned a home together.
We owned a business together.
We were raising this child together,
so when I broke up with him,
I broke up with my entire life.
I had to start over from scratch.
I had to get a job,
and I had worked for myself since college.
I didn't even have a résumé.
The last time I looked for work,
the internet wasn't even a thing.
I didn't know where to begin,
so I thought maybe I'd go to where I found my sofa,
where I found my car.
Maybe I'd find a job on Craigslist!
And I see this listing.
It says, "Do you want your job to be all fun and games?
Come work for a jigsaw puzzle company."
And I think, "This has been a terrible year.
I for sure want a fun-and-games job."
So I apply and I get an interview,
and I imagine a jigsaw puzzle company
will look kind of old-fashioned.
Like, there'll be wood paneling on the walls.
It'll be dusty.
It'll have this whole throwback vibe.
But I walk in and it's gorgeous.
It's kind of this loft space,
and there's soaring ceilings and modern art on the walls,
and it's just beautiful.
It's also very professional,
and I'm starting to get a little intimidated.
This is my first interview since I was 18 years old,
and I'm sitting across from the CFO,
and she tells me, "It's primarily a receptionist job.
"You'd be doing administrative tasks around the office
"and you'd be answering the phone.
"And because of that,
the unofficial title is 'missing pieces person.'"
(laughter)
Now, I'm intrigued.
It had been a point of pride for me to be an entrepreneur.
I loved being a business owner.
My name was on the cover of The Wall Street Journal
before I was 30 years old.
This was a hard thing for me to walk away from.
It was my whole identity.
So if I couldn't have that anymore,
I'd take the next best thing,
which is a super-weird job title!
(laughter)
I could picture myself walking into a dinner party
and people would say, "What do you do for a living?"
I would be, like, "Well, I am the missing pieces person
at a jigsaw puzzle company."
(laughter)
And that was the extent of my career planning.
But I get the job, and on the first day,
I answer the phone, and a woman says to me,
"I just spent eight hours of my life
"working on this puzzle and it's--
I'll never get that time back-- it's missing four pieces."
I want to tell her,
"Well, I spent my entire 20s in a terrible relationship.
"I'll never get that time back,
but you don't see me complaining."
(laughter)
It is my first day, so I refrain,
and I solve her problem and I solved the next problem.
A woman calls in, she says,
"I can't imagine how I'm missing a piece,"
and there's, like, four dogs barking in the background.
And I'm, like, "Well, I have some suspicions, but... "
Not all of our calls are complaints.
Some of them are just feedback about what type of artwork
we should have on our puzzles.
One guy says, "If it has a wolf on it,
"I'd buy it.
"I collect wolves.
When are you going to make some wolf puzzles?"
And I'm super-curious about what his home looks like.
(laughter)
We get a lot of letters.
I've become very good at deciphering cursive writing.
If there was a Venn diagram of people who like jigsaw puzzles
and people who like to write handwritten letters,
that overlap portion would be just a circle.
(laughter) Some of these letters...
(laughter continues)
It's a lot of people. (laughs)
Some of these letters have addresses on the return address
that are just longitude and latitude coordinates.
(laughter)
I realize the folks that I'm talking to
are very geographically remote.
They're pretty isolated.
Maybe I'm the only human conversation they're having
that given day,
and I was feeling pretty isolated.
I'd just moved into a new apartment,
I had no friends at this job,
so my compassion really grew for them.
The policy of the company was that we would send them
a brand-new free replacement puzzle.
I thought folks would love this,
but really, they just wanted that missing piece.
They wanted closure.
But all I had to give them was a brand-new free puzzle.
I found out that people don't really like to start over,
and I wasn't enjoying my fresh start that much.
My favorite letter of all time
was really dramatic, very poetic,
and the best line was,
"Can you imagine the frustration
"of never having the ethereal satisfaction
of putting everything into its final shape?"
And I thought,
"Are we even talking about jigsaw puzzles anymore?"
(laughter)
I stayed with that position for about two years,
and I've since been promoted in the company.
I work in marketing.
I love my job.
I feel like I have a real career path now.
But every once in a while,
there's an especially tricky missing pieces person
on the phone,
and they transfer them to me
because I have the most experience in missing pieces.
I did piece my life back together out of nothing.
I did answer a teeny two-sentence ad in Craigslist,
and it turned into this big picture
of what I do for a living.
So now, it's a point of pride for me
to say I'm an expert in the missing piece.
(cheers and applause)