Cupid In The Cubicles E Meet Across A Crowded Workplace, Another Office Romance Is About To Bloom
Working closely together can foster romantic attraction. Deadlines generate the tension and euphoria of passion. Jargon can create a private language.
Still, none of that explains how Teri Marrazzo, walking across the Itron lunchroom, caused Kevin Liechty to fall in love.
“I saw her eyes, and I was lost,” says the process technician of Marrazzo, a software engineer.
He wondered - and wandered - trying to find her. Dragging a friend along, he combed the cubicles at Itron. He plotted for weeks how to start a conversation.
The company softball team? No, she was already playing. Volleyball? Yes, every lunch hour.
And then, the jewelry box that held a ring. And then, a wedding, June 14, 1997. And now, a son, Ryan, 3 months.
Finding love at work may be the logical outcome of two people sharing common interests, long hours and zero social life. But dozens of Spokane and North Idaho couples know what’s really at work: the delicious and capricious hand of fate.
“What if he hadn’t been on that bus?” asks Nancy Mertz. She was a sea-kayaking guide working for Baja Expeditions in Mexico in February 1991 when a co-worker, a Seattle guide named Terry Prichard, brought his guests onto her bus. He asked her for directions. The day after the trip ended, they met for a friendly breakfast, then talked for the next nine hours.
“It was `Twilight Zonish,”’ Mertz says. “We were both 36, both oldest children. We had the same values, hopes and life philosophy.” They went hiking. “We were ready to marry at the end of four days.”
Eight years later, the couple operates the international Sea Kayaking Adventures in Coeur d’Alene.
Studies completed five years ago showed a quarter of all employees had been involved in a workplace romance. Now 40 to 50 percent have. More than half end up in marriage. Spokesman-Review readers flooded us with stories of meeting at work.
“Cupid needs better public relations,” says Dennis Powers, an Oregon author of the “The Office Romance. “There is no question work is the greatest matchmaker outside of university life.”
Social scientists say time and proximity create sparks. But fate works wonders with a fax and a phone.
In fall 1997, the owner of Spokane International Translation and Language Services needed eight medical words translated into Italian. Marta Reyes faxed a request to a statewide directory of translators. The first eight didn’t pick up. Seattle Spanish teacher Eric Anderson did. He translated those words and others.
The two phoned and faxed frequently, about projects, about trips to Costa Rica and eventually about themselves: Both are fluent in Spanish, had lived overseas, been married before, and had three children. The night they finally met, he knew he was moving to Spokane. Today, they work together in the office on West Mission. He is 52, Reyes is 46, and they’re planning their wedding.
“Our love is our refuge and the source of our strength together,” Anderson says.
Fate held the phone when Tony Fausett of North Idaho called Blue Cross in Boise eight years ago, frustrated and furious. Melanie Allen, the customer service representative who answered, was kind and helpful. After that, he always asked for her, and they spoke often as he struggled with medical claims from a degenerative bone disease that cost him his leg beneath the knee. One day, when Melanie came to Coeur d’Alene to see a friend, she stopped to see him.
“I liked everything about him,” she says, especially his intelligence and how after his career in mining ended, he learned to repair antique clocks and pocket watches. She moved to North Idaho and a year later, on May 1, 1998, they married.
“We feel like fate brought us together,” Melanie Fausett says. “There were 40 other people answering phones that day and that call didn’t come to anyone else. What are the odds?”
How about one in 3,000? That’s how many miles Andy Egloff of Maryland traveled to work at the Hard Rock Cafe in London, where he met his wife-to-be Samantha as they folded T-shirts and sold shot glasses.
They worked together in Alaska and Boise before marrying July 24 in Spokane, her hometown. Today, they own and operate Field of Beans on North Maple, working together every day in an 8-by-16-foot espresso shop they jokingly call the “Love Shack.”
“We’ll never be able to work with anyone else,” Andy Egloff says. “She completes my thoughts and I know what she’s thinking before she says it. And to think we had to cross an ocean to meet.”
Pam Watts needed only to cross the hall. When she needed an escort to a U.S. Bank party she was hosting in Yakima, a co-worker suggested Steve Lilla, a trust officer in another department. He agreed. It wasn’t a real date but they sat on the front porch afterward talking until 4 a.m.
Thirteen months later, she again walked into his office, closed the door (he was alarmed) and asked him to elope - a limo was idling in the parking lot. She had the suit, the rings, the wedding dress and, thanks to the collusion of both supervisors, the rest of the week off.
They were married Oct. 21, 1991, in North Idaho. When they returned to work that Monday, the bank staff threw them a reception. Today, Pam Lilla is still with U.S. Bank in Spokane. Steve is with Forney Industries.
Others married and stayed married at work - a phenomenon most common in media, entertainment and the software industries, researchers say.
Teresa and Rick Lukens met at KXLY-TV in Spokane and married Oct. 3, 1987. Both are still there: She’s a senior promotion producer and he’s sports director.
“You tend to eat, breathe and live television,” Teresa Lukens says. “People who are not in the business don’t get it. But we love what we do, and it’s not just a job. It’s your whole life.” Now their daughters, 6 and 7, are part of that life - making commercials.
Other couples married and changed jobs - together. Dale Higgelke met his wife Marci at 18 working for city park maintenance. He and his friend, sneaked a look at personnel files to get phone numbers for Marci and her best friend. The Higgelkes married in August 1983 and have two children. Their friends, Jim and Brenda Fullmer, also married and have four children.
For the last decade, the Higgelkes have worked at Deaconess Medical Center where Marci is a nurse’s aide and Dale works in maintenance. “We car-pool and have breakfast and lunch together every day in the hospital cafeteria,” Marci says. “That’s our one-on-one.”
Joe Conrad, a sheriff’s deputy in Valley County, Idaho, was asked in early 1995 to escort a new young dispatcher around. Fifteen months later, he called in this traffic stop: “Will U. MARE? 1-17-97.”
“I didn’t get it,” Mary Conrad says. Finally the sergeant standing behind her put a ring in front of her and told her to read what she had written down.
“I burst into tears and squeaked out: `Affirmative,”’ she laughs. Mary Conrad went on to work as a dispatcher for the Idaho State Police in Coeur d’Alene while Joe is attending college.
J.L. and Stacey Garcia met when he was a jockey wanting to ride the horses she trained at the Coeur d’Alene racetrack in 1982. By the end of that season he’d asked her to marry. He won 20 races for her before they stopped racing, using their earnings to pay for college. She became a registered nurse in Spokane; he’s an engineering technician with the Washington Department of Transportation.
“In those 17 years there have been almost no arguments,” J.L. Garcia says. “We get along very, very well. But I don’t think I would have ever met her if we hadn’t been at the racetrack.”
Fated love also tempts fate.
Lynn DeSena was supervising the upgrade of a Hawaiian hotel when she noticed a construction worker, Jeffrey DeSena, who in her words was “Aloha happy.” Although she was his boss’s boss, she agreed to dinner which led to a full-blown affair, including sneaking to unoccupied hotel rooms on lunchhours.
Thirteen weeks after they met, they married - both for the first time - on the beach at Maui. “It could have cost me the job, it was a scary time for me,” Lynn DeSena said. “But when I did tell the supervisor, he said, `Why didn’t you invite me to the wedding?”’ Five years later, Jeff is still in construction and Lynn works at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute in Spokane.
“I used to be a serious professional person, but when I met him my life changed,” Lynn DeSena says. “We have so much fun. I think we were just made for each other.”
As for Valentine’s Day, no specific plans.
“Maybe we’ll play hotel,” she says.