Reporter's Note: President has been in office 265 days. That’s a lot of days and a lot of letters to the White House.

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Tom Foreman | BIO
AC360° Correspondent

Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations! Everyone made so much noise about your first hundred days, let me be the first to wish you the very best of luck as you head into the final hundred days of your first year in office!

I’ll bet you didn’t even notice. That’s how it is with new jobs. When you first get one, you keep track of every hour, then every day, then every week, then suddenly you’re packing a box, moving on to the next opportunity and wondering where all the years went.

I used to work in a grocery store as a stock boy, and let me tell you it could be miserable sometimes. The cardboard boxes would cut the edges of my fingers as I reached in for cans of peaches and beans. The old milk I had to dispose of in the back room sink was so vile it made me gasp for air. My arms ached from mopping up spills on aisle four, and five, and six…and you know the rest.

So I came up with a trick. When I was scheduled for a particularly long shift, like 12 hours, I would imagine precisely what it was going to feel like when I was done. I would briefly close my eyes, blocking out the smells, sounds, and the buzz of shoppers; and I would think about how the night air would feel on my skin, how the store lights would flicker out behind me, and how the farm fields would roll past as I went home. And how the hours, once safely put behind me, would feel like no time at all. It worked and helped me through some awfully long days.

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