Worth the Effort�

2002-01-03

I've pretty much gone insane over the holiday season this year. Have I said that I hate my job recently? I know, I know; when I hate it bad enough, I'll leave. I really don't want to leave. It's a good company. It does the best it can for it's employees. I was the benificiary of it's largesse within the first three months of when I started. Of course, it was because they had a wacko on staff, and knew it. This guy drove me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Five years after I was all set to leave because of him, I'm still here, and he is gone. They gave me a chance to work somewhere else in the company becaue they knew he was crazy. I didn't know enough about 'Corporate America' to know why.

Now I know. They didn't want me to sue. They knew he was nuts, but he was the only person available that knew enough to do what they needed. As soon as they could, they got rid of him.

He was a hideous man. He brought personal furniture to work. I'm sorry, I will never bring to my office anything I can't take home in a file box. It would be just too humiliating to have to go back for a second load. (I am sitting here right now, thinking what it must have been for him to have to bring people to come and move his furniture.)

I feel much better now. I outlasted him. That and the person that was actually doing his job, got his job.

I'm not good with people. It's taken me years just to learn how to be nice. I'm still not good at it. I'm solitary by nature, and my early working life (worked ten years in a shop, all by myself) didn't help.

I'm trying to be better. I've got at least as much out of my job as I've put in (say it softly). I've learned a lot, and I've found people that I really like having in my life.

I think maybe I'm lucky. I've got a spouse that loves me, spoils me, but wouldn't hurt himself for me, at least not under everyday circumstances. I have almost never doubted that I am loved.

I have also got to meet people whose interests I share. These are work people, but people I am proud to call friends. The few and far between people. The people that were totally missing from my life when I worked alone.

You, you know who you are. You have made working at a regular job worth the effort. Worth years of effort. Each and every one of them.

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