The Difference A Week Makes

A week ago right now I was about to go to lunch at my job. I knew what was coming, that I was going to be fired, but I still had to go through the motions of the day.

So that meant lunch.

I had an inkling that I was going to be let go weeks before it happened.

The temperature of the water changed drastically at the place and so I started getting my stuff out of there and taking it home. It certainly made it easier to leave in the end. I can’t imagine having to box things up or watching as someone else did.

A week ago I came back from lunch and wait, wait, waited for the meeting that’d end my time there. It came fifteen minutes earlier than it was scheduled for but it came mostly as I guessed it would.

At that point the atmosphere was all ice and cold.

I was an ex-employee who just hadn’t gotten word yet.

There were so many things about it all that bother me but I think what bothers me most was that you can do two things when you have people working beneath you – you can be a boss or a leader.

You can tell people what to do or you can help make sure they are successful in doing it.

Businesses invest in you once they hire you, as you invest in them.
It’s a partnership that both sides benefit from and which both sides need. There is no point in hiring someone who you don’t believe in and no point in working someplace that you can’t believe in.

There’s a dehumanization that has happened in this country and the world, where people are numbers, are place holders. I get the notion of it, in that, if you take everything to heart you can’t survive in business but here’s the thing, it SHOULD hurt to fire someone. It SHOULD affect you. You are taking someone’s safety, livelihood, and pushing them out to sea without a preserver. Sometimes those people are just the wrong people for the job, or are intentionally doing things incorrectly, or maybe they just hit a rough patch and should be thrown a line.

We never know until we ask.

It’s been a long, weird week. I adapt well but this has still been hard. Suddenly so many people you used to see every day are gone from your life. So many connections you had are lost. Your routine is gone. Your future is changed. My days of retirement fantasies and all that are gone.

This is a hard reboot.

But life has them.

Bumps in the road and such.

But the road is still there.

I am still here.

It’s just been a heck of a week but after weeks of sleepless nights and high anxiety I am happier to be through the fire than still in it.

…c…