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Posts Tagged ‘job’

  1. How to Go Down When the Ship of Life is Sinking

    May 28, 2017 by Diane

    For the love of God, jump!

    I can’t remember the last time I laughed. I mean one of those stress-busting hearty belly laughs where tears stream down my cheeks and I can’t breathe. In a good way.

    My workplace took a turn for the serious. The ship is sinking. At first it listed. We added more weight to even things out, but all that weight filled the ship with water, and now we’re going down like the Titanic. Some people jumped overboard. Others were pushed, gently and with great sadness, to lighten the load. The rest of us are bailing water like crazy and occasionally getting into catfights.

    There’s a rescue ship on the horizon. We can see it, but it’s not here yet.

    So we offload more weight and strap on life preservers.

    This is the third sinking ship I’ve been on. The first was a travel adventure company that adventured it’s way straight into bankruptcy. The second was a nonprofit that managed their books so badly they didn’t realize they were out of profits until I developed a budget, brought in an ace accountant, and pointed out: the money? It’s gone.

    What’s the common denominator?

    Me!

    Am I the hex that brings these ships to their nautical knees?

    Or am I just boarding the wrong ships?

    At a writer’s conference one summer, a respected writer/teacher/book reviewer brutally edited my short story. The first paragraph alone was so bloody from the red pen, the page sobbed in pain. I told myself, I’m not a writer, I’m an actress, and marched across the quad to the empty theater, sat in the back row, and cried.

    Wrong ship?

    On Saturday nights, KQED airs movies. This week, it was the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. As I watched, transfixed, I remembered working on that show in college, watching from the lighting booth every night while lusting over the set construction manager who lusted over one of the dancers. I remembered dancing the ballet sequence in another R & H musical, Oklahoma, when my partner almost dropped me into the orchestra pit. I remembered shimmying on the grocery store checkout counter as Babe Secoli in the musical Working, and belting songs with a cockney accent in The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd.

    I remembered those smells, those roars. My heart yearned for what was missing, like a long lost love. I told myself, that’s the ship I belong on, not this sinking tub I’m on now.

    Here’s the thing. I could bail, but the lifeboat is sinking too.

    It’s not a matter of finding the right vessel for my voyage. It’s a passenger issue.

    I was one of those cats fighting last week. That isn’t me. The real me finds humor in the nutty stuff that drives us nutty. But there I was, snarling, showing my claws, ready to jump. Stress will do that to me.

    I haven’t found the humor in the situation yet.

    However. Until the rescue boat arrives (and it will arrive), I’m committed to going down dancing and singing. I’ll be like those musicians on the Titanic who refused to abandon their instruments, sawing away on their violins as screams filled the air, because as long as they still had breath, nothing had the power to take away their music.


  2. You Can Be the Hero In Your Job Again

    October 2, 2016 by Diane

    child playing with toy airplane

    We played at working, remember?

    We played house and war and spy and doctor and pilot.

    Of course, it wasn’t the real deal. We didn’t clock in and pull double shifts. We weren’t hiding in bunkers as real bullets landed true. It wasn’t us telling a young couple their toddler didn’t make it on the operating table. We weren’t the ones sitting in a beat-up Buick drinking coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and eating bologna sandwiches, and keeping an eye on a particular house halfway down the block to see if Mr. So-and-So was do-si-do-ing with someone other than Mrs. So-and-So, when all we really wanted to do was find a urinal.

    As kids, work was a game. And we were the hero.

    We just cut out the boring, dangerous, and unfulfilling parts.

    What we really wanted, was to be all grown up. Without the responsibility.

    We didn’t want to pay real taxes.

    We didn’t want to wipe real butts and mop real floors and gaze through the window wishing we were outside pretending to be mommy or daddy. No, no, no. Those were dolls we played with, plastic and rubber and cloth, and we could toss them aside when we grew tired of the game.

    Playing adults, we discovered, wasn’t quite the same as being adults.

    And work wasn’t necessarily all that grand.

    Flipping burgers, babysitting, filing papers, getting up at five a.m. to deliver newspapers on our bike in the rain. Where was the fun in that?

    Bagging groceries was entertaining…for about five minutes.

    Same with waitressing.

    Work became something we worked at. If we were lucky, we found something fulfilling to do that paid for the mortgage and groceries, letting some other poor sap bag them. If we weren’t lucky, we suffered the nine-to-five. Or became disenchanted, working the same gig half our life.

    Where did our sense of play go?

    What if we let the kid in us play at working again, but for real this time?

    What if we did our job…as the kid?

    Here’s what. We’d last thirty minutes, tops. Then the whining would start, maybe a tantrum. “WHERE’S MY COOKIES AND MILK!”

    We’d take naps.

    Then, out of boredom, we’d play.

    Bagging those cans of soup and heads of iceberg, we’d get creative. We’d try it with eyes closed. Behind our back. Twice as fast. We’d juggle them. Loft them into the bag. “Two points!”

    Filing contracts, we’d break out the Crayolas and draw pictures all over them first.

    Serving hash browns and eggs, we’d act like famous movie stars.

    Carting away people’s garbage, we’d sing arias.

    Flipping burgers, we’d tap dance.

    Driving the bus, we’d wear a cape.

    We’d find ways to turn work into a game. And if we got pulled into the boss’s office to hear, “You’re fired!” well, we’d kick off those adult-sized shoes and find a hill to roll down on our way home.

    Fact is, once we crossed the line to adultdom, responsibility came with the package. Unless we planned to mooch off our parents for the rest of our lives—or theirs—we couldn’t unleash the kid on our employer’s time.

    But who says we can’t bring that childlike enthusiasm, that creative imagination, that sense of wonder and exploration, to our everyday work? Who says we can’t find a way to bring the play back into working, and still be a responsible adult?

    No one. No one’s saying it, except, maybe, ourselves.

    So go ahead. Whistle while you work. Be the happiest dang garbage collector in the Northern Hemisphere. Be the most awestruck accountant, the most curious sales clerk, the most inventive mechanic.

    Or find the work that makes you feel like a hero again.

    What did you want to be when you grew up? What did you become? What one thing do you do, or can you do, to make your work fun?