Ground Zero

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
- Tyler Durden

Confession time. Work effects my mood. No matter how hard I try not to let it, or how many times I try to tell myself it doesn't matter, it does. Why? That's the more important question. I had to think long and hard about that, and I finally figured it out: My ego.

I remember well getting ready to leave my first job. I was convinced they'd be screwed without me. And when I told my close co-workers of my impending exit, they were down right frightenened because they depended on me so much. I had created an artifical sense of importance in order to feed my own ego. After I left, no earth shattering things occured. The machine kept on chugging as long as it could, with or without my help. Eventually all those people I worked with and that entire division was moved off-shore and they all lost there jobs.

So here we are today, and I've come to recognize the same thing. I have a self inflated sense of my own worth at "work". That things would just fall apart if I wasn't there. But they wouldn't. The machine will roll on, with or without my help. I might make minor contributions here and there, but by and large, the success of a company is way beyond what I do. If the current company I works for starts losing money, my contributions count for exactly dick. I'm just another line item in a budget. I've lived through lay-offs before, and to hell if I'm going to lose sleep over it.

The real lesson I should take away from my first job is this: I'm smart enough to see the end of the tracks. I knew Micron wasn't doing so well, and I could see the division I worked in was not doing so well. And although I survived a first round of lay-offs there, I was smart enough to see that sticking around longer was a gigantic waste of time, since no amount of contribution from ANYTHING would have changed the fact that the entire division was cut and everyone was out of a job.

So instead of letting work effect my mood, I'm simply going to do my best, ignore the rest, and remain unstressed. Nice little rhyme, eh? I'm so clever.