Maintaining Perspective at Work
How many times at work have you shed a tear or two? I know I have!
One particular day stands out as one of the worst. I don’t remember exactly what had me in a sour mood, but like everyone else on the planet, I was overwhelmed at work. It seemed to me that every tech ticket I submitted fell into a black hole never to be seen again and the constant requests for updates were exhausting. I had gotten used to it; that’s just how it was. This day must have been the day the tech team was working on requests that came in several weeks prior.
One of the techies came to ask me about one of my requests, and I explained the situation to him. Then he says to me, “Can you send that to me again? I have a million emails in my inbox.”
I lost it.
“Yeah, so do I! Why are your one million emails more important than my one million emails?? And, by the way, I just explained it to you and showed you screen shots!”
Not ten minutes later, someone else came to me. Different techie, different tech ticket, same scenario.
Talk about Niagara Falls from the eyes!
My poor boss — sitting there watching me cry and reminding me they’re only trying to help. And on a normal day, I would have been fine. But that day was the wrong day to press my buttons.
This is when I realized that work is just work. Yes, it’s important to have a great work ethic, care about your job, put all your energy into your work day, and love your job for more than just a paycheck. It’s the times when everything builds up and I can feel myself starting to go to that place of uncontrollable frustration that I have to remind myself exactly what I was doing. I was in a corporate office where the end user / consumer didn’t even know I existed, and I certainly wasn’t benefitting from company profits. What’s the point of getting all bent out of shape?
My sister was complaining about work one day and I said, “Can you hear yourself? You’re getting yourself all worked up and twisted into knots so that some idiot like me can get a piece of junk mail that is never even going to get looked at and end up in the shredder!”
And my brother worked for Coca-Cola. Somehow his sales job evolved into setting up displays and filling up the beverage machines. Management was all over him because a store was waiting for the distributor, and my brother couldn’t fill the machine until he got the product. We were supposed to meet for drinks that evening and he couldn’t make it because he was stuck waiting. Rightfully so, he was upset that work was taking over his life, once again. I got up on my soap box, of course! “You’re giving up time with your wife, son, and sister just because some moron can’t drink water instead of Coke just this once!”
Point is…what we do matters, but it shouldn’t control our emotional well-being.
Funny thing about that Coca-Cola story. Not long after I lectured my brother about that, my boyfriend at the time and I had a party to go to a couple hours away. We stopped at the gas station and he asked me if I wanted anything and I asked him to grab me a Dr. Pepper. He went inside and came back out and said, “They’re out of Dr. Pepper.” And I sat in that convertible yelling, “Who the hell runs out of Dr. Pepper?? This is a gas station for crying out loud!!!”
And I called my brother and told him to keep filling the Coke machines. 😁
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