Work Lessons

     Okay folks, I apologize for my long departure.  Seems I was beginning to ruffle a few family feathers- perhaps forcing a few to remember things they'd rather forget, but that's life and as we get older, every road is memory lane.  They will have to deal with it.  This is a book about work- what we give to it, and get from it. So let's continue.     At fifteen one could work part-time and I wasted no time in locating my next source of income. Having always been a tomboy with a love of baseball, (could not and still can not understand why women must play softball!),  an ad for a clerk with our hometown baseball team caught my eye.  I landed this part-time job with the farm team (probably why I'm still a Cleveland Indians fan to this day).  It was an easy job with good after school hours. My duties were to come in around 5 p.m., type up the team roster and news, and then use an ancient mimeograph to make about a hundred purplish...

There's a reason why people who do hard work can be seen buying BC Powders and Excedrin packs at the convenience store during the lunch hour,  swallowing them down with Red Bulls and Big Gulps. People who get up every day and go and do physical labor, hurt! There is a reason why I never put on a pair of socks without appreciating them.  Let's chalk that up to a life-changing brush with labor, the grind of mill work, at the age of 14. In my never-ending pursuit to be among the haves instead of the have-nots,  I decided to take a part-time job at my uncle's knitting mill, - one of many small, independent mills that dotted across Alamance County, North Carolina.  As my Dad took me into the mill, the first things I noticed were the incredible noise levels and the stifling heat.  The air was full of lint and saturated with the smell of oil, a combination that made my head swim. My Dad took me over to see my uncle and say hello and after giving me a quick up an...

You know what I'm talking about.  All that stuff you say you're going to do, or catch up on, or start on your next days off.  And there it sits, the unpainted room, the unsorted closet, the unbathed dog, the car thingy you were going to install- all  pleasantly delayed by the lure of that big shiny thing in your living room or the oh so snuggly curve that fits your body in the mattress. And all those big plans that didn't happen don't get a second thought until the last few hours of your last day off and then we pick up the guilt and carry it into Monday or whatever day is back to work. Well, the hell with it.  Why should we torture ourselves by assigning ourselves unreasonable tasks to be done when we least feel like it?  It's nonsense I say.  Self-defeating, guilt-inflicting nonsense to which we should all say no more!  If we haven't made fitness a daily part of our lives, it's very unlikely to be a weekend thing.  Those things count and need...

For amusement purposes only, I'll tell you of my next childhood businesses. As not-well-thought-out ventures go, they both bombed.  One was the idea to have all the neighborhood kids bring all the medicine bottles in their bathroom cabinets to my house where we poured them all in a big bowl and then redistributed the "more colorful" assortment of pills into bottles that would gain a 25 cent up-charge for all to repurchase.  Instead of new profits, our phone didn't stop ringing for about two hours, followed later that evening by a mob of angry parents separating their medications on our coffee table.  I swear on some days I can still hear someone scream my name from down any given street. Then there was the "mad scientist" as we called him who stopped in our yard one night while we were in pursuit of lightning bugs (okay, fireflies for all you non-Southerners).  He made us a business proposition of a penny for every two bugs we collected and explained to us...

One of the great things about being a kid is that for the first five or six years you are oblivious to your family's financial status.  Your world is full of play and imagination and a great deal of joy can be found in simple things like laying in the grass making clover necklaces or catching a jar of lightning bugs on a summer night. You don't notice so much what you are wearing or how your hair looks because nothing is really real yet. Rats- excuse me, the cat is making conversation with a black sock. Will return shortly. Sorry for the delay - on with the story. Growing up in a small town in North Carolina, money rarely crossed my mind.  The middle child of three, both my parents worked - often shift work.  If I had to place my family economically, I suppose it would have been somewhere between dirt poor and barely getting by.  At no point were there ever extravagances, but we had a roof over our heads that changed often, the best homemade biscuits in the wor...

One night at work I overheard one of my employees say "I hate this job."  I replied, "quit." He looked at me a little surprised, after all as a manager I'm supposed to be singing the praises of the company, encouraging employees to stay with the company and all that. "Look," I told him, "I've had 69 jobs that I quit."  Even as I said the words I realized it sounded like a lie. But I have a list and that's where the number is. Some might say that having and quitting so many jobs shows a profound disrespect for work.  Nothing could be further from the truth because there truly is nothing sadder than seeing a person pushed into depression because he or she can't take care of their family. Work is not just dreading the alarm clock, it is a huge part of our lives. Until recently, I had been working on a book that I had planned to call Work Sucks. That was until I looked up at the TV one night  and saw a lady being interviewed on CN...