This seems to be one of the hardest things for me about the ten tigers program. The good news is that I only have a week and a half until graduation. I also have a new goal. I want to get an online store up, running, and profitable by April 2010 or find another job. We have all discussed acceptance. Acceptance makes things easier to deal with. It allows us to move past barriers. It can even help us to effect change in our surroundings. But what about the unacceptable?
I can no longer accept the selfish ineptitude of supposedly intelligent and educated people who adamantly refuse to see the borderline incompetence and overt finger pointing that permeates the working environment in which I must present myself. Judge for yourself. The plan from the mystic world of dementia; Company notifies workers Sunday evening that they will be working Monday until 3 pm and then pouring a bridge deck starting at 3 am on Tuesday. Motel room will be provided. Sounds clear cut and well planned, right?
Ok, now reality: workers wake at 3:45 as usual and drive 1.5 hrs to work. Workers notified at 10 am that we must be on the job ready to pour at 8:30 pm. Office wants to finish the cap we are working on so we work 8 hours to finish. Get to the motel at 3 pm, shower, eat and try to sleep. No luck with the sleep. Workers leave the job site at 4 am Tuesday morning and drive 1.5 hours home. No breaks during pour with inadequate lighting, 2 boxes of doughnuts made available just prior to leaving.
Now the really good part! The reason for the big change was a chance of rain during Tuesday. I'm not sure what kind of access to weather forecasting a million dollar company has but my simple perusal of the weather forecast on Sunday told me what they didn't know until half way through our Monday work day.
The only acceptance I can find in this more and more frequently occurring example is the fact that I can no longer tolerate this. While I have no problem with hard work, being flexible, or even going without sleep when needed, I would rather not do these things just to cover someones poor judgement, greed, and inability to properly plan an event we do on a regular basis.
So here is a challenge to the ten tigers team. Can each team member think of one positive way to mentally deal with a situation that has become unacceptable but requires time to separate one's self from that environment? Imagine yourselves in any scenario you can think of where you might experience things that are unacceptable to you. How would you handle it? How would you prepare yourself? How would you deal with others who are involved?
While writing this post I am aware that it is a bit on the negative side of life. I still wrote it though, with the knowledge that life in general is not always positive and we must occasionally find ways to deal with negativity, sometimes in the extreme. I will have to think a bit in order to answer this challenge, sometime after I have cooled off!
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It is often easier to accept such situations when you know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. You only have to accept that you will be in that situation until your other opportunities are bearing fruit.
ReplyDeleteI admire your honesty and ability to allow yourself to be angry. I stayed in an alcoholic marriage for 14 years. I learned how to detach and conserve my energy as best as I could one day at a time. I learned to accept that he had a terrible disease. However, eventually that disease became more of a burden than I was willing to bear. Yes, I could take it, but at what cost? I used to feel a sense of pride because I could take so much, now I see that I was just allowing myself to be abused. I made a promise to myself (kind of like you did) and I lived the rest of that marriage out one day at a time until the waters became clear and the day I knew it was over, it was over. Acceptance is a process for me. It brings me through several uncomfortable (sometimes agonizing) stages. Denial, bargaining, anger, renegotiating...until finally one day, we just arrive.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I held back and let the Sifus speak first. Their combined thoughts are MOST helpful to me. I hope they are for you as well.
ReplyDeleteI will add, though, that the situation you describe, your job, has been outrageous for some time, even unsafe. Despite your experience and understanding, you have tolerated it all mostly with equanimity -- as if you had no other choice. There is always another choice.
I also want to point out a practical aspect. If you are working this hard, barely able to stretch your energy to cover school, then staying in the same position will mean that you will have to struggle similarly to create your new opportunity. Think about, as Sifu Tammy said, whether it is worth the abuse.
Finally, to answer your challenge directly ... I found myself at U of Louisville working with a professor I knew was difficult, but thought I could handle. I can handle anything, right? I'm tough, smart, ... yeah, well. After one semester of using all my tough and smart trying to manage a mentally-ill personality, I accepted that I couldn't handle her. My next step was to figure out how to get out of that situation without losing ground in my PhD program. I talked to people, made connections to jump to another position, and quit working for her at the end of that first semester. I felt a little bad at first, thinking it was unkind to leave her in the lurch mid-school year(nevermind her extreme unkindness to me), but she took care of herself and hired on some other sucker pretty quickly. I saw then that I didn't matter as an individual at all, and felt no further guilt.
Since I left that position, I know of three others who left the same spot, for similar reasons, and one of those quit the PhD program entirely. I felt vindicated, but also a little slow for not seeing the harm that was being done earlier. I vowed to be wiser the next time.
Getting out of a bad situation sometimes makes us feel like we are quitters. If we were tougher, better, stronger, we could handle it. However, isn't that a little like what abused people of all sorts tell themselves? That the bad other people do to us is somehow our fault? That we provoked it and if we were just tougher, stronger, better, the person (or company) wouldn't be mean to us anymore. What trash!
You are a very skilled, dedicated worker. I'd guess that you could walk onto just about any work site and get a job. Would a pay cut for a while be so bad? A better company would recognize your skills and promote you through the ranks. A less demanding job would let you continue to develop yourself as a person. Jobs are not supposed to be our whole lives. If we're lucky, we like what we do. If we're very lucky, we love what we do. But there's a whole host of other activities that we are supposed to have time to love as well.
Walk away, my friend. Sleep for a week, and then go out and find something better. Oh, and while you're at it, EAT!