simplerich

So, sometimes work makes me crazy right?

It’s management and I’ve been at it for a while. Sometimes I feel like I’m saying the same things over and over to the same people and I just want to scream! Or it seems like the higher-ups are making insane decisions without even talking to any of us front-liners. Or it seems like politics are what are driving decisions instead of the good of the stores, company, whatever. It’s been like that in almost all the places I’ve worked and under everybody I’ve worked for. Some things are just perceived that way sometimes. (For all you co-workers out there reading this wondering if I’m violating our don’t talk about work under pain of termination brand new shiny social media Internet policy I’m not. I’ve had bouts where I felt like this in every job I’ve ever been a member of management in, so get over yourselves. This song isn’t about you!)

So, to all you white-collar whiners out there talking about how this is terrible and you don’t know how much longer you can do it blah blah blah. Find one of your blue-collar friends who actually WORKS for a living and go work with them for a day or two. Seriously. On your next vacation or day off see if you can go to work with someone who works with their hands and back for a while. I’ve made a point of doing this through the years. I’ve walked beans, worked construction, and most recently, worked installing hardwood floors and carpet. (Oh, and if you don’t have any blue-collar friends, you should go find some. Broaden your horizons a bit. Diversity isn’t just about race or ethnicity or any of that. Diversity is about diversity.

It was two days before I could make a fist or pick up my coffee cup without thinking I was going to drop it. Tack strip, the stuff that goes along the edges of a room so the carpet can be attached to it and stretched into place, is a demonic thing. It’s a strip of wood about an inch wide and quarter-inch thick that has nails going out both sides. It’s alive, hates me, and is out to get me, not kidding here. Some nails hold the strip to the floor and others hold the carpet to the strip. It’s nailed into the ground, sometimes concrete… BY HAND… right next to sheet rock. Care to guess what happens if the hammer slips and slams into the sheet rock of this person’s brand spanking new house? Yeah… nothing good.  What happens if you’ve cut yourself on the tack strip or one of the dozen knives used to cut the carpet, pad, whatever? Yeah… you’re bleeding all over brand new carpet in this person’s brand new house. You want stress? Forget getting your TPS reports done on time and CC’d to the right people. Install carpet for a day in new construction.

What’s that? It’s “just” manual labor? Until you’ve done it I don’t think you’re entitled to say “just” in that context. It’s like waiting tables or working behind a counter at a fast food restaurant. Until you’ve done it I don’t think it’s a good thing for you to look down your nose at those people. “But I went to school so I wouldn’t have to do those kinds of jobs.” Ah. I see… and yet, you need them. You need those people you’re better than. You need them because regardless of how much education you have… they have skills you don’t have, skills I don’t have and I’m a pretty smart guy! I’m also smart enough to know that while I play at carpet installer there’s no way I’ll ever get higher than assistant flunky. Perhaps one day I’ll be a full-fledged flunky… one day years from now. But those people holding jobs other people went to school so they wouldn’t have to do… I’m glad they’re there because I can’t do what they do and I’m really glad they’re there to help me when I need it.

The person I worked for is picky. He’s a perfectionist. If I were getting flooring done I’d want him to do it because I know it’d be done right. Working for someone like that is sort of like working for me. I’m picky at my work. I want things done right as well. It’s HIS name on the side of the van and it’s his reputation on the line with every nail I drive and every cut I made. I asked for him to check my work probably more than he wanted to, but his confidence in my ability was higher than mine. Funny thing that… I’ve had employees say the same thing to me. He, without knowing it, was doing to me what I do to my employees. He showed me how, he let me do it while he watched, and he trusted me to do things that he knew he could fix if I botched… and he got out-of-the-way to let me get the experience and confidence I would need to do other things.

You know what I’m most confident about? My hands are almost fully recovered. My back isn’t hurting too bad today, and my knees… you have any idea how much time you spend on your knees when working on floors? A LOT! They should put floors higher!!!… my knees will one day recover I’m sure. Would I do it again? Yep. It’s kind of fun in a way. Part of the fun is I know I don’t have to do it a lot. I’m choosing to do it and it really looks good to leave work at the end of the day and see what you’ve done in a very real, tangible way.

PS: I didn’t do any of those accidents yet. The worst I’ve done was an accident involving a saw, a board kicking back, the back metal plate breaking off, and the palm of hand being smashed to pulp and bursting so blood oozed out onto the floor and continued to seep out most of the day. No bones were broken so I’m happy. I feel bad for wrecking the saw though. No clue what happened, just glad I still have all my fingers since it happened so fast it was over before I knew anything was happening. It made the most spectacular bruise on front and back of my hand. In the story I told there was me defending a bus load of nuns and orphans from terrorist hijacker ninjas. Please don’t tell anybody the truth. The ninja thing sounded way cooler.

Once upon a time I created a monkey list and it was ambitious but doable… It never got off the ground. Well, that’s not true. I did buy the calendar… I just never put any check marks on it as I did the things. Which left me with the feeling I wasn’t getting them done. Stupid screaming monkeys in the back of my head nagging me, pestering me, giving me this feeling of “You’re not doing the things you’d publicly committed to doing! You’re a failure! You suck! You’re a pretentious faker with your fancy pants blog and your blah blah blah…” My inner voice is kind of a jerk sometimes.

I’m reading the book, The Spark, from the creator of Sparkpeople.com.  One of the first things it says to do is to write your goals, physically write them down and put them where you can see them. This is important for two reasons. One, so you remember to stay focused on them, and in my case, so I can remember that there IS progress being made. I started this post as an apology. I couldn’t remember my list and in my head… with that voice up there talking to me I felt like I’d dropped the ball and had this chronic public failure thing going through my head. It was really bugging me. So, I came on here to apologize and start over with a smaller list. Then I looked at the list.

• Half an hour of yoga at least five days a week.
• At least 3 crossword puzzles a week.
• Read at least half an hour with an hour being better for relaxation. Not work related reading.
• Start running again.
• Get down to 165lbs and stay there for a while. I went from 205 to 175 but want another 10lbs.
• Cook and eat at home at least twice as often as I eat out… at least!
• Get my bike running.
• Finish my novel.

Holy crap! I’ve done most of the list! I’ve put the ones in bold that I’ve completed… “Get my bike running” is half in bold because I’m almost there with that one. lol The Crosswords & Yoga. I haven’t done them at all. I also quit smoking, something I hadn’t added to the original list because I was ashamed to admit I’d started again after having quit for five years.

My goodreads goal of reading 40 books this year is still on track. I’m ahead of schedule and that’s OK. Some of my books were short so probably shouldn’t count. I think some ppl doing this are only counting those really cool books that they don’t care if ppl see they read. I’m counting fiction too… really good fiction in some cases. Dan Wells’ “I’m Not A Serial Killer” series is really good! But not something I’d want to read in an airport. Also not one I’d take with me if I were meeting a mentor so they’d see what I was reading. Reading’s funny that way isn’t it? There are those books we all think we SHOULD be reading… and then there’s our guilty pleasure books. Why do we feel guilty for having a good read? Get over it! It doesn’t ALL have to be “Saving The World in 3 Easy Steps!” Sometimes it’s OK to read about the Zombie Apocalypse, and since my goal was escapist non-work reading I’m actually following my goal on that one!

For the weight loss thing, I’m back on Sparkpeople.com managing my fitness and trying to stay on track there. I really like that site. The articles, the stupid points you can get… the spark-streaks (like the seinfeld calendar, but online). I call them stupid points because they’re stupid… and I love them. It’s a constant stream of positive reinforcement for doing things I should be doing anyway. It makes it a game almost to score points. Life as a game that I can get points in I like. The more I work out the more points I get. The more food I log the more points I get. (Granted, the part where I want to log healthy food is on me. I COULD log bags and bags of chips and get as many points as if I logged a salad and some fruit. The important part for me is the logging. Just paying attention helps me make better choices.)

Maybe I’ll get on the Crosswords and maybe I won’t.  Maybe I”ll keep up with the yoga on the non-running days, but the five days a week I know won’t happen. I won’t make the time for it. I’ve taken them off the list by lining them out. They don’t get erased. They can still be there to remind me for later maybe… but the lined out part means they’re not on my list so no pressure to doing them or not. When doing yoga becomes a stressor something’s gone horribly wrong lol.

So, instead of apologizing for being a failure on my Monkey-list I’m going to say to all of you who have long to do lists… Write them down, remember to re-evaluate them periodically, and that David Allen Guy is right… out of your head and onto paper. If for no other reason to get the stress thing out of your head. I feel SO much better now that I look at the list and realize that my inner jerk is a rotten liar! My next blog post will talk a bit about my inner jerk and a teacher I had that made a huge difference to me. She’s dead now so no chance she’ll see this, and that’s too bad.

Mary Poppins said when they were cleaning the kids’ room, “Once begun is half done!” That’s true of more than just cleaning rooms.

I quit smoking for five years. Got some personal catastrophe that was pretty life changing and thought to myself, “You know what? A cigarette won’t change a thing but I want one right now and I’ve been quit so long I’ll smoke a pack just to get through this without driving into a bridge abutment.” So, I bought a pack… Nine months later I was still looking for the perfect time to quit smoking. I’d wait until this pack was over… then I’d wait until inventory was over, but then oh wait… not this weekend, gotta busy one. I’ll just… finally I bought some patches and lozenges and armored up… I wore the patch for a couple of days and used the lozenges for a couple of days (not at same time as the patch.) And then I quit. No nicotine substitutes, not cigarettes, no patches, no lozenges. It wasn’t exactly cold turkey but it wasn’t the way those nico-replacements say to do it either. The thing that was important was to quit waiting for the right time and just quit already.

A couple of days ago it was 95 degrees. I was going for a walk. I’d been working my way up to running again but haven’t yet. You know… needed the perfect time to start. So, here I am on the nature trail, walking in jeans and a t-shirt and it’s 95 and humid as hell and I realize… I feel pretty good. I feel like a quick jog. So, I ran some intervals. I haven’t run since July of last year, not really. So intervals seemed like a good start. The part where I was in jeans drew some looks but hey… why not? If I had a lion chasing me I’d run in jeans and not stop to change into running shorts. Today I ran again… twice. Once in the morning on purpose and once in the evening by accident. I don’t have my stamina yet, but I can feel it. I’m better than I was the first time I started running. I didn’t need to way for the perfect time to start. I started while wearing jeans and it was 95 degrees.

My point is what are you waiting on? What are you waiting for the right time to do? I wasted a lot of time waiting for the right time to do both of those things when I could really have just done them and gotten it over with. Talking to my room mate’s mom today at dinner and she said something similar, “I like to go for a walk, but that first five minutes is the hardest. Once I get started I’m good. But it’s the getting started that’s tough.” She’s right.

I’m glad I’m not smoking again (this quit was easier than my first quit because I knew the craves would go away… when I was craving one I knew it wouldn’t last forever and it would get better. The first time I quit smoking I assumed it would always suck. It doesn’t.). I’m also glad to be running again. I can’t wait to get my legs back. I was pleasantly surprised to have not lost my wind.

Today while I was hiking I was listening to Mur Lafferty‘s Podcast “I Should Be Writing” today and she talked about how odd it is to hear adults say, “I want to bake a cake” (or whatever) but they don’t actually bake the cake. Why not? They’re adults. If they want to do something there’s nobody telling them they can’t. It’s not like they’re 6 and want to bake a cake and need help or permission. I’m an adult. I didn’t have to wait for permission to run or quit smoking. When I would say, “I want to quit smoking” but then didn’t actually go about QUITTING I was saying, “I want to say I want to quit… if I actually wanted to quit I’d work on quitting and not on talking about it.” I’d say, “I want to run” but I wouldn’t run. So what I meant was, “I want to say I want to run.” If I’d wanted to run… I’d have run. I wanted to watch Survivor and I watched that. I wanted to eat and I ate. I wanted coffee in the morning and I got that… those things I really want… I do. So next time you hear someone say, “I want to…” Push them. Find out why they’re not doing it right now? What’s stopping them? Do they really want to? Or do they just want to appear to want to? If they want to why not do it right now? Once begun is, after all, half done!

Mary Poppins wouldn’t lie to us. “Once begun IS half done.” So, get busy getting started and once you’re off your butt and doing that thing you’ve been putting off you’ll be half done! There’s probably nobody stopping you but you!

Did you know I have another blog? One that’s more personal and less thoughts on manager stuff? I do. Whether or not you find it more interesting or not I don’t know but I thought I should tell people it’s out there.

I just put up a post that’s a writing chunk kind of thing. It’s incomplete but it’s thoughts on towns and town’s personalities… it’s a little maudlin maybe. It’s a first draft and I don’t know that it’ll go anywhere but I had it in my head and had to get it out on paper. It started life as something I wrote down and just now I typed it up so I wouldn’t lose it. I lose fewer things online than I do in real life.

I’ll refer the two blogs to each other once in a while, but not all that often as the two aren’t terribly related except in that I write them both. I doubt they have the same target audience at all… I haven’t put much thought into audience on the Simplerich Strikes Back blog as it really is just a personal blog so it’s more online journal than anything directed or specifically FOR someone else. It’s more for me.

So, if you didn’t know about it go give it a look. You’ll find writing chunks, book reviews, winning lottery numbers… OK. You won’t find lottery numbers. I was just seeing if you were listening.

Once upon a time I was a troubleshooter. I think that’s the nice name for it. If there was a store or area that needed help I’d get a call. I didn’t have any kids and it was easy for me to travel. I could go to the area and sometimes figure out who was worth saving and who wasn’t or I’d already be tasked with replacing everybody. If it was option two I was part of a team that would go in and take over, get a new crew, get them trained and leave again. Now, that wasn’t my job at the time. My actual job was I was an area supervisor with anywhere from 4 to 11 stores to supervise. But if something came up. I was often the one that got the call. I really liked the travel. I got to work in every state we had stores in and got to meet a lot of interesting people and see a huge variety of stores. It was a lot of fun.

I never saw myself as a hatchet man. I was more of a fixit guy. I got to take part in store take overs when we’d buy some stores and go in and turn them from a mom and pop store into one of our stores in a couple of weeks, switching out the inventory, point of sale system, and train the crew all without closing the store. It was definitely a hit the ground running kind of thing in both situations. Our primary concern was always to make the transition as smooth as possible for the customer and to try to retain (in most cases) as many of the people as would stay and do things the new way. Sometimes it was part of a fire everybody and start over thing. I didn’t like those as much. Sometimes it was a fire the manager and see who in the crew should stay. Those were harder. The only one of those I didn’t like was when it was a manager who had no idea they were in trouble. That one felt bad. He should have known it was a possibility. But, he didn’t and I didn’t know it until after it’d happened. He handled it better than I did. I felt like a shmuck.

I got to do that for years and without even thinking about it I wound up getting a reputation as a hatchet man. It was NEVER my idea to do this to stores. I was just the person that got called to do it after someone else made the decision it needed doing. I saw it as I was keeping as many as could be kept and making things better. From the outside it looked like I went in, took out the opposition, replaced them, and then went home to wash my hands and rest up to do it again, and never lost a moment’s sleep. Mostly that’s true. I didn’t lose sleep except when I was working the long days, in one store there were some 24s. That was a takeover and we didn’t get the computers when they were supposed to show up. I didn’t care. It was New Orleans and I was eating on an expense account. Any amount of hours is worth that!

Fast forward to last year when I stepped down and became manager of a store that opened up. Do you want to guess how the crew felt when I showed up to be manager? They were all scared to death of me. I couldn’t figure out why. I hadn’t done anything to the previous manager. I took his position when it opened up, but I didn’t open it up. Didn’t matter. My reputation had preceded me. Nothing I could say would change their mind. It didn’t help that customers knew of me from when I’d done it at other stores… turns out I was sort of KNOWN for going in and cleaning house and then wandering off whistling and drinking a cup of coffee with a smile on my face. The rumors were impossible to deal with. “Oh, he’s just being nice until he gets your replacement. He’s like that. Seriously. You have to watch him. He’s good at what he does, and what he does is clean out stores.” Wow.

So… It’s been six months now. I’m still here and haven’t wandered off with a cup of coffee and a smile. But today, this morning, the janitor asked me, “So, you going to X to clean out the store? I heard they needed it and that’s what you did. You’ve been here a while.” *sigh* What’s it take to convince them that I’m done with that part of my job? Not because I’m glad to be. I miss the travel. But because I want to be home more? I dunno. You’d think six months of me and they’d know I was settled down and happy here. Maybe I should fire them all and start over. *grin* KIDDING! But seriously… how long does it take for them to stop thinking I’m an ogre? I wasn’t then, and I’m not now. But I can see how they’d think so. In my defense, most of the time the stores where I went, they liked me and wanted me back after I left. THEY didn’t see me as an ogre. It’s just all how it looked from outside. (You want a hatchet man, that’s MY boss… he’s the one that made the decisions. I just implemented them as humanely and kindly as possible and saved as many of them as I could.)