The right thing to do…it’s so hard to know what that is!
I’m reminded of this line from a comic, I think, but I can’t remember, for the life of me. I wish I could, because I have a mental image of something. Ah. No. OK are you ready for a meaningless paragraph? I have that line about the right thing in my head but the image is from Reign of the Supermen, when the cyborg is saying “my memory, so much of it is gone.” Which is possibly apropos considering my memory is pretty much gone regarding the thing I wanted to use to open this blog. So let me just try again and we can forget this, the worst intro ever written to anything.
Sometimes it’s hard to be a robot.
I don’t know what I should do. As you may or may not know, I was recently let go from my job. I’m still at that company however, as of this writing, and will be probably for a few more months.
Now I have to determine a course of action. How do I maintain gainful employment to support my family right? One option is to apply internally. And that’s where being a robot comes in.
Because I have emotions. Like Dr. Hfuhruhurr, I’m a man, flesh and blood. And as such, being fired, no matter how clinical and impersonal, stings. And it makes you think a lot about a lot of things, some of which I’ve thought about here in the open and anyway one of those things is – EFF THIS PLACE. Only I’m not sayin’ “EFF” if you know what I mean.
As I look through online internal job postings I see any number that I might be appropriate for. And I know after fifteen years here that I do have a fair amount of internal karma. I guess what I’m saying is not only is there a nonzero chance I could get one of these internal positions – there might even be a better than 50% chance.
Thing is. Do I do it? That’s where emotions come in because why do I want to stay at a place that already told me to hit the bricks? But then, that’s just emotions talking, you know. If I could latch on to some other gig here, then the immediate financial problem is resolved once again. Is having that, plus a new mindset, enough? Or would I fall back into a rut?
That’s the other thing. This is like one of those life chances to really do something special and great. Get another job. Start over, start fresh. Lose that old baggage. Truly it’s not all bad. If I get a gig internally I’m a lame duck and I lose all that. I probably would just get comfortable all over again.
NO, okay I wouldn’t do that, but it would remove a great deal of motivation from me to start filling those extra buckets, motivation that right now, I have in spades, as evinced by me writing a blog at least every weekday, no matter how vapid.
What the hell am I trying to say here? What the hell is this entry all about? You gotta weigh everything. When you’re presented in life with something this big, there’s not one part of the brain it leaves untouched and you have to get down to the nitty gritty. You have to balance the emotional – holding a grudge against a faceless corporation that never cared about you in the first place, thereby continuing your old codependent relationship with them even in job death – against the logical – taking a job internally that continues to pay the bills, hoping that you can refrain from just sighing deeply in relief and becoming a human cog again, working once again for a corporation that doesn’t give a fig for you.
Right now I’m taking the robot approach. I’m looking at all my options and remembering that the main thing is to support my family and continue to move forward in life, taking recently learned lessons to heart.
Life can suck. But that’s not necessarily bad, it just depends on your point of view.
Later.