The Zen Kitchen

Explaining the cryptic post from a few weeks ago

Now that a bit of time has passed, and things have had a chance to settle, I'm going to explain why I wrote my insomniac "lessons" post. Well, at least partially, not everything is worked out yet, and I don't want to jump the gun nor curse things.

There were two major and positive events going on in my life at the time that were both very much up in the air, and were causing me to feel anticipation and worry. Anticipation, well, because they were events that could make my life much better. Worry, because neither was a sure thing, and I didn't want to get my hopes up.

I decided to stick with the positive, but not so positive as to be a fool.

The first event was I found out that the company I work for was going to be giving out large pay raises to people in production positions in our company. Since I am the senior production person in my store, I was hoping this would mean a large pay increase for me, and others were giving me the same impression.

This ended up not being the case, in fact, I got royally screwed over by my company. Not only did they not give me the raise they were promising, they gave me a stealth demotion with no explanation other than "our records don't match what you're telling us." And, since I don't have papers proving what my job title was or the amount of time I'd been doing it I was pretty much left at their mercy, my raise was the minimum they were promising - or mere peanuts.

But, in every cloud there is a silver lining, as they say. I was upset over this to say the least. Upset enough that I was ready to leave the company for good and take my chances in this not so spectacular job market. I found out about the stealth demotion before I was supposed to, and at my review I was ready to walk in and tell my boss that I was out the door. Before I got a chance to, however, he looked at me, told me in no uncertain terms that I got screwed, that he thought I got screwed, that he fought for me but couldn't beat the beauraucracy, and announced that the first day he was able he was giving me another promotion so that I would at least get some form of decent raise. At our monthly meeting this morning, I also learned that my fellow coworkers voted me our "Employee of the Month."

My company screwed me. It screwed me hard. But, I have good people surrounding me. People who respect me. People who want the best for me. My boss is fighting for me, my subordinates like me, and wanted to honor me. That's so much more important than money. Would the cash have been nice? Hell yes, it would have been. But I couldn't have used it to buy respect or loyalty. So fuck the CEOs and the paper pushers, but I got to learn that I work with a phenomenal team who stand up for me when the chips are down, and you'd better believe I'm not going to return the favor by walking out on them.

The second event still isn't settled, not by a long shot, but just this evening I got one hell of a confirmation showing that things are going in very much the right direction.

This morning, she had to cancel our second date because she wanted to spend time with her son. I was disappointed, but what kind of person would she be if her son wasn't her priority in her life? I showed up where she worked this evening and offered to walk her home so we could have at least a little bit of the time together that we missed out on this morning. She turned me down, stating that a friend of hers was in town and he was driving her home.

So, as I left, I gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. I looked her in the eye and said, "I'm not giving up on you."

She gave me a coy smile and said, "Don't."

"One final thing I have to do... and then I'll be free of the past."

posted by Shaun @ 2:32 AM