This is for me. Sly needs SPF 3000. 
Teeny, Tiny little coffee cups. Or stupid, clumsy ogre hands. 
I get coffee! 
The Zaal's Run on Dunkin' 
Sly on the beach, Zaal in the water. 
Sly more interested in beer instead of sexy Zaal 
It's a pier! 
Tasty Cone. This place is now dubbed Tasty Cone. 
Zaal working, Sly documenting for leverage... erm I mean posterity. 
Tale as old as time. 
"When is he getting off that fucking computer?" 
Look! It's the ocean! 
Alcoholic Slurpees. 
Alcoholic Slurpees!?!?! 
Whimsy. 
Drink it up!
Handcrafted? Bullshit!
Just finished a survey for Starbucks. Throughout, they continually referred to their drinks as ‘Handcrafted’. That is such a crock of shit since the only hands involved in the entire process are used to carry my drink from the automated machine, to the hot water reservoir and back to the drop off counter. That’s it! There was no crafting involved.
How do ‘Mental Health Days’ Reflect Your Satisfaction?
So here I am, sitting in one of a dozen local Starbucks (I really, really hate this place) hooked up to the Telus open wireless hot spot in this area (protected via SAIT VPN) and just had a very funny epiphany. Hopefully, you won’t think less of me after my confession, Gentle Reader.
You see, for a very long time I’ve compared myself to my ideal self. By that I mean the self I thought I was going mature into. You know, you go through your adolescence slowly building up an idea of what you would like the rest of your life to be like. In some cases, you’re correct, usually the easy stuff. Marriage, kids, house ownership. In most others, you’re grossly incorrect but be that as it may, you still have that picture in your head of where you wanted to be and what you wanted to be doing at particular phases in your life. And by ‘you’ I guess I really mean ‘me’.
For those of us that were much less ambitious in our youth, a lot of those things weren’t pursued. I didn’t think post-secondary education was important and took a major short cut. Though there was a close call, I didn’t consider marriage until well into my 20’s and only when I’d finally met my ‘match’.
So if I say that I haven’t been completely satisfied with my life, particularly my professional life, and some of the decisions I’ve made, I think that’d be a pretty good summation of where I was sitting… up till about six months ago.
You see it wasn’t until then that I started getting the opportunity to manage our team and aid in the direction we were moving. Though I’m still pretty green, I’m learning all the time about skills that I truly see as valuable. Yes, I’m getting to the point and it is this….
I haven’t had to take a single ‘sick’ or ‘mental health’ day in several months, probably stretching back to April or so. Like, at all. This is significant as it illustrates a willingness to overlook those shitty days where you wake up, you aren’t feeling 100% and really don’t want to go into work. I’m not positive on this, and I’m sure Sly will correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall that sort of time period without me needing to take a day off a month for decompression or real sickness.
The only way I can explain this is that I’m really finding a certain degree of satisfaction with my work and I really want to be there. I’m not at work today due to a Flexday need and I really wish I was. So much so that I’ve actually been logged into my computer at work, spending some time on a problem that has dogged me for a couple of days. Isn’t that weird?
Yeah, it kinda is. But I’m going to accept this new position and do the very best I can to fulfill the requirements set out before me. Who knows? Maybe I’ve finally found what I was really meant to be and can banish all that adolescent ‘wishing’ to the past and continue, with open eyes and fewer expectations, into the future.