Wordless Wednesday: The Cure

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Such a strange thing. The place where I worked for 3 years closed their doors this week, leaving many people without work. I don't think the closing was unexpected, but certainly the timing. March was the buzz I was hearing when I was home, but then they closed just this week.

The strange thing is thinking-- what were those 3 years of work about? Lots of calling people, trying to get them to accept the free stuff they had earned by being AT&T customers. Imagine trying to get people to believe that. Hi, I'm from AT&T. You've earned $500 in Visa cards. Yeah, right they said. But they did. So weird. Then a couple more years of working with an amazing team of project managers, spending entire nights adding little electronic coupons into people's accounts. I know that doesn't make sense when it's typed out, but that's what I spent some time doing. And now that work's for naught. Or is it? I learned a lot of things during my time there:

1. The excitement of having a schedule full of meetings (post-call center)
2. The excitement of having a full day without any meetings (post-1st year in project management)
3. The fun of remembering birthdays with Koch's donuts
4. How to function as someone's second brain (miss you, Donna!)
5. Many Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, and Word tricks
6. The not-so-beauty of the not-so-effective "recall" option in Outlook
7. How to brainstorm for catchy tag lines
8. The bribing/rewarding power of cupcakes
9. How to fill empty hours with "research"
10. The importance of being ethical

I think ethics is ultimately what undermined the business. From the very top to the very bottom of a company, you must have people who do what they say will do, are who they say they are, do business with who they say they do business, and speak frankly and familially with both their customers and their employees. I watched that breakdown, and I am sad to say that.

Differing weights and differing measures-- the LORD detests them both. Even small children are known by their actions, so is their conduct really pure and upright? - Proverbs 20:10-11

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

my own response

I've been lying here, watching the snow come down for several hours thinking about what I posted yesterday.

Abundance. That's what I experienced last month at home. Abundance. In every sense of the word. We had surf & turf with wine instead of frozen taquitos. We had the very best of friends in wave upon wave of laughter and food and unplanned time together. So I think it's only natural that I miss home. But I also think it's got to be natural for me to continue on here where I am. And then I will celebrate all the more those moments of abundance.

I'm reading a wonderful book on Sabbath that I highly recommend-- The Rest of God by Mark Buchanan. And toward the end, he suggests that one of the reasons we don't delight in the abundant rest that Sabbath provides is because we do not know frugality the other 6 days of the week. If we're eating cupcakes everyday, then what's special about a birthday cake? And so I even invite a bit of frugality, because the last year and a half here made me treasure home in a way which was fairly unexpected and deeply celebratory.