I recently heard from a good friend of mine, a previous coworker, that she had been fired from my past workplace. Even thinking about this, a situation I was 100% removed from, makes me so angry. This particular workplace represents everything I dislike about our society. People were inconsiderate, disrespectful, arrogant, power hungry; basically everything that is distasteful in someone's personality was part of almost every employee’s personality and behavior. It was a lot like being back in middle school, but the “mean girls” had grown up, become economically powerful, and learned how to be even more manipulative and hurtful. I kept a smile on my face the whole time I worked there, keeping my mouth shut with a polite smile and nod as I watched a business fall apart with immature gossip and poor business practices. It was awful to say the least.
I’m am so grateful to be able to have the skills and experience and support to risk trying something different from the same old underpaid, under-appreciated, emotionally tolling workplace. Hearing about my friend going through this change and needing to find a next step I so hope she can find something that she’s happy at and helps her figure out what she wants to be doing long-term. Unfortunately I think sometimes it takes a horrible experience to be the push that forces you to either rethink what you want to be doing or discover something that you are happy to get out of bed in the morning to do. I think the real challenge sometimes is not only finding a JOB you want to be doing, but a staff of people that you want to be doing that job with. Therein lies the challenge, but luckily for my friend I can’t imagine any worse workplace environment, so she really has nowhere to go but up!
