Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Another Quora question got me reminiscing about my introduction to free enterprise after retiring from Navy life. It was the first, and only time, one of my boss’s appeared at my front door. It was an unexpected visit after I had abruptly resigned for reasons relating to his fraudulent business practices.
Estimated reading time: 17 minutes
As I’m beginning to wind down my career into retirement, I’m forced into reminiscing about career experiences both good and bad. One recurring theme of bad experiences relates to the many times I’ve been set-up for failures. I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would deliberately put effort into making the people around themselves fail.
I’ve experienced too many people in my professional life who seemingly worked extra hard to get me to fail. Most of the time I succeeded despite the best efforts of other people. But, there was one time I didn’t. As I reminisce about my career I keep coming back to the one time when despite my best efforts, I was successfully set-up to fail.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
I’ve had a long post-Navy career at this point, and moved around a lot in my jobs. Within the different companies I’ve worked for I’ve had the great fortune of moving around doing different things, learning new skills, and working with different people. Some of the things I’ve done and people I’ve worked for were good. Other things and other people – not good.
I’ve also made some bad decisions throughout my career, mostly on basis that my word was the same as my signature, and other people’s word was the same as their signature. So when I had a chance to answer a Quora question ” Did you accept counter offer from your current employer when you put in two weeks, how did it turn out?” I went with my most infuriating job-related incident of trusting someone to keep their word.
During difficult economic times the “Success Gurus” seem to crawl out of the woodwork. These gurus are happy to share the secret of how they made millions of dollars with little-to-no-effort/overnight/the easy way. For just a few dollars they will happily share some of their secrets. For a few dollars more they’ll share all of their secrets.
The secret they don’t share is the secret of showing up.
I’ve been off all week, between jobs, and had the rare pleasure of not having to do anything on anyone else schedule.
It’s been nice.
Well, today was the last day of my new old job. After a short six weeks on-the-job I literally turned in my badge and went home. I have a week’s break, and then start my new job on March 24.
Right after changing jobs, it seems I’ll be once again changing jobs. Yes, It’s completely voluntary – the folks I’m presently working with didn’t get tired of me this quickly. But I do have to admit, this will end up being the shortest I’ve worked at any one place since leaving the Navy.
I haven’t written much these past few weeks. It’s not that this has been a quiet time; It really hasn’t been. Over the holidays we visited with Mom while my brother’s family was also with her in New York. Then they all came down here to Virginia with us. Then they all went back to Mom’s house and we stayed here. Then we started the new year of 2008.
But I haven’t written much just because it’s been a stressful time besides all that. In late December I started to look for a new job.