You know, probably 80% of success in life is showing up. Alas, I didn’t make that up. I’m more or less quoting somebody but I can’t remember who. Maybe it’s an amalgam of a bunch of statements from a bunch of people. The thing is, I didn’t really figure this out until I was maybe about 50. I didn’t figure it out until after I had watched person after person after person commit to employment or volunteer work or even college classes (which they are PAYING for (usually)) and then basically just not show up when they said they would. “My car broke down.” “My grandma died.” “My back hurts.” “My guinea pig is dying.” “My printer didn’t work.” Whatever.

I could kvetch and kvetch about volunteer help all those years I did nursery school and PTO and youth theatre guild work. But the truth is that when you don’t pay people to do something, they don’t show up. Why should they? Or they show up and they don’t do what you want them to do and you don’t have time to train them. Or they show up once, effervescing with enthusiasm and then never show up again. But they are *volunteers*! They don’t get paid! Work is a different thing, in theory anyway. You go to work and you do your job and you are there when people need you and you collect a paycheck every couple of weeks or so. A friend from my elementary school mafia days went to work back then for the JC Penney store in The Mall. I’m not sure if she’s still there but she was there the last time I talked to her. Others? Heck. They would hire people who would NOT SHOW UP TO WORK! Did they get better jobs? I don’t know. If they did, why did they not inform the store that they wouldn’t be working after all.

In one of my earlier careers, we hired keypunchers. Yes, they punched cards. Believe it or not, keypunching required skilled personnel. We never hired a keypuncher who couldn’t do the job. We did hire a couple of keypunchers along the way that would use just about any excuse in the book to not show up for work. In the worst case, one of them worked for us for eight months and took probably about three months out of that off. The day my boss told me he was going to fire her, I had parked my vee-hickle next to hers and I went out and moved mine! And this was after we went to her wedding at some crappy apartment where, during the reception, a drunk guy who was playing frisbee in the parking lot shot vomit out of his NOSE and then just kept on playing. I can’t believe I just wrote that either.

I will never be the CEO of anything unless you count the Landfill. I do not care. I like my job. I show up! I show up on time, if I possibly can, although I don’t punch a time clock these days and people trust me to put in my hours. I’m not going to go on and on about my job.

Show up. Do your homework. Read the directions. That is all. Er, except, do they make big blow-up menorahs?

Goodnight,
Kayak Woman

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.