Taking care of the important stuff

Friday, April 24, 2009

My boss is recovering from what he thought was a heart attack - which leads me to even deeper consideration of what we're all putting ourselves through right now. Thankfully it wasn't a heart attack, but spending the night in the hospital having tests and finding out that chest pains are stress related is a pretty good sign that you're taking on too much.

My boss is that kind of person times a hundred. If anything needs to be done, he does it. If someone is messing up on something that he knows he can do right away, he does their job, too, just so he can move on with what's already on his plate. When he realizes how overloaded those of us on his team are, he does the work that we would normally do, just to help us clear our plates. It's too much for one person.

I'm thinking of course the obvious, what would happen to his family if it had been a heart attack? He is young and vibrant, and the thought of him having a heart attack, fatal or not, is tragic. He still should have many years left to live. That is also a selfish thought though because I was also thinking about how it would affect us at work. I'm not sure that we could make it, ourselves, without him around. We can make it with him doing less and having more time to relax and be healthy, but he does so much around the company that I'm pretty sure it would go down, no questions, without him there.

We're all pretty indispensable right now, anyone who is left to work after layoffs. There are certain people who know and do so much, though, that losing them would be the equivalent of laying off another ten people. For that person, it might be great job security but it's also too much stress for any single person to handle. It's gonna catch up with you. And sure, your co-workers will cry and miss you because you're an awesome person, but they're also going to cry over the stuff you did that they can't do.

Even though we all have to work longer and harder on the production line than we ever have before, we must take care of ourselves. Not only are we cheating our families but we're costing the company and coworkers as well. We won't be replaced...our work will just be absorbed into the already over-saturated work load. How's that for more stress?

Plus, if it had been fatal, I wonder if my boss would really want to look down from the netherworld and say, "I did this for mother-freaking work?"

by Still Employed at 5:26 AM  |