Returning to work from vacation is a real bummer. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy my job and my co-workers. I had lunch w/ a friend whose also getting married so she was asking how everything turned out. So that is good. The bad part is I had about a million emails and about 1 hour into reading them, I found a note mentioning that at 10AM (15 minutes from now) I would be having my email migrated from one delivery method to another.
It’s nitty-gritty, but essentially it knocked out like 2 hours from my day following all the instructions and getting my email all set up. Well then in the new email program I couldn’t tell what I had read and what I hadn’t so I spent a ton of time going back and forth between the old and the new program. What a pain.
I didn’t even respond to anyone today because I was so busy trying to figure out what had and hadn’t been done while I was gone.
Tomorrow is going to be rough.
I did have a very strange situation to deal with today. In one of the many emails I read I found that a colleague had forwarded some racist jokes. I really didn’t know how to respond, if at all. I know that this person didn’t mean any harm in the jokes (in fact I honestly believe the person was under the impression they were a real David Letterman top-10 list and figured that made it OK to pass along), the jokes weren’t really even overtly racist, more just playing on stereotypes–but still they were the kind of thing that wasn’t appropriate for the work place.
I did get to thinking though; about how when you sometimes get a “forward” and there is that incredibly long string of To: and From: headers you have to scroll through to get to the actual meat of the message. I thought about what it would look like if somehow that message did get passed further along and there in the middle of the stream of endless headers was @blah.com where blah is my employer. How would that reflect upon my employer? Is that the kind of employer I’d want to work for?
So what did I do? I said something to the person about not forwarding messages from a work email account and how the content of the message even if not questionable (which this message certainly was) reflects upon our workplace in a way that isn’t in line with the kind of workplace I want. Honestly most days I wouldn’t have said something, but there was something my little brother said during his toast that inspired me today. While mentioning that I have strong strength of character he said (and I’ll probably get the quote wrong) “some people talk the talk, but -pause- my brother -pause- he walks the walk”.
That quote has really been sticking with me the past couple weeks. It’s never something I really considered myself doing, but now I almost feel guilty not doing the right thing (like when I saw some trash on the beach in Hawaii and just had to pick it up, or when my napkin didn’t land in the trash at the airport restaurant how I had to pick it up)… it’s completely ridiculous that someone could hold themselves to such a high standard so I’m sure sooner or later I’ll be able to relax and let myself make a mistake here or there, but for now I’m really fueled.
