This blog is not going to have the humor of the previous two. I promise the next one will return to what I am hoping you are coming to expect from me.
I am writing this blog about a serious fact that hardly happens in the workplace. I have been with two companies where this has happened, so I felt the need to write about it...
Monday, November15, 2010, was like any other Monday. I was stuck in traffic and worried about being late for the weekly sales meeting. It seems that any time a gnat flies across Interstate 270 in the morning, traffic backs up. This Monday it was no different. I made it into the meeting room at 7:44 am. "Safe again" I thought to myself. This meeting was short, which is very strange. I settled in at my desk, and began setting up my calls for the day, checking bids from the week before, and returning emails (one of which was one of my customers bragging about shooting a 79... JERK!) I rarely pay attention to the paging system in the office, well because I never get paged, but for some reason I heard this one. My boss was paged, and our receptionist sounded different. I walked to the kitchen to get my third cup of coffee and my boss sprinted by me. Leaving the kitchen he did again. I joked, "What are you doing? Laps?" He face was stone cold. I went back to my desk, and began my calls.
Two hours later, we were all paged to the conference room. My boss with tears in his eyes told us that the owner of the company had passed away that morning of an apparent heart attack. Now not only was this man the owner of the company, but he was also my boss's father. I looked around in the room as members of our accounting team began to have tears stream down their faces. Dollie, who is the boss of the back of the house, along with being one of the funniest women I have met in my life, began to sob. A man that I barely knew had passed away. It was amazing to see how he had touched people in his company lives.
Death is a part of life that we all must deal with. I remember shortly after being hired, Charlie (my boss), John (the owner), and I talked about my father's passing two years ago. I tried to explain what it was like to lose someone too soon. Most believe that all deaths come too soon, but we all have a checkout time at this hotel. I relayed my emotion, my fear for my mother, and how it affected my work. To tell you the truth, it took me a month to rebound, maybe longer, but that is when I could regain my flow.
Death is something that we all have to deal with. I spent the week after my father's death planning a charity auction rather than grieving. I watched as my boss spent this week focusing only on work. He, like I did, just ignored his emotion. The grieving process is something that we all have to go through. Pushing it off will not only affect us, but those around us. We need to remember to let life set in. As much as we think we are robots we really aren't. Tell the people you work with that you appreciate them, because you are going to spend more time with your colleagues than your family. In situations like this take time to reflect. All of those negative things will disappear, and you will only laugh about the good and funny times.
Two links before I go:
John D. Stenger
Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings
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