I had started my career the Thursday before and was still new to the game. I was nervous about fitting in and whether I had what it took to do the job. Then I went to Drudge Report and it didn't load. I thought the internet was down.
Then someone called my colleague and told him there was an accident at the WTC. He said it was probably nothing and got off the phone. As events unfolded, both my boss and my colleague (the entire development team there) pretty much blew it off.
Instead of absorbing the event and living it with the rest of America, I sat in my office trying to figure out why a particular bug was happening and how to fix it.
The whole event.
I was freaking working.
At the end of that day, I decided that I was going to do everything possible to work in a human environment with a core value of respect for others. If that ever happened again, I was going to walk out of that building, go home, and figure out what was going on.
It took a few years, but I finally got there when I started working at Radiant Systems (now NCR) in 2004. This is a company that treats their employees well. Where respect is their core value. Where if something like 9/11 ever happened, they would say, "Let's turn on our TVs. Let's do what we can to understand what's going on and react to it accordingly."
I don't ever take that respect for granted. It fuels me to excel at that company every day, because I don't ever want to find myself in the situation I did on 9/11.
Then someone called my colleague and told him there was an accident at the WTC. He said it was probably nothing and got off the phone. As events unfolded, both my boss and my colleague (the entire development team there) pretty much blew it off.
Instead of absorbing the event and living it with the rest of America, I sat in my office trying to figure out why a particular bug was happening and how to fix it.
The whole event.
I was freaking working.
At the end of that day, I decided that I was going to do everything possible to work in a human environment with a core value of respect for others. If that ever happened again, I was going to walk out of that building, go home, and figure out what was going on.
It took a few years, but I finally got there when I started working at Radiant Systems (now NCR) in 2004. This is a company that treats their employees well. Where respect is their core value. Where if something like 9/11 ever happened, they would say, "Let's turn on our TVs. Let's do what we can to understand what's going on and react to it accordingly."
I don't ever take that respect for granted. It fuels me to excel at that company every day, because I don't ever want to find myself in the situation I did on 9/11.
6 comments:
--Michael, we're gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage B. We have some new people coming in, and we need all the space we can get. So if you could just go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there, that would be terrific, OK?
A company which respects it's employees and where employees respect each other is a gift in life. Work takes so much of our time and energy. Nice to work with kind people. Good post...Mom
well said as always mom...BTW, WTF did that trench guy say?
Also, Michael, that was a quote from office space if you hadn't figured it out yet. That office is what I pictured when you described a less than ideal work environment.
I went to trenchguy's blog....let me guess...it was something about anti-muslims.
What did I win?
Yeah that was an anti-muslim rant. Who are these people?
I knew that was Office Space. You don't think I know that movie? Do you even know me?
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