My home is taking shape, little by little. I will be filling up this wall with paitings to make up for the sparse furnishings.
I’m still figuring out where to put this.
I also made a reading nook/hideaway for my girls in one huge closet in my room.
With a sizeable bookshelf above.
And my girls put up their own wall decorations to personalize their space.
I have all the time in the world to make this apartment my own. No rush. It has to be just right.
photo courtesy of lunarland.com
I’ve been having this work-related conversation with a friend who is having a hard time motivating himself after not getting the expected rewards for hard work the past year. I told him that I remember my older sister telling me this: in the workplace (this particular workplace that I was supposed to go to) bawal maging bibo (don’t show you’re smart). Why? Either they will 1) dump more work on you; 2) idiots will feel threatened by you and sabotage your work and reputation; or 3) completely ignore you and not reward you for your hardwork and sacrifices. Better just as do what is expected of you; nothing less, nothing more.
I know it’s really a bad principle to adopt but it really makes a lot of sense. That is the reality and have seen it several times in my career. It’s idealistic to expect that the company will value you as you think it should but that is not always (or never) the case. It’s normally how you project yourself (face value/packaging), connections, and how thick your skin is that gets you the prize. Sadly, I’ve seen that several times over the 16 years of my professional life.
So what did I tell my friend? You can seethe and rant all you want and your only recourse now is to resign OR scale back on the work load and take it easy. Perform and do what is expected of you but don’t overdo it again. Save your hide. No point in giving your soul. (Another friend ranted to me one time “Ano pa ba ang gusto nila eh nakuha na nila kaluluwa ko?!” But that friend had a happier ending than this first friend of mine since he got a high double-digit raise.)
So why did I say “changing tides?” Well, I heard a number of people in the company where my friend works are now looking for other jobs. One even had four job interviews in one week. That’s how bad things are, how badly managed the company is. They don’t know how to value people.
I’ve read an article somewhere that people leave because of bad managers. True. I stayed with a job before despite the crappy pay and all because I had a good boss/mentor. In the case of my stark raving mad friend, the company is badly managing people and is rewarding the wrong people (the deadwoods).
If the Facebook memes are to be believed, it was Sir Richard Branson who said that companies should value its workers first before customers. Pay attention to your own people before chasing the profits. Sadly, only a few do. (On a related note, read “Can Small Businesses Afford To Adopt Sir Richard Branson’s Approach to Employee Benefits?”)
So what are we to do? We should work for ourselves then. But that route is not for everybody.
photo courtesy of alliancecoffeeandtea.com
I’ve had a working-chatting session with a colleague in a tea shop somewhere in QC this afternoon and our conversations in between rushing to meet deadlines went from closures and moving on, to people who are not sensitive towards other people’s plights (or those who exhibit sociopathic tendencies), to investments and estate planning. All in one afternoon.
She is a couple of years younger than I am; she just entered the big 3-0 while I am inching closer to the big 4-0. We’re both at the stage where we find it exhausting just thinking about spending our Friday nights getting wasted like when we were in our 20s (she spent Friday night with our much younger colleagues who imbibed alcohol like it’s going out of fashion and they went to work today nursing a nasty headache or fighting off flu). She said she now feels like spending evenings or days off like this–just drinking coffee or tea and talking with people who are worth talking to. We both feel that socializing should not often involve alcohol. I can still drink like a man but that does not mean I should.
What have we become, L, I asked? I also answered my own question: We have become adults.
But adulting is very hard, no? When we were kids, we thought that adults knew what they were doing. We were so eager to become adults. Now that we are adults, we just discovered that everybody else was just winging it. Some are still clueless, some are just feeling their way.
We talked about lessons learned from what we witnessed from our elders–our aunts and uncles, the titos and titas who behaved abominably towards each other because of some petty things such as inheritance of inconsequential stuff like dinnerware sets, a ring, or a clock. From bad money management by some relatives or family friends. By spoiling rotten siblings or aunts and uncles who never fully made it into adulthood and feel that the world owes them a lot due to circumstances of their own making and because they were raised to be self-centered monsters.
We were talking about how long can we still do what we do. About how do we see our lives in the next five years. Next 10 years. Can we live alone during our twilight years, when our children would not or could not take us in under their roofs? L and I both agreed that we should prepare financially and mentally for the event that we have to live on our own without help from our children. We must not rely on them to take care of us since they have their lives of their own. It’s painful to see a relative being passed from one offspring to another because they could not take care of their mother/father due to financial constraints or just plain they do not care.
I do not want to be in that sad position.
While I do not expect my children to carry the burden of taking care of me or their father when we’re old, I at least expect that they would be caring enough to check up on us, visit us or see if we’re still alive.
And that boils down to how I raise my girls. Which is a different topic.
Hard to raise little human beings while you yourself still have some growing up to do.