I had a frustrating morning with one of my bosses today. It was the kind of encounter where you have to get up and walk away for a few minutes to refocus. I stool in an empty conference room for some time, talking myself down from my crazy thoughts such as quitting before I had a solid offer somewhere else.
I came back to my desk after cooling down and was blessed with two things.
First was an email from the company’s automated job board with a new posting for a position I might like. I quickly fired off my resume. (There are many problems with the automated system; for instance, the listed contact person does not exist and I’ll have to find an alternative recipient for my resume. That’s just a minor snag.)
The second thing I came across was an article on Yahoo Finance called Is Your Boss Killing You? (Fast Company provided the story to Yahoo.) It’s about health, not about Executives With Knives. I can identify with some items from the article:
A study of 6,000 British male office workers over a four-year period, published recently in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that employees who felt their supervisors treated them fairly had a 30 percent lower risk of heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the industrialized world. Put another way, caustic, abrasive, and overbearing bosses just might be taking years off their employees’ lives.
The article suggests taking periodic short breaks to refocus, just like I had to do a little bit earlier. Generally I’m known around the office for my laid-back attitude. Stress rolls off of my like water off a duck, but only to a point. There are some things—certain attitudes towards me—that I will not tolerate. That is what made me walk it off earlier today.
Note: I don’t normally talk much about my work life. No one in my office can access this website without a browser cookie enabled, but they wouldn’t be able to find Consumerism Commentary armed with only by real name. If that were not the case, I wouldn’t be writing so frankly about the issue.
Subscribe
