Happy Independence Day (Observed). Obviously my DoD office was closed today, on top of which it's an actual fixed paid holiday for my employer (as opposed to a floating holiday) so today was a welcome day off. Mondays are always days off for my wife, and thus always a no daycare day for the little guy, so today a little after 11 a.m. found the three of us all sitting on the couch together, sharing a large bowl of Goldfish crackers and watching The Price is Right. Which is basically all I really want out of life - anything else on top of that is nice, but basically icing.
Tomorrow I'll be back at work, but a foreshortened week seems much more than 20% easier to take, for whatever reason. I have yet another new coworker sharing the converted storage space with myself and the lady who started last Monday, and he probably merits a post unto himself (forthcoming) but I realized over the weekend that I'm expecting to see both of them tomorrow. Which is kind of a change, because there were so many times in my career that I would get a new coworker who only lasted a matter of days, due to various circumstances, that eventually I started considering everyone's employment alongside me to be moment-to-moment for the first month or so. It just made managing my own expectations easier. And then if you add on top of that general tendency for people to flake out the fact that both of my new coworkers started the week before a long-weekend, which provides those extra 24 hours for soul-searching which might lead to I'm-just-not-going-back thoughts, and it seems like the odds for immediate attrition would be high.
But the economic climate has never, in my mere decade-and-a-half of professional life, been as bad as it is right now. I know (because they told me) that both my new coworkers were unemployed for a while before they came on board with my current employer, and I know (because this is just The Way It Is at the moment) that neither of them has other job offers likely to sneak in out of the blue and lure them away. So yeah, they'll be punching in alongside the rest of us at the Big Gray tomorrow.
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