Jessie X

Today was my anniversary. I’ve now had a j-o-b for 12 months. 365 days. A whole year. And now, I’m starting my second year there. I like it. I like having a job and being inside a structure. I wrote more about what I like at my six-month mark.

What I find fascinating, thrilling, exciting, frustrating, uplifting, endearing and enticing is the terrain. It’s the terrain of being on the inside. And, I speak no ill of my company or any other when I say this: I like the concept of development inside of contraction. I like the challenge of finding ways to continue to be/d0/have “more” inside an economy that is contracting. Gone are the days for most all American companies where year-after-year of growth was pretty certain. Nope. And yet, inside a contracting economy, who is to say all companies will take the hit evenly? Some may thrive. Excel even. This is what excites me about my job. Those challenges of developing inside an environment where it seems harder than ever.

I like the people inside the company. Our customers. Our partners. The external contacts with whom I work. The global distributors. The local folk. I like walking the halls, seeing people I work with, day after day. Before I even went looking for a job, I wrote a doc called My Ideal Job. And while I knew that exact job probably didn’t exist when I wrote the doc, my sense is that I’m moving toward it each day.

There’s one thing I genuinely don’t like: the air quality of the building where I work. My company execs and various staff, along with the building landlord, have been near-heroic in attempting to solve this problem. But they haven’t been able to, and it just sucks. My lungs hurt somedays. I often feel a physical contraction in my lungs, especially after having been out of the office for a couple days. I want to work out in fresh air, to work anywhere but the office and to have access to air that isn’t the air of the building. We’ll see. Maybe that will come to be more of an option in year two. Fingers crossed.

Thanks again to all the people who’ve been a part of my life at each moment of development. Whether as a client and how I honed so many of my skills learning how to deliver solutions inside of tight budgets, as a colleague, as a friend. In any way, shape or form that I’ve come to stand more solidly on this Earth, thank you. And to my colleagues at my j-o-b, thank you, too. My first year has been quite an experience, and I’m looking forward to Year Two.