Didn't Give Up

Last week was a particularly tough one at work.  There were a lot of things due all at once, plus I had to cover for one of my coworkers who was on vacation.  Add to that my allergy medication was really making it hard to think clearly with how drowsy it was making me.  This caused me to make multiple errors with preparing documents and getting them out to our clients.  At one point, my boss said that my performance was so bad that she wondered if I was "daydreaming" instead of working.  It was these words that convinced me to stop taking my allergy meds; I had already been thinking about it, but this was what I needed to push me to do it.

On Friday, everything came to a head.  I arrived at work unmedicated, worked through lunch, and even stayed nearly two hours late to get everything out on time.  When everything was said and done, my boss said that she respected the fact that I never gave up during the recognizably difficult week.

This reminded me of one of the few time that I was fired from a job.  A little over a year ago, I worked for about two months as a telemarketer.  I am uniquely terrible at sales: I recognize the agency of the customer and, while I try to convince them to buy the product I'm selling, I will take "no" for an answer.  Anyway, the reason I was fired from this job was because I wasn't producing the necessary numbers needed to remain employed.  On my exiting interview, my manager assured me that I was being let go not for a lack of effort, just a lack of results.  Looking back, I think I was one of the few people he ever had to fire, because most people quit when they saw how hard the job was (every week, a half-dozen or so people started and by the end of the week, only one or two remained).  I was bad at my job, but I was never going to stop trying: I had to be forced.

Now I have a job that, while not perfect, is far and away the best job I've ever had.  If I didn't give up on one of the worst jobs ever, I'm not going to give up on the best.