Decade

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out a clever alliterative title to this post.  All the D-words I could think of were rather derogatory (see–there’s one right there), and while I may have failed to change others’ lives with my career, like so many with hopes and dreams of grandeur, I did managed to change mine, and drastically improve its standard of living.  And after all, isn’t that our prime directive as a species, before we get into all that nonsense about purpose and self-actualization that we’re spoon-fed from the time we learn to write our names?

But I’m too young for a midlife crisis.  This was a mere 10 years.  What happened career-wise in that timeframe?  Hmm…

I joined the company as the recession hit.  Large swaths of the management staff were let go.  Merit raises were frozen, our insurance was overhauled (not for the better), there was a hiring freeze, and then the parent company tried to sell off the division.  When that failed, they realigned it, then merged it, and ultimately spun it off.  In the end, I held 6 different positions over that time.  It wasn’t exactly a period of sustained economic growth.

Through it all, the company has still maintained the practice of awarding ceremonial gifts unto an employee upon reaching a milestone number of tenured years.  Or rather, they send a digital catalog and the employee gets to pick out a gift.  They can be a bit odd too, like sunglasses, a crockpot, or a telescope.  But I, reflecting upon what I have endured to reach that point, prefer to find my own symbolic meanings and so choose something of…symbolism.

So it was that upon reaching 5 years, when I was still a call-center agent toiling away in the ranks, when every second of my time spent on the clock was tracked and reported to generate various statistics and graphs that visualized how I wasn’t working hard or quickly enough, that I chose the Bulova analog watch:

…you know, because time?  Although now it occurs to me that this may already be intended symbolism, due to the watch’s ubiquity as a “years of service” award.  Because I guess there isn’t really a wearable calendar.

But now, I’ve reached 10 years.  Following suit on the symbolic gift appropriate choice…thing, I noticed this in the catalog:

A crystal whiskey decanter!  I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate had I tried: both a symbol of what has gotten me through those 10 years alive, and going forward, a physical item to get me through the next 10 years.

Plus, it’ll annoy Liz.  Win!

–Simon

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