Man has this week gotten away from me!  As you well know, I was home from work on Monday due to car issues, and on Tuesday I went to work, however, we had an all-company meeting, so I didn’t really have time to do much work at all.  I busted ass from around 9:12am (let’s be honest, I don’t always get in on time.) until 10:45am and then left for a lunch meeting and I went home directly from there.  Therefore, today kind of sucked like the worst Monday I have ever seen, workwise.  The meeting on Tuesday went well though, the owner of the company bought us all lunch and thanked everyone for working so hard in the last year plus to keep the company going in a really tough time.  We are technically a part of the housing market, don’t you know.  I think it is the only meeting in recent history that didn’t involve any negativity at all, and it was nice.  So as a reward (aside from the lunch he so generously purchased for all of us), he is closing the company entirely on both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve in addition to our previously announced paid holidays for the year.  Now that’s a reward!  I’m so grateful, and I hope that the gesture drums up some desperately needed employee morale in the office.  Just like everywhere, I’m sure, more work out of less people makes for a stressful and sometimes unhappy environment.  It’s so refreshing to see the owner making an effort in turning that around and it made me really happy.  So it was bad in a busy way today, in a “all these people who call are crazy” way, in a nothing is going right today way, in a rushed so badly that you make mistakes kinda way, but I still like my job and all most of the people that I work with and I feel lucky to be working where I am.

Which of course gets me to thinking about how this all came to be.  Do you believe in fate, or ever contemplate the alignment of the planets that would cause a series of events to unfold in such a perfect way?  When I think about this job (and yes, even when I’m bitching about it and occasionally even lamenting at how torturous it can be I am secretly grateful for it), I am in complete awe of how it came to be.  I can look back and see each event that led me to this place, and if even one thing had changed, I have no idea of where I would be right now.

If I wasn’t fired from my job at the bank, I wouldn’t have considered going to college.  If I had gotten my acceptance letter to Columbia College sooner I wouldn’t have applied, let alone gone to Eastern, and I wouldn’t have met… well, lots of people that are still influencing me today, including my husband.  If I hadn’t started college in the summer semester I wouldn’t have met my bff Maureen, who dated Tom, who phoned me out of the blue long after college and invited me to the party where my husband’s band was playing; the night I would ask him to go to a wedding with me for our first date.  If I hadn’t gotten pregnant unexpectedly (uhhh, jump ahead people, we were already married), I probably wouldn’t have ever quit my job at the telephone company.  If I hadn’t quit and stayed home with the kids, I wouldn’t have ever considered finding a job with flexibility, which led me to the real estate test prep classes.  If one person hadn’t dropped out of the class, my seat wouldn’t have been moved next to the real deal Jacquie Buschbacher.  And if I hadn’t struck up a friendship with her, I never, ever would’ve even heard of the company I now work for, let alone submit a resume, etc, etc.

That’s just the condensed version.  Shit, I obviously have too much time on my hands if I’m thinking this much.