Hello blog!
What happened to this year? Apparently my last post was in January. I meant to look at you, read you, even post at least once a month, but time went by and major stuff happened and my time was hijacked.
There has been a long history at work that if something big is going to happen it will happen while I am away on holidays. It happened again this year in a huge way which meant on my return I was greeted by several people telling me that "the shit hit the fan" and "you are going to be travelling".
Bottom line - an entire department had imploded and the managers had both been given the boot. The department is in another city and I have spent much of the year flying back and forth between there and my home city. Following on from that (and as a consequence of the work I am doing) I was put on a project that meant adding trips to yet another city, then another project to a third city.
Yes life has been manic!
It has also been astonishing because I am not a business power house, not exceptionally intelligent and have no higher learning. Yet here I am being given more opportunities, being sought out as someone who can fix it, having my opinion valued and, most important to me, being respected by people I respect enormously. I have found myself in discussions with people far smarter than me where I hear myself explaining something and think "bloody hell, I know what I am talking about and these people are listening". I spend a lot of time just a little gob-smacked at my life
So why has it happened? Because a handful of people had faith in me and apparently saw talents in me that I didn't know were there - and one Nun long ago in another universe. Figuratively of course.
I left school at fifteen and apart from some one or two day courses have had no further education. I hate classroom situations and always have. I suspect if I were a child today I would be assessed with some type of learning problem. Formal education does not agree with me, but I learn from necessity really well and have a belief that I can probably find some way to do just about anything asked of me. Thankfully no brain surgery has yet been requested. :-)
I am fully aware that despite all of this, I work in an industry where no-one is indispensable and we are very prone to huge profit downturns and buy outs. In reality if I do my job properly and train people well I could make myself obsolete, and that's OK. As much as I need to work, I have and still am enjoying this ride if a little travel weary.
And that Nun? She has come back into my mind a lot over the last year and I think it is a little kernel planted in my mind a long time ago by her at my high school that allowed me to have faith in myself despite my well recorded below averageness.
When I sat my last test in her classroom she told me that while my final results overall would not show it I would be a very valuable employee to anyone who could see beyond the numbers. She was right my results were crap as we both knew they would be, but I remembered her words all these years and I can't express how much I appreciated her being able to see past the surface.
So thank you Sister Josephine. I pretty much hate Nuns but you were the exception I suspect you, like me, flew under the radar for much of your life, but you were a teacher in all the right ways. I am still grateful you were there in an otherwise execrable school.
