I actually used that phrase yesterday. You see, on Thursday, everyone where I worked had a huge bomb dropped on us. We didn’t know what to do with the news, but we knew something was off about it. Something was wrong. The news smelled. Stunk.
I was planning to use Thursday to get ready for the new school year, which begins on Monday, but instead I spent the entire day in meetings, even staying one-and-a-half hours past my normal endtime to attend yet another meeting with three members of the Board of Trustees. I got nothing done.
In the end, that meeting was worthless, and I knew it as soon as all three of them walked in the room. I knew it as soon as I saw their stony faces that they considered this a worthless meeting, and I started to consider it such as well. They weren’t going to change their minds and, as all three were businessmen, they all reverted to PR-speak of “no comment” and “I can’t answer that.”
One did say, however, my new phrase that gets me through the day, and I felt a strong desire to stand up and shout at him. “No, this isn’t what it is! You lie!” To me, this phrase reminds me of something that just is, that I can’t change, that cannot be made whole by my own power. This man has the power to correct this mistake and instead chose to ignore our pleas and to shrug off our cries for help to make this right. None of us in that room, except those three businessmen, could make this wrong decision right. To all the rest of us, it <i>is</i>what it is. It just is. We had no hand in the decision and we have no choice now that it’s made. To those three men and their 17 counterparts who refused to face us, that phrase doesn’t hold weight. They made this decision without input from us (or any other member of this community) and based their decision on falsehoods, outright lies.
When someone finds out their decision was based on untruths and misleading rumors, I expect that mistake to be remedied, but this was not to be. (By the way, they only told us on Thursday because someone, more than likely someone on the board since no one else knew about it, leaked the information to their family who in turn leaked it on Facebook. Our students knew before we did about this life-changing decision.)
Yesterday I decided I just needed to get back to work. No matter what, the kids are coming in on Monday, so I tried to get my mind on work. I got very little done, but at least it’s something. I’m not remotely ready for Monday, but it will come no matter what. For me, it is what it is, and now I must keep calm and carry on. It’s sad, in a way, that my work life is reduced to these catchphrases, but if I didn’t keep them in mind, I wouldn’t show up for work on Monday at all.
I’ve had bombs dropped on me, big ones that hurt so badly I thought I must surely die from it, but I didn’t, and somehow I crawled out from under it and kept on keeping on. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I hope you and Neal are all right. You both mean a lot to me. A friend is a friend, you know, even if we’ve never laid eyes on that friend before!
–love, jane
That means a lot to me, Jane, and I haven’t been as good of a friend as I should have been lately, I know.
I’m not sure what this means for me in the future. Right now, things are going to be going on somewhat the same but…depending on how things go in the next few months to a year…well, I just don’t know. I hate being so cryptic, but I also know that this thing blew up big because of online activity, and I don’t want to lose a job for the same thing. Suffice it to say that I vacillate between thinking that it won’t affect me as much as I think and worrying that it will affect me more. The hardest part for me right now seems to be figuring out how to respond to something that I feel is an unethical and immoral decision while still trying to “keep up a happy face” for the kids, who shouldn’t be involved in this (although many of them think they are, unfortunately, even though they don’t have even half the information they would need to make an informed decision on it, just bigotry and hate from parents and friends).
I’m hoping we’ll be fine, but it’s going to be a battle to recover trust in my workplace after this…if I ever do.
Bummer. I am glad you found your mantra before this happened. Even in commenting on your post I feel a need to censor myself from what I really want to say about workplaces because I feel like the Internet isn’t a safe place anymore to speak one’s mind. That is sad, and it is strange how the world has changed in the last decade. Needless to say, I am glad you are still currently employed, and I hope this situation works out as well as it can.
I think this is part of why I don’t blog as much as I used to. More people I know are online now (especially coworkers) and they are more internet-savvy than any other place I’ve worked. Add to that the fact that I work with kids, and you have some super-internet-sleuths on your hands. I haven’t written anything that I wouldn’t say to the person-in-question’s face, but that doesn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t find it and take offense to on that person’s behalf, you know? I’m becoming more and more censored in what I write about, too. I talked to my boss today about some of my fears in relation to the job, and she agrees that she feels them, too. I guess we’re all in the same boat.
(And I’m glad I found my mantra before this, too. Otherwise, I’d be a wreck now. As it is, I dwelled on it a bit this weekend, but this week I’ve just kind of gone with the flow so far. I’m slowly getting back into the school year, but I still feel so far behind from last week’s “issues.”