Take This Job And Love It?

I started a new job recently. The first two days have been the best first two days of any job I’ve ever had.

Patch on parade in the south suburbs.

I’ve started a few newspaper jobs where “helpful” individuals took it upon themselves to point out all the assholes in the room. And within a week at those jobs, I had my ear bent by half a dozen folks who needed to tell me everything and everybody that was wrong with the place.

Better yet were the folks who decided they hated me without getting to know me or my work, motivated by some deeply rooted insecurity or dysfunction.

I can think back to the first day of my last three jobs and the same thought crossed my mind at some point: “Did I make a mistake here?” In one, the work I was given was well beneath my abilities. It was like riding a little bike with training wheels. And in another, I toiled for 12 hours straight and was told “get used to this. We work like dogs.”

Of course, over time I managed to carve out a niche for myself and even help make the workplaces better. At least for a little while.

But I’m still pinching myself with this new job.

I immediately took a liking to the folks in my crew. And everyone I’ve met has been kind and helpful and upbeat. And smart as a whip. In fact, today I met a colleague who started her job three weeks ago. She practically gushed about how much fun she was having and how happy she feels.

News people, particularly those who grew up in newspapers, tend to be quirky iconoclasts. Some are downright mean, and the meanness informs their work, gives them an edge. But the worst of them are bitter, cynical broken-down shells, their wreckage made all the more pitiable by the disintegration of the newspaper business and the haphazard devastation visited upon the newsrooms by feeble publishers and other execs.

So, upbeat and happy aren’t familiar emotions to this lot.

But I think I can get used to this. I might even start to like being happy.