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Day: July 9, 2012

Breaking the negative cycle

PaperboyGameplay
Does anyone else remember playing Paperboy in the arcades?

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I entered the workforce as the world’s worst paperboy – honestly, I was better at the video game. After that I pumped gas, made fries at Burger King, unloaded and loaded trucks for a commercial dairy distributor, and for a couple of years drove a limousine (which is not as cool as it sounds. I mostly drove station wagons to and from Newark Airport). Sometime during the dairy or limousine years, I began to notice a pattern of negativity.

At each job I worked, the employees thought we knew how to do the bosses job. We, the mostly high school aged employees of the King, talked on breaks about all the things the managers did “wrong.” We dock-workers, moving milk around the dairy, convinced one another over lunch we knew how to run the business more smoothly. We chauffeurs would sometimes bump into each other at the airport waiting for a flight, where the conversation would quickly turn toward ways we could improve the company. Those not running the organization seemed convinced we knew better, and were eager to share. Like a black hole drawing everything into itself, the negativity claimed the majority of the workforce at each of those jobs.

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