The Grind
It was about a week ago as I was walking down one of the long grey halls of the non-descript interior of my bland workplace that someone passed me in the hall and said something that I found a bit disturbing.
As anyone who has spent any time with me will tell you, I am a pretty content person. Not only content, but calm as well. It is rare that I fly into a rage about anything, unless I'm driving a rental car - or any car for that matter - as I have been known to yell and curse at other drivers. At work, I am even calmer simply because there isn't anything worth getting into a fuss about. I've worked in the kitchen at Harvey’s in my high school days, and that was a stress filled job. The particular location in which I slung grease was the record holder for sales in a year in Canada. When you can keep track of 30 different burgers on the grill, six different deep fryers, all while keeping up the stocks of buns and packaging for hours on end, while rocking out to Led Zeppelin IV, you will know you can handle any kind of stress. When you work in a shoddy hotel with clients expecting four-star service, and you are one of three waiters on staff, the senior waiter in fact, with three shifts of Pizza-Hut serving credentials to your name, and no one speaks English or French, you will know stress, and how good four straight shots of brown tequila can taste!
Don't get me wrong, office jobs can be stressful. There are tight deadlines, people yelling at you, you yelling at people, people yelling at other people, long hours, and with the blackberry craze there are times when you can never leave. And I must say, in the grand scheme of things, my office job in particular isn’t very stressful.
And no one who has a steady job - especially those of us who are public servants - ever has the right to hate their job. They are paid well and have job security and benefits. What more could you ask for. With only a modicum of motivation, you can find a job that challenges or interests you.
So there I was, walking down the hall, and someone who I don't know all too well walked by and said "What are you so happy about?” Of course, I had no idea that I had one of my goofy smiles on as I was strutting along with my head in the clouds. I was probably thinking about our new apartment (stay tuned!) or the hockey game the night before. I might have been laughing at an old tired joke (Did you hear that the Pope caught the Bird Flu? He got it from one of his Cardinals - Wakka wakka wakka! Thanks B.).
K., by the way, frequently asks me what I am smiling about. While I often have no idea which of the billions of trains in my cranial-subway system generated the smile, I maintain a fairly solid answer:
"You know, there are so many random acts of violence and hatred in the world that I guess I just feel like I need to add a small act of random happiness, for balance."
Of course, I couldn’t articulate this to the person I passed the hall. All I could answer was "Oh, just life in general," which was met with the reply "Must be nice..."
Next time you find yourself in a bit of a "Must be nice..." mood, try this little exercise. I saw a CBC news piece about Laughing Yoga or something. Most of Laughing Yoga consists of getting together which a bunch of people and just laughing for no reason. You just go and belt out some good old laughter. I thought was a bit excessive, I mean why should I pay some stretchy pants wearing Yoga type $10 for an hour of laughing when I can rent The 40 Year Old Virgin for $5 and laugh for two hours? But one nuggets of wisdom that came out of watching the story was this:
1 - Take a pen or a pencil THAT IS CLEAN!
2 - Place lengthwise in your jaw as far back as you can so you look like a dog carrying a bone
3 - Try and pull your lips away from the pen or pencil
This is an artificial way to force a smile. Whether through Pavlovian training or some biological reaction, when we smile, we get happy. Apparently, we don't smile because we are happy, we are happy because we smile. So if you are stressed at work, try it out and inject a little random act of laughter into our world. I dare you not to give a little laugh as you do - you can't help it, it's biological.
Tee-hee.
D.
As anyone who has spent any time with me will tell you, I am a pretty content person. Not only content, but calm as well. It is rare that I fly into a rage about anything, unless I'm driving a rental car - or any car for that matter - as I have been known to yell and curse at other drivers. At work, I am even calmer simply because there isn't anything worth getting into a fuss about. I've worked in the kitchen at Harvey’s in my high school days, and that was a stress filled job. The particular location in which I slung grease was the record holder for sales in a year in Canada. When you can keep track of 30 different burgers on the grill, six different deep fryers, all while keeping up the stocks of buns and packaging for hours on end, while rocking out to Led Zeppelin IV, you will know you can handle any kind of stress. When you work in a shoddy hotel with clients expecting four-star service, and you are one of three waiters on staff, the senior waiter in fact, with three shifts of Pizza-Hut serving credentials to your name, and no one speaks English or French, you will know stress, and how good four straight shots of brown tequila can taste!
Don't get me wrong, office jobs can be stressful. There are tight deadlines, people yelling at you, you yelling at people, people yelling at other people, long hours, and with the blackberry craze there are times when you can never leave. And I must say, in the grand scheme of things, my office job in particular isn’t very stressful.
And no one who has a steady job - especially those of us who are public servants - ever has the right to hate their job. They are paid well and have job security and benefits. What more could you ask for. With only a modicum of motivation, you can find a job that challenges or interests you.
So there I was, walking down the hall, and someone who I don't know all too well walked by and said "What are you so happy about?” Of course, I had no idea that I had one of my goofy smiles on as I was strutting along with my head in the clouds. I was probably thinking about our new apartment (stay tuned!) or the hockey game the night before. I might have been laughing at an old tired joke (Did you hear that the Pope caught the Bird Flu? He got it from one of his Cardinals - Wakka wakka wakka! Thanks B.).
K., by the way, frequently asks me what I am smiling about. While I often have no idea which of the billions of trains in my cranial-subway system generated the smile, I maintain a fairly solid answer:
"You know, there are so many random acts of violence and hatred in the world that I guess I just feel like I need to add a small act of random happiness, for balance."
Of course, I couldn’t articulate this to the person I passed the hall. All I could answer was "Oh, just life in general," which was met with the reply "Must be nice..."
Next time you find yourself in a bit of a "Must be nice..." mood, try this little exercise. I saw a CBC news piece about Laughing Yoga or something. Most of Laughing Yoga consists of getting together which a bunch of people and just laughing for no reason. You just go and belt out some good old laughter. I thought was a bit excessive, I mean why should I pay some stretchy pants wearing Yoga type $10 for an hour of laughing when I can rent The 40 Year Old Virgin for $5 and laugh for two hours? But one nuggets of wisdom that came out of watching the story was this:
1 - Take a pen or a pencil THAT IS CLEAN!
2 - Place lengthwise in your jaw as far back as you can so you look like a dog carrying a bone
3 - Try and pull your lips away from the pen or pencil
This is an artificial way to force a smile. Whether through Pavlovian training or some biological reaction, when we smile, we get happy. Apparently, we don't smile because we are happy, we are happy because we smile. So if you are stressed at work, try it out and inject a little random act of laughter into our world. I dare you not to give a little laugh as you do - you can't help it, it's biological.
Tee-hee.
D.
