After the Milk has Expired

When you take a job working in a "professional business" atmosphere, you are of course, expected to dress appropriately. For me this meant saying good-bye to my traditional Cheapo attire of jeans, a T-shirt, and sweats in favor of dress slacks, a tie and cotton shirts. This also meant an added chore: weekly ironing.

My parents were kind enough to buy me an iron and for a while it was the greatest thrill of my life. I took to ironing like a termite to wood; I enjoyed it so much I ironed every item of cloth I owned. I ironed my socks, I ironed my pants, I ironed my sheets and I even ironed my towels. The pressing of heated metal against the material into a seamless, smooth surface entertained me to no end.

Somewhere however, the novelty wore off. I joined the legions of others who found ironing to be a time consuming chore devoid of any charm. So out went the 100% cotton shirts, in came the 50/50 blend that required no ironing, that could be line dried to a fairly wrinkle free state.

One of the theories behind purchasing a house rather than a townhouse or condo was the idea that it would be kind of fun to take care of a yard. The line of thinking was that I would come home from a hard day at the office, have a outdoor task to attend to, and the fresh air and manual task would get my mind off the events of the office. Last week my parents were kind enough (I do have kind parents) to buy me a lawnmower. The grass itself was rather long, apparently not cut last fall before the house went on the market. Plowing through the long grass took some effort and after I was finished I had second thoughts of the "fun" of home ownership. Mowing the lawn in the middle of July might not be as charming as I imagined last November.

Yes at some point joy becomes routine, something you GOTTA do. But you know, much of life falls into this transition. As the years pass by much of what you used to do for fun doesn't hold much pleasure anymore. The feelings don't cut so deep and you find yourself doing things for the sake of doing them rather than any element of fun they used to bring. In the workplace this can be a deadly transition, as it gets to be harder and harder to do your job tasks as they become more and more chorelike. Granted, work isn't supposed to be a barrel of laughs, but who wants to continue in a job that is just dreadful repetition? What's the point of going in to a job when just the thought of it drains all the energy out of you?

Sometime it is better to say your work is done and it is time to move on to other things. After all everything we do is temporary and has its own time frame, beginning to end. But you can't just keep walking away from something once it begins to turn a bit stale. One way to keep things fresh is to apply creativity wherever possible. In one of my favorite books, John Jay Osborn Jr.'s The Associates, one of the young lawyers decides to pump some life into his job by quoting Cicero in his memorandum rather than actual law cases. Showing that kind of initiative in a workplace may get you fired, but it is challenging to look for ways to channel the creative embers inside to improve the work processes.

Just looking at things from a different perspective, a different angle can help flame the creativity in new ways. Finding new and better ways to do old tasks can be a challenging and rewarding mission. There are also external elements that can add new life to worn out tasks. Sometimes a new employee will come along to pump some energy into your view of the workplace. Other tmes it takes trying to remember what made the job rewarding in the first place to see if there is some way to reconnect you with those old feelings. Unfortunately, once you start juxtoposing old feelings with new, you're more likely than not constructing walls rather than bridges.

None of this may apply to any of you but events of the last few weeks have shown me it may be time for me to get out my iron and press the lawn.