Rolling over slowly looking at the clock, I was finally sleeping in for once on an off day. My wife had left early to go shopping or something, I don't really remember what, I just know that I was alone and wasn't getting up until I was ready. The cat wandered in, jumped up on the bed, and curled up on my wife's pillow, close enough to scratch his ears.

While I lay there, I thought about my job history. Since "It finally happened", I have begun to be concerned about having to look for another job before I have finished my plan to leave this series of "Joe Jobs" forever.

But as I thought back on each job since I was in high school, I considered that there had been some real problems on my part. Not every job, but it happened enough times to concern me. In the year and a half of blogging about my job, I have never really attempted to examine my own failures as a worker. So I thought it was time to consider that. Of course, the details will have to be changed some for the sake of anonymity, but the story won’t suffer.

And yes, this sort of thing is extremely self-centered and self-involved, that’s why it makes so much sense to blog it. Where else but on the internet can you find millions of words on thousands of pages blathering on and on about people’s lives you will never meet? Sometimes when I’m surfing blogs I will look at the huge posts people do about themselves and think, “Is somebody reading this stuff?”, and then realize I’m writing the same stuff. That’s why we should never take blogging too seriously, no matter how poignant a post you produce, there will always be someone on the other side of the screen laughing their ass off at your pain.

Just think of yourselves as my psychiatrist, sitting on a couch, chewing on your pen asking yourself, “When will this wacko shut up??”, or just click one of the links on the blogroll, its all good stuff. I’m also going to make this a series, so it will go on for a while. If you comment, great, if not, you won’t hurt my feelings.

Even before I joined the workforce officially, I knew that I was not a very motivated person. My room was always a mess, and I would do a half-ass job cleaning it until my Mom got disgusted and cleaned it for me. In school I wasn’t much better. I got B’s and C’s mostly, a D on math now and then, and A’s only occasionally. My teachers would go on and on about how much potential I had and how utterly brilliant I was if I would just apply myself and stop daydreaming. I remember my parents put me into a private school for a little while, thinking that the challenge would do me good. It was great, I could work at my own pace, which was a lot slower than everyone else.

I guess facing it in the end, I was a real slacker as a kid. As a teenager I only wanted to play video games, watch TV and try to get past first base with my girlfriend. I could blame my parents for “not providing the necessary impetus to make me a responsible young man.” But I’ve really got beyond that now. At some point everyone is responsible for their own character whether they were raised well or not. My parents taught me a lot of good things that make up for my lack of discipline. They gave me a moral foundation, rules for living, and a real love of books. My mom and dad always taught me a lot about how important people are, and how you should be sensitive to their needs. My folks never spoke badly about people just for kicks, I rarely heard them bad mouth people.

Part Two-"Would you like fries with that?" coming soon...

Thanks for reading,

AC