A New Day

Today marks a new day for me. For almost nine years I worked in the church insurance business, an experience that at times was enjoyable, but was often less than pleasant. As of last Thursday, I no longer do that, and frankly, it's a relief. I won't go into all the gory details (but I may at a later date), but let's just say that when a buy-out was offered, I accepted. Life's too short to spend your working days being miserable.

Since I haven't figured out a way to get all of you people to spend thousands of dollars to read this site (though you are welcome to hit the tip jar on the right if you wish), I'll be looking around during my paid vacation for something new to do. It would be great if that something involved writing, since I really enjoy that and think I'm fairly good at it (though your opinion may differ), but we'll see what happens.

I had a bit of an epiphany on Friday. I recently bought a DVD recorder to replace the Chinese piece of junk we got at Christmas time in 2004. My initial goal with the new recorder was to transfer about 24 hours of family VHS videos that have been taken since we first bought a video camera in 1988. Those tapes have irreplacable moments of our growing family that I desperately want to protect, and transferring them to DVD will certainly put those precious pictures on a more stable format. If I lost those tapes, it would break my heart.

Upon completing that project I started pulling out other tapes I had made with my camera and started transferring them. There was the video report on Dana Point that my son made in elementary school, several cross country quartet tours and concerts, and a tape I made in 1989 while working at Beverly Hills Savings.

I was the Vice President/Branch Administrator at the time, and we had a big company-wide meeting coming up. I suggested to my boss that we make a BHS home movie featuring all of our branches and as many of our staff members as I could record, and show it at the meeting. I spent several days traveling around to the branches, and finished up by filming people throughout our corporate office. This was back before desktop video editing was available, so I filmed it in sequence, somehow figured out how to replace the video soundtrack with music, and the finished project, though crude by today's YouTube standards, was a big hit at the meeting. The Executive Vice President of our Michigan-based parent company even requested a copy so he could send it to the CEO. I was flattered, to say the least.

The thing that sparked the epiphany was the very last shot on the video. After shooting dozens and dozens of other employees I set up the camera for one last shot of the branch operations management team which included myself, my boss, the marketing manager, and the sales manager. I looked at the smiling, much skinnier, 33 year old Vice President that I was at the time and realized that I wasn't just looking at a small moment in my life, but at the time of my life when I was the happiest I've ever been in my job. Never before or since that couple of years in the late 80's have I enjoyed my work as much as I did then.

Why? First of all, I was in a job that fit my talents and abilities to a tee, and consequently, I was very successful. I liked what I was doing and I was good at it. I had the respect of my peers, the management, and those who worked for me. Work was very good and I actually didn't mind when Monday morning came around.

My boss, Sean McCarthy (maybe he'll Google his name some day and find this) was a couple of years younger than me, a classic Type A, hard charging high energy type with an ego as big as a house, but we worked together incredibly well. I described myself as his voice of reason, keeping him from going too far off the deep end while providing him the support he needed. He recognized my abilities and strengths and wasn't shy about rewarding them. During a brief 2 1/2 years that I worked for him he promoted me two or three times and tripled my salary. Thanks to Sean, my wife was able to spend 10 years as a stay-at-home mom and we were able to buy the house we still live in. Thanks, Sean! Needless to say, that was not my experience during these past nine years.

Thirdly, the company was a good place to work. The atmosphere was great and people liked being there. I didn't appreciate at the time how rare that experience is.

I realized in watching that brief film that one of my goals as I explore the opportunities out there is to try and make that moment on the video the second happiest time in my working life. It may not be possible, but I'm going to give it a good try.