**1967 bell telephone white office workers – NOT my coworkers (circa 1979-1994)**

For the month of November I’m participating in a daily gratitude challenge posted by the journaling app that I use, Day One, and here’s today’s prompt:

What is something in my life that I feel “lucky” to have?

At the risk of offering a chicken sh*t response, I’m tempted to say, “everything.” Okay, one thing recently has come to my attention, that isn’t necessarily a universal experience, I’ve been lucky in the quality of the people in my family or those whom I’ve worked with. They’re driven to do the right things and do the best at whatever they do. I’ve been lucky that I’ve rarely to had to directly work with any one who cheated to get ahead or was more interested in what they could get away with than with the quality of their work. Oh they were around, but I was lucky that I rarely had deal with that behavior or M.O.

I had a roommate who thought I was too idealistic because I believed that giving workers some levels of autonomy to improve their output, etc., was at least as important as getting a fair wage. I guess his experience was with a lot of guys just seeing how much they could get for as little work as they could do. Ugh. So, apparently I’ve been “lucky” that way. Hell, when I worked for the phone company our group’s acronym was DNAC, which we said meant “Do Nothing/Act Cool.” But I saw that attitude as a shift during the commodification of the technicians’ job, whereas previously the technicians controlled their assigned “machine” (the central office switch) and that sense of ownership (and their good pay) was a powerful incentive toward their productivity. Most of those old timers had a lot of pride in their work, which was slipping away in the era where job decisions and responsibilities was taken away and given to remote centers and managers. So, on second thought, I guess I did work with those “less quality” folks, but the experience taught me the importance of not micromanaging and giving quality people freedom to own their efforts. Funny that, given my more or less retired situation, my thoughts about what I feel lucky about having in my life is the quality of the folks I worked with. Happy holidays, y’all.

On a completely different train of thought, here some LEGO projects I’ve been enjoying (and my admin said in my exit interview that I’d get bored… lol):