Loyalty, Is It Overrated?

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Now that we have all had a chance to consider the effects Covid-19 has had on our social life and the changes we have experienced, we are being asked to return to life as we knew it. Looking at it from the perspective of business owners who probably owned massive amounts of real estate that is currently empty, one can sympathize why they would insist their employees come back to the office. It is not the same experience from the employees’ point of view and I, personally, can identify with both sides.

My initiation in the shipping industry began when I was 18. I had taken an entry-level job for the sole purpose of saving money until the Fall when I was going to begin my college career. After a few months, I realized how much I enjoyed the freedom of paying my own way in life. Pretty soon I began to think about other educational options that would allow me to continue to work. I settled on an Associate’s Degree in Secretarial Sciences at night. I loved the Secretarial Sciences, I never had ambitions to be “something more”. I made a very decent salary and I felt that my functions were essential to the smooth operation in our office. If I were in the working world today, I would call myself an Administrator but back then it was customary to do more than what you were getting paid to do and not complain because one was happy to have a job.

The shipping industry in which I worked tossed around the words “a following” when placing ads for recruiting people. I never understood what was meant by it until after the interviews were concluded and people were hired on the basis of their “following”. It occurred to me often that if the new hires did not work out (it happened), they would take their following with them to the next place. There was no loyalty to the company, the following’s loyalty was to the person who understood their needs and coddled them.

I have been blogging on WordPress for the last decade. Because my main focus has been to sit and write and therefore improve my writing, I have never paid that much attention to the importance of reaching out to try to get more people to follow me. When I looked at my various blogs and added how many followers I currently have, I admit I was a bit surprised to see that it is close to 1,000. I feel a certain responsibility to write regularly and I have been doing that but without too much feedback, it is hard to know whether what I write is reaching anyone.

I write with my readers in mind, an exercise that I find both limiting and illuminating. This writing circumstance is something that I am now exploring over on Medium.com where I have recently become a paying member. My reasons for starting off as a paying member were to support writers like myself but I also thought I would be participating in getting some income. To my disappointment, before I can even sign up for the participating plan, I need to have at least 100 followers on Medium. I think I have 8! In order to import some of my followers from WP into Medium, I need to be better acquainted with whatever algorithmic AI makes that decision. So, while I feel a little bit bad about splitting my loyalties between WP and Medium, I think it is too soon to give up on either.

Any thoughts?

Redecorating

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A few days ago while I was scrolling my IG (I’m cutting down, I promise) I ran across a picture of a random person who was very excited because a delivery of recent purchases were at the front door. She went on to describe her joy at finally receiving these long awaited treasures that would make her home so much better. She does this every few months she added. At that point I had to go back and reread to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

“I do this every few months” the sentence read. I could not believe it. I looked around my living room, noting that in 20 years very little has changed. My husband and I recently decide to sell our old sofas and purchase new reclining ones but that is about it for major purchases. Rearranging furniture every few months is something I can’t even contemplate doing, let alone actually doing it. I think if has some psychological reason and I wonder if more people are like the person I mentioned or like my husband and me. I decided to research it. I found the replies are all over the place. It is a very individual thing, everyone has a different reason for doing or not doing it.

I grew up in a two working parent household. I had three siblings. To make ends meet our parents often rented out a room or two. My mother, who tired of everything quickly, was constantly moving furniture around. It used to drive me crazy. I think the reason was that I began to feel insecure. The furniture itself was not the reason I felt insecure, it was coming home not knowing what to expect. Oftentimes, the rearranging of the furniture was actually a clue to my mother’s state of mind. If she was angry, or frustrated by events at work, she would take it out on the furniture, cleaning roughly as she rearranged a table. I don’t think I ever really put it together until recently when my DIL commented that she had only seen two changes in our furniture since she met us a decade ago. I had to chuckle. In my defense, however, I will say that even though I have “fixed” places for furniture, it gets moved around often for the deep cleaning that takes place every couple of weeks. I have never been humiliated by moving a piece of furniture to find long lost items or food under things. And my husband and children have never tripped (like I did when I was a kid) over a piece of furniture that was in a different place in the afternoon than it was in the morning.

The best justification I read when I researched the subject was that “everything needs a refresher, including furniture.” For now, I will be content to see before and after pictures of someone else’s rooms, mine will stay the way they are, I feel happily secure with that decision.