Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Giving My Head A Shake

"How about I forget to send it in the courier and by the time it eventually gets there all will be good?"

I'd gone into her office and shut the door behind me to ask her perspective on my newfangled plan to help someone through a loophole I designed myself.

"But if they ask me on the other end I'll have to lie and say oops, I forgot. I'll know I conveniently forgot,not accidentally forgot. Okay, so that's not going to happen. Scratch that plan. I have to sleep at night."

My boss smiles at me. She knows that I'm a stickler for having my integrity intact at the end of the day. Not sure why forgetting on purpose became a viable option in my own mind to begin with, although if I told you the whole story you might see why, but the bottom line was it instantly became a non option when I realized I might have to lie to cover my butt down the road. If I hadn't thought it through out loud with my boss I might not have seen that and then would've slipped through the loophole only to fess up when I realized what I'd done.

I know in the whole scheme of life most people would look at the situation and think what is the big deal. So a piece of paper gets sent a week late and it helps someone out. On the other end that slip of paper being a week late is really not a big deal. It wouldn't make a difference to them in the long run. But I'd know my motivation and intention and well, there you go. I was grateful for some clarity before it all potentially blew up in my face.

I handled so many pieces of paper today that I left them in a stack on my desk to deal with tomorrow. Although tomorrow will see another stack as high to add to it. By day's end I couldn't think straight and instead of spending any energy on getting tomorrow's day ready I left the papers on my desk, locked the office and came home. I am once again counting the time until I can go to sleep. I am grateful this weariness is temporary.



Photo Credit

2 comments:

daisymarie said...

Never surrender your integrity. It's a terribly difficult thing to rebuild. Hope you awoke with enough spoons for the day.

Scott M. Frey said...

good for you! Things like integrity are all we have. If we give it away, what shall we be left with?