In Jan 2003 I started working at the journal. Yep, it's been almost 5 years for me there as a part time grunt. This is the background for my latest observation on life....
As a part time employee, most of the full timers would barely acknowledge that i existed since i was new. On my first night i met some cool guy named Mark. He's a really happy go lucky and laid back type of person and was willing from day one to tell me the loop holes in the system and really showed me the ropes necessary for survival. I consider him a friend because he's helped me through some rough nights at work.
Mark was out off for a couple days from work and i'd heard through the grapevine that it was a death in the family. No surprise really if you think about it. Wed night when i saw him, he clarified why he was gone. His daughter (didn't catch her name) had just died the previous weekend. She was 26. I was floored. From the picture he showed me, she was very cute!!! She was his only kid too. He's divorced and she stayed with her mother after the divorce. Apparently she was a psych major at UWM going for her masters.
A number of things caught me off guard by this. First of all i honestly never knew he was divorced. Seriously. It never came up. Usual daily chatter and no mention of something like this. I suppose i can understand that it's history but it's still very surprising for me. I obviously didn't know he had a kid. So after all of these years of talking about school (he had been a poli sci major way back when), politics, history, work, etc, i find out there's so much about him which i'd never known. That got me really thinking. How much do you truly know someone? You get to know a person over the years and talk about the day to day stuff but do you ever really learn about where they came from? Or do you focus on who they are right now?
Another thing that hit home with me regarding this situation was the age of Mark's daughter. She was 26 and i'm 28. I've known this guy for almost 5 years and never knew he had a daughter close to my age let alone going to the same school as me.
The icing on the cake is how she died. Apparently she had been drinking heavily that weekend and passed out in her boyfriends arm. The positioning of his arm was such that his forearm was under her chin. She choked on her own vomit. Wow. As bad as it is for Mark I can't even begin to imagine how the boyfriend must feel. It's creepy because i could see that happening to me. I'm comfortable with a girl using me as a pillow like that and so that could very easily have been me if i was truly unlucky.
What i'm trying to get at is that i'm still shocked by how little i knew someone i considered a friend from work. I write this with the intention of asking you how much do you really know about your "friends" from work. Considering that most adults spend 40+ hours a week in their work environment and thus make friends there, I'm truly curious if the majority of people would be as surprised by me by similar circumstances.
Just a thought to consider....
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