I Am Not a Cubicled Resource

Let's begin with an ending: In short, 2006 sucked, and I wasn't sorry to see it go. I started the year out in a job that I thought was going to take me places, but I ended up being miserable in. Mid-year, my wife and I got the news that she was going to need surgery to remove a growth that was preventing us from starting a family. And toward the end of the year, in what seemed like a personal atomic explosion, my grandpa passed away, my wife went through the ordeal of her surgery, and I went through a personal breakdown that led me to realize that it was time for me to go back to work in the "real world".

So when the clock ticked past 11:59pm on New Years Eve, I was GLAD to put all of that behind us.

I can remember when this mess all started. It was May or June, and I felt like I was really taking the business that I worked for places that the partners had never imagined. It was a small company, where I was one of just a few people who worked there, so my role in the company was quite large. But whenever it came time to reward me for my hard work, I found my reward to be quite lacking. Instead of a raise, I would get cheap show tickets. Whenever anything would go awry in the company, I would get berated no matter how quickly I worked to resolve things, even if the problem was not my fault in the first place.

Then the unimaginable happened. One day, while having lunch with the more 'eccentric' of the business partners, they tell me that they've come to the conclusion that their role in the company is to 'use me as much as possible to make them the most amount of money possible'. Straight out, just like that, they tells me this. And while I realize that the ultimate goal of any business owner is to leverage their workforce to make them the most amount of money possible, I have never had someone tell me to my face that they feel that they need to use me for their own personal gain.

All at once, I felt like I went from a key part of making the company a real success, to nothing more than a cubicled resource, to be used up until worn out and then cast away.

That was the beginning of the end of my involvement there. I refuse to wake up in the morning with the sole purpose in life of making someone else rich. I am not a cubicled resource!