Are you Accountable or Flexible?

Written / Winter 2014:

I came home from work 3 hours early today.

 Most of the days of the year I like sitting next to a wall of windows that is a front row seat on Racine. But when it’s super-hot or super cold, those 70’s era windows lose the fight with Mother Nature, and the office can become slightly miserable.

I could keep on writing about what we do to cope; lately its long underwear, layers, and a sense of humor. Most days the four of us who casually share the space are not glued to our chairs – we have to go to other parts of the building for significant chunks of our jobs.  Twice a week I work in another site altogether. 

But today was a chair and computer day and by late morning my bones were cold.

 I decided that after a 1:30 work-related thing was done I’d take a couple hours of vacation to come home.  Which is where I now am; it’s lovely warm in here.

Here’s the thing.

Some people cope the way I do. Do what one is supposed to do until one realizes they’ve become too cranky, cold, hot, and/or weird.  Think about it. Consider if there is a way to tone down the discomfort and if so … go for it.

Others always stick to what they are supposed to do. 

Flexibility and Accountability are two buzz words in the modern world. 

Can you count on a person to always do what s/he says she will do?  Remember “I said what I meant and I meant what I said. An elephant’s faithful 100%.”  (Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg)

I was raised by a lot of Highly Accountable people. They got up early in the morning, never ate three donuts, worked a productive eight hours each work day except for when they worked more than eight hours.

I have friend and co-workers whom if you ask them to do something and they say yes – they will do it. Always. They’d have to be in the hospital with tubes attached before they’d miss an obligation. If that person had my job, they would have figured out a way to make it through the afternoon.

Heck, I know how to do that.  Put my outdoor scarf over my lap as a lap robe. It helps.

Except I didn’t do that for a variety of important and ridiculous reasons. The main one being I realized it was Very Cold, no one could Argue With That, and therefore, I had a Bonafide and Unimpeachable reason to take the afternoon off from work.

So I did. (I also know where I am in my on-going work load, and it was not going to set anyone else back in their work for me to vamoose out of there.)

If you had known me when I was four-ish and five-ish, you would have seen this coming.  I was the little girl who, every day for two years, told my mom I couldn’t go to school that day because I had a sore throat. According to my mom, some days I DID have a sore throat.  Mostly I found school to be way more work than I had anticipated. It was 3rd grade before I really got the hang of getting up and going there. (Kudos to Mrs. Chisholm who liked kids, laughed a lot, and made learning fun. Bless her memory…)

Have you read about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

In the late 60’s and early 70’s researchers conducted an adorable experiment. They put little kids in a room.  Then they put a marshmallow (or cookie, or one piece of candy) on a dish in front of the kid and told the kids s/he could eat it right away. But, if they waited until the researcher returned to the room (about 15 minutes) they could have TWO marshmallows.

The kids who could wait, when followed through their lives, did better on SAT scores, in matters of health, in the aspects of things generally called a successful life.

Do you know me? Do you know that I am a serious marshmallow-iac? Do you know I stay out of Walgreen’s pre-Easter just so that I don’t lose my soul to Peeps? I suspect I could not do the Stanford Marshmallow experiment even now. When we have them in the house, Len has to hide them in the basement behind the power saw. I’m not going to say how I know where he tends to put them.

Human beings are kind of adorable. Some of us can’t walk away from an obligation, even when it’s dumb and we are sick, tired, and old.  If there’s an “ought to do this” attached, these folks are there.

Some of us are like me. Generally reliable.  A good egg. But if there’s a way to slink away to read, cook, write, walk, or just noodle away an afternoon … and nothing too horrible will happen … we’re “gone fishing”.

Accountable and flexible. Both are needed.

Which are you?