Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I just read the email. I am stunned. The nirvana that was my work environment is about to change. We knew that changes were coming, but we didn't think it was going to be this radical. I sit at a computer all day in a cubicle that is open on two sides. In the year and a half that I have had this arrangement I have been surrounded by three wonderful women with other workers scattered further away in the room. There isn't much privacy. And we deal with people over the phone who have some pretty intense problems. You tend to get close to your co-workers. That's what happened to us.

Come Monday March 28, most of the cubicles in the room will be empty. In my little area, only one other person will remain. This is hard for me to wrap my head around. I am very fond of this person, but both of us are going to be lonely without our other two buddies.

Change happens. Often, change is good. I happen to know that one of my friends who isn't coming back is moving on to some wonderful adventures including a new grandchild very soon. Maybe those of us who are left will form new bonds and relationships. But change is hard. Before I invest in these new relationships I need to mourn the loss of the old ones.

These women--my friends--have seen me through some very difficult times. When I first came to occupy my cubicle I was a temporary employee, and I had never done this kind of work before. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I would be hired into a permanent position. As I struggled to learn the software application, and later the call center, my friends were there for me.

Oh sure, nothing at the moment is happening on my particular contract. The one other person on this contract who works out of Reston is still there, as are all of my team up at headquarters in Linthicum. There will be a wonderful sameness to authorizing case management, mobile treatment, and psych testing always waiting for that beep in my telephone headset signaling an incoming call center call. A few of my fellow Restonites will still be around, working on various things. But it will be different.

I'll be ok.

March madness

What is it about the month of March??? I am pondering this on my use-it-or-lose-it-leave day when I am supposed to be getting my taxes in order but oh well, there are two more use-it-or-lose-it leave days this month. March seems to promote this kind of procrastination madness (axis 4: rated severe for ability to get things done on time). Maybe it's partly the weather, which today is a typically dreary rainy cold March day, which could just as easily be sunny and warm, or snowy with temperatures below freezing. Maybe its the longer days. Maybe its the bulbs lovingly planted last fall just beginning to poke their little green noses up through the soil, to potentially be zapped by a frost. Then of course there's the aforementioned preparation for tax day, the threats of a government shutdown, and the anxiety that the first quarter of the year is almost over and things aren't looking so good for the economy. And least we forget, by definition at least a portion of March falls during Lent every year. For Christians, Lent is that part of the year especially set aside for us to contemplate everything we're doing that separates us from God's love and what we are going to do to restore our relationship with Him. Her. Whomever.
So much for the environmental factors, and I use that term to encompass the political, spiritual and enconomic as well as the natural. For me personally, March does not have much to recommend it. It probably started in 1964, although maybe I just don't remember back before then. In March of 1964 I was sent for what seemed like an eternity but was probably just the month of March to live with my Godmother's family. They were incredibly nice people, and I was well care for, but I was an only child used to living a very solitary and sheltered existance and my grandfather was dying in a far away place and the whole experience brings back negative memories every March. Those memories got reinforced by my grandmother, a farmer and master gardener in the true sense, coming to live with us and getting horribly homesick every March for her budding garden far away.
In recent years, March 2007 to be exact, a tiny snowball (probably on one of those snowy below freezing days) at the top of the mountain that is my career started to form. It slowly rolled down until it picked up speed in 2009 and became an avalanche that buried me in August of that same year. Having unburied myself by March of 2010 in a process by which I was blessed to be in a temp job that I grew to love I painfully started climbing back up that mountain by another route. At my age I will probably never reach the summit again, but I'm totally enjoying the climb at the moment. The weather is definitely better over on this side of the mountain.
This takes us up to the present day, March 10, 2011. There are some potential changes coming in my job which may affect my lifestyle. There's a best case scenario and a worst case scenario, and everything in between, and a lot of friends that are in a far scarier position than I am.
What is it about March?? Well, maybe it is something like Christ's passion, which we commemorate on Good Friday (Good Friday often falls in March although not this year). The thing about Good Friday--and the month of March--is that it is followed by a new birth, a second chance. What sustains us is hope...because we know that resurrection---and spring--are right around the corner.
Maybe I will make it back to the summit of my career after all.