Some helpful advice I once received

was from a guy whose was one of my managers at a job I had a little while back. They had hired me to sell a new software product on a contractor basis, with a projected three-month term to be followed by an offer for a fulltime position if all went well. (At the time, I was delighted to be employed on ANY basis).

Well, all did not go well, mainly because the team who had decided on the pricing, licensing, and support structure for the product (before I arrived) got everything wrong. They were never going to be able to sell enough of the product to ever recoup their development costs, let alone turn a profit. All of which I was obliged to report to them, as I became aware of the facts.

So two months in, they came to me and said, thank you for all your good work, now beat it.

I was stunned. As I cleaned out my desk and got ready to turn in my laptop and badge, Rob - who had been my manager, technically, but who I rarely saw - stopped by and casually asked how everything was going. I said, Rob, didn't you know? I just got canned. He said, wow, I'm sorry, I hadn't heard.

A big part of why he hadn't heard was because he'd been out of the office a lot lately. Spending hours in the hospital every day with his youngest daughter, who was slowly dying of inoperable cancer.

And he said to me, just never give in to self-doubt.

Best cure for self-pity I've ever been given.

A little illness

can be a good thing; it certainly makes you appreciate even just moderate health, much like deep hunger makes any food seem delicious.

When I was in the ER yesterday for a few hours, getting treated for some suddenly aggravated breathing problems related to the intersection of a chest cold and my chronic asthma, I was told by both my attending nurse and the doctor on call that I was in relatively good shape, based on my measured lung output and my chest X-rays. And though I was reassured, I wanted to say, great, so why do I still feel like shit?

But I kept my mouth shut - again, the wisdom of the ages - and reflected on the other people I saw and heard being treated there that day. One guy was on a gurney in the hallway, apparently because he was in so much pain from some mysterious damage to the nerves in his feet that he couldn't be moved. He moaned in pain till he was given the maximum pain meds they could administer without knocking him out altogether; then he sang a bit and told lame jokes to his wife who sat silently in a chair next to him. They were having a much worse day than me, that was plain to see.

I was ready to go home.

On a related note, part of the treatment I received was prednisone, an oral steroid I also got when I had my first really serious asthma scare. That time, I went from being in the ICU on a Sunday night with oxygen tubes in my nose to being back at work on Tuesday, carrying a ten-foot-tall oak armoire up three flights of spiral stairs in a Victorian in San Francisco with just one other guy.

I'm not experiencing that same miracle drug bounce, I thought to myself earlier today. Then I realized, hey, bonehead, you were only thirty-two then. Tick-tock.