Some say I have exacting standards. I prefer to think I have standards — whether they are exacting or not is a matter of opinion.
Is it exacting to expect work to be done well, correctly and on time? Not really. Is it unreasonable to expect everyone to put in their best efforts every day to be the best of who and what they can be? I don’t think so.
But obviously, not everyone thinks like me. It’s been the root of much of my dismay and disappointment.
When someone tells me the stain on the floor cannot be removed, I stay mum. But after they leave, I go on all fours and try to do the job myself and voila, with just my hand, I manage to get the stain removed — and with the application of simple effort and zero product. Imagine what you can do with more.
With every task that fails to get done, the explanation is the same. It cannot be done. I resist doing the eye roll. Did they even try? When I am faced with a task, I am the kind of person who would go to heroic lengths to get it done which is why I have an abhorrence for indolence and indifference.
I would have been the perfect assistant to Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada.
In my 13 years of teaching, I heard all kinds of excuses why people were late for class — from the alarm not going off to feeling unwell to getting stuck in traffic to the dog getting away.
After a while, a pattern emerged. The same students came to school late every semester. How unlucky could these “chosen few” be that every day of their lives was marked by misfortune that caused them to be late?
These are the very same people who now habitually report for work late.
Road accidents happen but not three times a week. One can wake up unwell but every Monday? Sometimes, the alarm fails but how unlucky can one be that it happens every month?
I can remember the alarm not going off probably only three times in my entire life. Three times in 62 years.
I’m not an early riser. But I’ve never been late for school — not as a student or a teacher. And I taught a 7:30 a.m. class. Even with all the partying I did during those years, I showed up for work, prepared and on time. Every. Single. Day.
In my 32 years of writing a column, 28 of which were spent at SunStar, I only missed sending a column once and that was after partial nephrectomy in 2017. My sister joked the surgeon probably had the Internet disconnected in my hospital room to prevent me from working, post-op.
All my life, I’ve always been busy with things other than writing: organizations, volunteerism, entrepreneurship, design & development, communication, marketing, human relations, staff training, store openings.
I was troubleshooting, migrating into new systems, learning new apps, adjusting to the unfathomable work ethics of millennials and zoomers, managing a household, caring for my parents, not to mention doing the laundry and solving other people’s problems.
There were days when I felt sad, drained, broken. There were days when I was sick, unwell, grief-stricken. There were days when I didn’t want to get out of bed. But I did. I might not have produced my best work on those days. But I showed up and tried my best, anyway.
It’s all I ask from others. Is it such an impossible ask? Am I doomed for life — to wallow in bottomless disappointment?
It’s not about being the best. It’s about giving the best of ourselves. It’s not even about getting something done but simply “trying” to get something done. But some don’t even try. At all.
It’s not about having exacting standards. It’s about not having any. At all. Zero effort. Zero concern. I fear it is humanity’s ruin.