48 weeks a year. 5 days a week. 8 hours a day.
Generally, those are your working hours – give or take the week of days you need to take off for sick kids.
52 weeks a year. 2 full days a week. Maybe 5 hours a day for the other five.
Generally, those are your non-working hours.
So. Let’s face it. If you’re like me, you’re at the office WAY more than you’re at home. The people you work with, if you’re lucky, become your second family. I have been VERY blessed in my twenty years of working to have had many families. I’ve had a few bad experiences with co-workers but they were minimal. Face it, if you’re dreading going to work, you have the wrong job and work with the wrong people.
The problem with work families though, is that through the natural course of business, layoffs happen. They just do. And then your families split up. And it’s hard.
We’re going through that this week at our office. And it’s like a death. It truly is. You grieve. You’re incredibly sad. You wonder how you’re going to cope and what direction things are going to go in. This is just like grieving a death, albeit it, you get to see your family again, just not nearly as often as you’d like.
But like anything bad, you have to try to see some positive from it (or else you’ve truly lost it all). It’s made me think back this week on all my previous work families. My first job was 20 years ago at Scotiabank. I still see my work BFF monthly for lunch and my ‘group’ a few times a year. I left there for a children’s mental health centre, and while I don’t see them much anymore, through Facebook, we are all still in touch and it’s amazing. Since I’ve been at my current company, we’ve been through this restructuring/layoff cycle a few times. But it allows for different relationships to form. My old boss and I are buds and he’s introduced me to a whack of new people who I’m lucky to call friends.
This current round has been especially hard. I truly love these people and the days won’t be the same. BUT. Life continues and I know that the people that you want to stay in touch with you do. I know I’ll still share music and stories about our kids with my former boss and I’ll continue to get life lessons from my other friend who get let go this week. He is the wisest man that I know. And the third family member we lost, well he’ll torment me until the day I die with Jefferson Starship’s Sara!
So. I’ve given myself this week to be sad. And then, I’m just going to be happy that I got to spend so much time with them and that they’ll always be my peeps – just in the 52 weeks a year; 2 full days a week; Maybe 5 hours a day for the other five – capacity.
Do you have a work family???
In my previous life I did – before husband and kids. I still keep in touch with them.
Now? No.
After 12 years of being at home I just started working part time this past January and I wanted a job that I could leave there. Go home and forget.
I like the people enough, but I’m fine to not commit to a relationship with them. I feel like I have enough friends.
Does that sound awful?
i did and it was wonderful. you spend more time with your work family than you do with your real family and it’s really hard when you have to say goodbye.
I totally relate. I’ve made some of my best friends in jobs that I’ve held. Work families are very special.You see them every day and it’s very hard when that ends.
I don’t work outside of home these days, but I developed some good, deep friendships and attachments with people I used to work with… and many remain solid friendships today. It IS sad to say goodbye… but it doesn’t have to be forever. I hope you stay tight with your important peeps, lady!