It seems the mantle of authority can shift suddenly, and whether it comes through a coup or too much cootchie-coo, every now and then somebody has to step down.
Given the daily scramble to call the shots all over the world, this can be an awkward moment. How does one gracefully remove one’s self from a position of power, particularly when it becomes clear that one will be removed by force if necessary? Of course you’ll want to portray it as your own decision, reached through careful contemplation.
But sometimes it’s a great relief when you can just defer to an undeniable authority figure who spoke to you privately and told you exactly what to do. Especially when there is no transcript and the voice is too mystical to be questioned.
You don’t have to go this far, but to lessen the blow you could also say the instructions rhymed.
I know it’s good to be the boss
and to be good and bossy.
Sometimes you get to choose and toss
and sometimes you’re the toss-ee.
You’ve been around the block my friend.
No more a sprightly pup.
All good things do, at some point, end.
So please, dude, hang it up.
No need to protest. Don’t act tough.
Although you might feel bitter.
It’s time to gather up your stuff.
Embrace your inner quitter.
They’ll make up reasons why you’d leave –
that someone’s out to get you.
Ignore it. You will not believe
how quickly they forget you.
For this part, no one is prepared.
You’ll be replaced. Don’t cross him.
When, side-by-side, you are compared,
He’ll look completely awesome!
Your pink slip came in dopey verse.
Admittedly, that’s odd.
Say it was Seuss, or Zeus or worse –
The Sing-Song Voice of God.
When have you received a gentle nudge?
Trail Baboon 
Morning-
Way back in the day, my friend Skip could be counted on to give me a kick in the butt when I needed it. Not exactly a ‘nudge’ I guess but effective just the same.
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i believe this is a first . ben starting the day. i hear god gave you a little nudge to be sure your pumps worked yesterday. sounds like you got hammered
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Yeah.. something is out of sync if I’m first!… haha!
Just “Up and At ‘Em” early… wondered where the rest of you were!
On our farm we only got 1″ but friends got somewhere between 2″ and 6″ total.
And yeah… a pretty good waterfall in the Charleton Building of the clinic. I mean a real one coming in from outside next to the fake one inside.
(See if that works…)
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in sales you get a little nudge as part of doing business. it caused me to change my business model. when you work for others they can fire you, when you work for yourself the others you deal with are the people who wont buy form you not the comapnies who want to take all the sales you created for them and steal them for themselves. business… the american dream
i think the rhyme would have made it more surrealistic. if it is a big deal the wave of reality that wafts over you as you recognize that you get to adapt to a new reality could be well served by a suessical tone and maybe some calliope music
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tim, this is one of your statements that is not making sense as written, but I think it might be an important thought. Can you clarify or correct some spelling?
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form and from are the only misspelling in this one it is just the long run on sentances that gets you. dont worry about missing something important. its like a breeze its there for a moment then its gone
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its not the spelling jacque, it occurs to me that not everyone has their life come crashing down around them and understand the feeling of the world coming undone as it seeps into your brain that you are screwed and that it is time to begin plan b because plan a just got yanked. i hate it when that happens and i dislike the feeling i get when the news is presented and the reality sinks in.
i was spinning an image of what it feels like to mea and im glad that you ahve no reference to it in your life. good on you. now how much do i owe you for this session counselor?
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Good morning. I guess we have all received lots of gentle nudges. One I get all the time is, “you are talking too much”. Maybe I do some times talk too much. Of course, everything I have to say is of value, isn’t it?
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Huh? Did you say something?
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Never mind, Jacque. I am just babbling on as usual.
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Blah, Blah, Blah
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You’re in fine form this morning, Jacque.
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I am not in the office so have time to reply. Will work from home this afternoon (as well as go get a renewed Drivers License, which I am afraid I will forget to do at my advanced new decade and age).
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I’m guessing I’m a decade ahead of you, Jacque. Nothing to worry about; I’m sure you’ll be fine. Just stock up a Post-It notes.
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
I have had too many “nudges” to count, and most of them were job related. Usually a day comes along in which a functional, sane manager would leave and I would think “Uh-0h. This will be trouble.” And indeed it would be. Then after meeting the new manager or supervisor on the requisite power trip, my resume, and then soon I, would fly out the door. Once, at a county agency in Southern Minnesota, the Big Boss fired the entire Mental Health Team (me included) which had taken 5 years to assemble after the functional, sane manager who had assembled us was becoming too effective. Big Boss decided to subcontract the mental health agency to a non-profit agency which paid even less than the county, just assuming we would all go work there for a lot less money. Big Boss was stunned when we all just moved on. Several years later Big Boss was nudged to move on and the County had to start over with “assembling” a mental health team.
That experience was really not a nudge. It was an ejector seat. It was my first professional experience of seeing Big Boss being threatened by the competence of Little Boss. Such situations are so hard to believe when they occur. What I cannot believe, even today, is how often this occurs!
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From what I understand, the situation you described that happened in the county where you worked, Jacque, is a wide spread problem in county human service agencies. There seems to be very few people that understand or put any value on the work done by these agencies. They are providing services that are needed and that should be improved instead of being reduced or not properly managed as often seems to be what is happening.
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It is my opinion that County Adminstered Social Services are filled with nepotism and many, many problems that result in poor service.
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Disconcerting, to say the least.
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i had an epiphany in ely this last weekend. in nature, everything is easy. the loons cruise the lake and roll with the day, the frogs sit in the sunshine while its there and look for the warm spot in the pool on the shore to bask in. you look at the mos growing in the woods and it is obvious it has been doing fine for a hundred years, its like walking on angelfood cake, the lilypads in the water form perfect beautiful settings and the arrangements of the natural order works without a hitch. then man comes in and the state wants to do some job creationa dn make the north country feel like they are getting their fair share of tax dollars so we tear uop the woods to build a 4 lane blacktop smooth as a babies but right up to the edge of the boundry waters wher it turns into a gravel road, we have people getting involved in their notion of how it ought to be. in nature it is so easy , so obvious, it is time for this and time for that. we kind of throw a sideways perspective into the equation that makes the ramifications of the actions tweak the outcomes this way and that and oh lord what happened while i was looking the other way… i think its easier to feel the nudge of the proper way if you get a bit removed from the echo chamber we call civilization.
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priceless
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The best gentle nudge I ever received was from my girlfriend nudging me into asking her to marry me. I did, she said yes, and 35+years later, here we are. We’d been dating for 4 years and she unilaterally decided I needed to put up or shut up, since I was in my last year of college, she was finished with hers, and we should either get on with our lives together, or go our separate ways.
If you look closely, you can still see her boot print on my butt. 🙂
Chris in Owatonna
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Nice!
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id raterh not look at your butt but thanks. glad it worked out. i had to give my wife more than a gentle nudge. on our 3rd kid she said yes. shes been resentful ever since.
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I got a not-so gentle nudge when I was making the decision to leave librarianship in 2006. My dad had had two strokes a couple of years earlier, the house was gone, I was living in a studio apartment in Minneapolis and trying to eke out a living as a substitute librarian, so I was deeply worried about the future. I started investigating other careers, since it was clear I wouldn’t be getting a full-time librarian job. I found a school that taught paralegal studies, and it felt like someone–I call it Goddess–put a hand between my shoulderblades and pushed me, while telling me to do this immediately (as it was, I signed up for the fall session instead of the summer, and my dad died the first week of classes). Every so often I get clear guidance like that, though most of the time I’m flailing around trying to figure out the best thing to do, just like everyone else.
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Do you like being a paralegal? Is it difficult? Do you have to dress up?
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Morning all. I feel like I get nudged all the time… by the weather, the teenager, one of my zoo members. I did get a classic nudge about 25 years back. I was in a job that I had previously loved, a start-up, but it had started going through some serious growing pains and upper management change. My new boss was clearly a member of the “clear out all the old wood” club; he started making life miserable for us (about 12 of us at that point) the minute he arrived. That summer I was out for a medical concern and he tried to push me under the bus by blaming me for something I hadn’t been involved in. Luckily the Loss Prevention Manager was a good friend of mine (still is) and knew that I hadn’t been involved. But it was enough of an eye-opener to me that I relized I really needed to get my keister out of there. Got the job in my current company that led to my current job a year later. It’s been 24 years, so ex-boss clearly did me a big favor, although I certainly didn’t appreciate the form of the “nudge”.
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I had a similar experience when the first CPA firm I worked merged with a larger firm. They got rid of the managing partner and installed another partner in his place. This new managing partner was carrying on an affair with one of the secretaries (and had previously dallied with two others – causing all kinds of headaches for me, the office manager). I had confronted him about this, and told him that it was none of my business that he was cheating on his wife, but that I wished he would keep his hands off the office staff. While I was on a two week medical leave to have my first knee surgery, he hired a very attractive woman as an interim office manager. I didn’t need an MBA to figure out my days with that firm were numbered, so I got the heck out of there as soon as I could.
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I’m being more than nudged right now and an incident while getting my mail brought it home. I’ve had a friend, Marilyn, who also had a scary cancer about a year before mine. About four years ago, I saw this beautiful, petite blond woman dancing at the neighborhood Cheers bar. I noticed that she had the very same foot-long incisional scar as mine crawling from her side and extending the whole outline of her shoulder blade. Curious, I approached her and thus began a friendship. She was newly single at 59 as her wasband left her shortly after battling Stage 4 lung cancer for a 24-year old girl. We began a whole year of going dancing together every week end. It was such a treat to finally have a buddy for this! After a year or so, I introduced her to an acquaintance with whom she would eventually co-habit. The dancing stopped, but we still stayed in touch. She stored her furnishings in my garage.
Scan forward to last spring when the grand mal seizure hit me, along with a 3-month driving ban. I emailed her, asking if she could visit or drive me to the grocery store sometime. She emailed back that I was acting like a whiny child, that I could just take a bus, and that she didn’t have the time to see me. Her complete lack of any compassion stunned me, so I emailed, “What is going on here? If you’re upset with me, please just tell me why”. Weeks passed and I decided that she was no friend. I wrote asking her to remove her belongings from my garage. She showed up shortly, came in, and we hashed out every last detail of things said and done for the last four years that had bugged her. It was a five-hour dialogue, during which time I implored her to never hold things back and to just tell me right away if anything was bothering her. She apologized, we hugged, and I felt relief that together, we’d done one helluva clean-up job.
This summer, she dropped in several times and invited me to a friend’s pool weekly. Our conversations were comfortable, fun, and easy while lounging on air mattresses in the pool for hours. Several weeks ago, I asked her if she still had a small hair pick I’d loaned her, explaining that I can’t find them in any stores. A couple of days later, she drove up, threw the hair pick on the entryway table, and took off. I called her asking why she didn’t visit for a while. Her response; “I’m too busy….by the way, I’ve never seen you wear the birthday gift I gave you two years ago; if you don’t like it, I want it back!”
That was the last contact we’ve had in weeks. Emailed requests for her to be straight with me had gotten no response at all. I’ve concluded the obvious all along: this woman is such an extreme passive-aggressive that I can (could) never trust that she’s being honest with me or that some little thing isn’t going to turn into a complete cut-off in the future. I’m trying to let it go, but with a medication side-effect of hypersensitity, it’s difficult.
Just now, while getting my mail, I looked down the road and saw her car coming my way. I stood there hoping that she’d wave to me just out of courtesy, but she drove right by as if she didn’t see me. And so, asking for a silly hair pick back ended a friendship, along with whatever else that triggered in her which she’s unwilling to share. This is but one more lesson for me that “Minnesota Nice” usually leads to abrupt blow-ups or cut-offs that make no sense at all. This, however, is the last “nudge” I need to accept that this is not the way friends treat friends.
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It just seems so harsh. I had something similar happen with a neighbor who started out as a friend. Hurts.
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I have heard about as well as experienced the difficulty that women seem to have ending friendships with other women, and how gracelessly it is often done. Why can’t we be straightforward with one another?
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I don’t know that women are any better or worse at ending relationships than men. I have ended numerous relationships with men, but only a few with women. The relationships with men invariably were romantic relationships, with women that was never the case. Don’t know to what extent that plays into the equation.
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My stint as manager in a holistic veterinary clinic (1988) lasted all of 7 months. I was the one who quit, but it was because I sensed that’s really what the owner wanted by then. (This is the guy who used the seagull form of management – fly in, sh** all over everyone in, fly out…) I could see the writing on the wall when he would balk at meeting with me to discuss stuff, saying he’d rather go to the dentist than attend meetings. The night I called to resign, I could hear the surprised relief in his voice. We were both elated.
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OT – We have reached the peak of the summer bounty. Made a large batch of Ratatouilli for supper with all of the ingredients fresh from this morning’s farmers’ market. A wonderful grazing meal with garlic sauce, olives, and fresh naan bread to sop up all the wonderful vegetable juices. Heaven!
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Sounds great – I haven’t harvested the eggplant yet, but there are some ready… and everything else too.
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Perfect! 🙂
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its so fun watching m kids grow up.
my daughter olivia just had the nudge to commit to the performing arts world with her life. she was doing a show at the childrens theater someone mentioned that she should go look into the performing arts school in st paul. she knew that was for her and we got her signed up and enrolled all in a week and she is so happy she cant see straight, i watched my oldest get his vocal performance major because he loved the world of singing. my oldest daughter wanted to do something that would be interesting and pay well, she is struggling a bit but her main interest was in people and she is hapy happy happy in her marrage just 1 year old this month so she is doing fine. next son at st thomas is nudged to be a business guy. family entrapreuner ship is on his agenda this fall. watch out what you wish for boy
youngest daughter is still an open book waiting to pick a theme.
what a treat watching the nudge and following the dreams it inspires.
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