Work Going Well

It's odd to be writing about this in the midst of what is a holiday weekend for most American workers, but things are going really well on the job. My yearly raise kicked in this month, with an adjustment retroactive to January, and I received my ten-year service award, along with an additional week of vacation. Yeah, things are going well for me.

Even better, a former co-worker who left the organization a year and a half ago will be coming back to work for us for twelve to twenty hours a week, as needed. He left when his wife transitioned from part-time to full-time work, giving us a full month's notice and working to the end of the busy season. I had a chance encounter with him in a supermarket last October, and he told me that he 'missed the place', which set in motion his return. I told him, 'come back on your own terms, and I will do what I can to accommodate you'. He stopped by this evening and we just shot the breeze for almost an hour... it's as if he never left, and I will be incorporating him into next month's schedule (necessitating a rewrite on my part). We get along famously, having similar values and similar attitudes- another of the guys in the department once told me 'when they hired him, they were hiring another you'. As an added bonus, when he went to the main office to fill out the paperwork for his return, he learned that our new boss' assistant (her position was created a couple of weeks ago in preparation for some major projects) and he knew a lot of people in common.

Even the day-to-day operations on the job are going really well. We have had a lot of visitors, the gift shop is doing a brisk business... things are just generally turning out well these days, and I am looking forward to a really great summer season.