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By RAHN ADAMS<\/b><\/p>\n
Back when Timberley and I worked together in the newspaper business, one of our all-time favorite bosses was an affable man who still managed to get under our skins now and then.
\nIn paying us every two weeks, our boss also printed memos on our paystubs, whether it was to wish an employee happy birthday, to encourage us to have fun at some local event that weekend, or, my favorite, to remind us, \u201cThe eagle flies today!\u201d<\/p>\n
That phrase has stuck with me for a quarter century even though I\u2019m now receiving pension checks at the end of each month. The eagle still flies, just not quite as high or as far.<\/p>\n
But even our old boss would have to admit that some of his tongue-in-cheek paycheck notations could be just a bit irksome to hard-working employees, especially after a long week. The best one in that category always showed up on the payday before Labor Day, a holiday that our newspaper did not observe, at least as far as we laborers were concerned.<\/p>\n
\u201cCelebrate Labor Day!\u201d the memo exclaimed, before ending with the zinger, \u201cWork hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yeah, we chuckled about it\u2014the first<\/i> year that our payday fell on the Friday before Labor Day. It wasn\u2019t quite so amusing the second and third years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Still, the fact of the matter was that our boss\u2014who was owner, editor and publisher of that award-winning weekly newspaper in what is still one of the state\u2019s fastest-growing counties\u2014worked as hard as or harder than any of us on his staff. And he was right there working with us on Labor Day and on every other holiday that state and federal employees got off but we didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cWork hard\u201d was right. But as an imperative sentence, as a good-natured command, it was fair and honest. And we were paid well for our hard work. You can\u2019t ask for more than that from your employer.<\/p>\n
We both learned much from that boss during our several years working for him. And we carried that hard-earned knowledge, as well as the leadership skills that he had instilled in us by example, into our next careers as public school teachers.<\/p>\n
Until this summer when we both retired, I was an English teacher, computer support specialist, tennis coach, basketball coach and substitute teacher during my 24 years in public education. Timberley was a marketing and business technology teacher, yearbook advisor and tennis coach during her 20 years.<\/p>\n
Why did we retire early? Why did we quit? The simple answer is that it was time for a change. That was something else that we had learned from our old boss, who often talked about \u201cthe art of the possible\u201d as it related to newspaper work. In other words, do the best you can with the time you have, then move on.<\/p>\n
That concept is what deadline work\u2014like old-school journalism\u2014is all about, but it\u2019s also applicable to life, in general. As we live every day, we should practice the art of the possible.<\/p>\n
Before going any further, I should say that I\u2019m not identifying our boss here, because he\u2019s still alive and well, as far as I know, and he might not appreciate seeing his name splashed all over our little strand of the Web.<\/p>\n
Also, I do have an ulterior motive for this tribute\u2014to introduce what we hope will be a fundamental part of our next shared career in journalism: this weekly blog and our revamped website, GaillardiaPress.com.<\/p>\n
A few paragraphs back, I mentioned my leadership skills, something that my most recent bosses probably would question. Me, a leader? The guy who was always working at his computer or grading papers in his own classroom before school, after school, and during his planning period? The guy who ate lunch by himself every day so he could keep working?<\/p>\n
The guy who seemed lost in thought as he trudged down the hall to the copier room and back several times per day, and didn\u2019t smile or talk much but minded his own business, at least, while he did his job day-in and day-out? The guy who expected his students to actually read assigned literary works and then be able to discuss something other than the SparkNotes basics?<\/p>\n
Yeah, that guy. Well, folks, I\u2019m here to tell you that leading by example doesn\u2019t count for much at school these days. Or anywhere else, I\u2019m afraid. Just go on down to Raleigh and ask our governor and all the legislators who would seem to be experts on education and everything else under the sun\u2014but really aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n
As tennis star Andre Agassi famously stated, \u201cImage is everything.\u201d In other words, it\u2019s apparently more important to seem<\/i> to be something than to be<\/i> something\u2014which is exactly opposite our state motto: To be, rather than to seem. [Note: My new song \u201cMountains to the Sea<\/a>\u201d is based on that subject.]<\/p>\n Nowadays, our lives and, yes, our jobs are all too often about shameless self-promotion and public recognition, however fleeting and shallow\u2014garnering likes and shares on Facebook, likes and retweets on Twitter, and whatever the equivalents are on Instagram, Snapchat and whatever else the younger generations are using to avoid us old folks.<\/p>\n Shakespeare was right. All the world is <\/i>a stage\u2014or a social media platform\u2014and all of us are merely players. Or users. But who uses whom? Who makes the rules? And who enforces them? Those <\/i>are the questions. And we shouldn\u2019t have to kill ourselves answering them.<\/p>\n Our old boss definitely made and enforced the rules at our newspaper. There were definite protocols for every task, and we ignored them at our peril. As far as \u201clikes\u201d went, the boss didn\u2019t hand out compliments like lemon drops. He expected us to do our jobs on time and to the best of our abilities. In return, we received a paycheck every other Friday.<\/p>\n In the nearly three years that I worked for him, the boss complimented my work once that I can remember, with a sticky note over my front-page story on a fresh copy of that week\u2019s paper that he had dropped on my desk early that morning. \u201cGreat headline!\u201d the note said. I can still smell the ink on that paper hot off the press.<\/p>\n The story dealt with a local property-owner group\u2019s T-shirt sale to continue funding their legal efforts to keep a little old bridge to their island from being replaced by a great big new one. The group called its effort \u201cSave Our Bridge,\u201d which was featured prominently in the T-shirt design.<\/p>\n My headline: \u201cSupporters Augment Briefs With T-Shirts.\u201d As I recall, I avoided using the obvious acronym to identify the protesting property owners. Or did I? It was a long time ago.<\/p>\n Still, years later, our old boss also purchased, read and commented favorably on our novel \u201cNight Lights, or, Golf, the Blues and the Brown Mountain Light\u201d that was published in 2004 by Parkway Publishers, Inc. He even found several typos in the published text that we had missed in the galley proofs.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t matter that he had retired by then or that neither of us had worked at the newspaper in over 10 years. Why didn\u2019t that matter? Because we were part of his newspaper\u2019s family.<\/p>\n Family. It\u2019s a term that\u2019s overused and sometimes abused, but in this case it accurately describes the relationship among a group of co-workers who labored hard to put out the best product, the best newspaper we possibly could by our weekly deadline.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s what Timberley and I hope to do for as long as we can with this weekly blog and the new GaillardiaPress.com.<\/p>\n Yes, we\u2019re going to promote ourselves, though hopefully not shamelessly, and we certainly hope to see many likes, shares and positive comments from you, since they will be ways for us to measure our success at what we\u2019re setting out to do\u2014and time will tell exactly what that is.<\/p>\n But we\u2019ll always try to remember that we are all family in one way or another, whether we\u2019ve ever worked together in person or not.<\/p>\n So on Monday, do celebrate Labor Day, and do work hard\u2014at whatever you love the most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By RAHN ADAMS Back when Timberley and I worked together in the newspaper business, one of our all-time favorite bosses was an affable man who still managed to get under our skins now and then. In paying us every two weeks, our boss also printed memos on our paystubs, whether it was to wish an … Continue reading Celebrate Labor Day But Don\u2019t Work Too Hard<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}