I’m veritably sitting poised over the keyboard, loosening my joints and my thoughts. As long as it’s not my bowels I should be OK, loosely speaking.

It’s been quite a while in weblog time that I’ve written on the interwebs. A year has changed. I’ve seen Hawaii. I’ve celebrated yet another anniversary of my birth, 47 and counting. We’ve celebrated M.’s, too. I won’t name the number, as he keeps accusing me of outing him. Go figure, I imagine the marathon man should be proud for having done what he does for so long. And, I’ve been freed from the shackles of another off-kilter boss-employee relationship. The world keeps spinning on its axis.

Despite being much more attuned to avoiding weblog entries that might interfere with my income stream, I do have one thing to say that’s really about myself. I’ve had a pretty long career in the old, non-profit business. My first gig was in 1989, a literal lifetime ago in that folks born then are now voting, drinking citizens of the world. It’s had some ups and some pretty awesome lows from a storytelling point of view.

Here’s the interesting thing. Year after year, job after job, minor task after major overhaul, I’ve had one weird little bit of luck, if you could call it that. A bit of my success has always been surviving the nuts, freaks, screwballs, characters, and all level of unique individuals that comprise the American workforce. And the key word there is surviving — I’m the last buffer of sanity (well close anyway) that keeps Employee A from gutting Employee B like a cold mackerel.

In that first job, I got promoted on the strength of the near certain strength that NO ONE ever wanted to talk with two managers to whom I reported, if it could at all be avoided. Invoices got paid, grants got submitted, and I greased the communication skids for two very angry-seeming women.

Later, it was I, the soul female under 55 not banging the seriously Lothario-challenged chubby, yet well-coifed, director of a major research lab. His charms escaped me (and thank heavens, mine escaped him), and I held piles of some dysfunctional shit together among days of comforting the weeping women and juggling neglected paperwork. Through it all, I helped put together and work with the government on the largest grant the organization had gotten to date for the biological equivalent of the moon-landing. I walked away with my hymen unscathed by an asshole’s extramarital shenanigans and a kick-ass reference from a National Medal of Science award winner.

In another world, I convinced the lab staff to clean up just enough to prevent inspectors responsible for upholding two different sets of government regulations from declaring a toxic waste site. I was dubbed or deemed or unholy blessed as the one person able or willing to communicate with a certain nuclear scientist who had papered her office like the corner of a gerbil cage and refused to account to just anyone who asked about her work with radiation. Yeah, like atomic, that kind of radiation.

Down the hall, I was the UN negotiator for an underpaid lab of Indian postdoctoral students who when not facing all sorts of racism by surrounding scientists were jacking up paperwork to a fare-the-well, unable to keep straight DEA forms for classified substances and/or NRC logs for irradiating the odd lab rat. From them, I learned how to pronounce names like Gautam and that the preferred method the research nurses used in communicating with them — raised voices alternating with passive aggression — was not actually effective.

In my last gig, I foolishly kept millions of dollars of budgets flowing and all sorts of paperwork in apple pie order, in addition to my regular, daily toil. In doing so, I inadvertently saved the ass of one of the most ineffectual managers I ever met, who incidentally all witnesses to my job demise point to as the trigger man. The sweet ending of that tale is that as time rolled on others discovered what I had been doing to help the organization and he had not. Last I heard, he’s selling real estate at his partner’s company.

Here I sit, still employed. I’m at that sweet spot when I am well-liked and respected, I think, and quite possibly on the cusp of wearing out my welcome (if history is prologue). Only this time, the narrative has shifted. I withstood and helped make productive another crazy situation, and now someone else has moved on before me. A co-worker characterized it thusly — I’ve been holding a large cup of crazy and now that cup is gone (or has been depleted or emptied or cracked or put down or whatever else might flog the porcelain receptacle metaphor).

New people, new challenges and no doubt new characters. For better or worse, I persevere. I am the clover patch on the lawn of working America. It might not be symmetrical waves of Kentucky blue grass you imagined, but when noxious weeds start creeping in, I keep the dust from blowing up, the crab grass from taking over, and I ain’t half bad.

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