I Was the Worst Employee

The epiphany arrived along with my third glass of wine

By Sky Nesher on iStock (image licensed by author)

It was just after my thirtieth birthday when I realized I was a terrible employee. I worked my way up in the company over a few years of hard running, been promoted to a job I created for myself, then realized I finally achieved everything I hated about work. I was now an hourly minion, dedicated to making someone else’s dream of financial wealth come true.

This epiphany arrived, along with my third glass of good wine, while I was sitting alone in the neighborhood bar next to our office, in the Marina District in San Francisco. The bartender, Ron, had been pouring drinks in this place for almost twenty years. He worked five nights a week, his job pouring drinks, serving food, and putting up with stressed out, crazy business drunks, hookers working the bars posing as college students, and nurturing the locals who hated anything that changed in this little neighborhood, which meant they hated everything.

Since this was “The City by the Bay,” under siege yet again from the onslaught of first wave tech people discovering this little sleepy town full of hard drinking gays, old Italians, and transvestite cabarets, everything changed everyday as new businesses, fueled by younger workers, took over the old, gentile neighborhoods, where your neighbors were your friends…