Resilience Means Being Flexible

 I got the covid booster the other day.  This was something I had not intended to do, given that the first two doses of the vaccine made me way sicker than when I actually had covid!  But I'm attending a conference next month and being boosted is a requirement for attendance, so got the booster.  I've been thinking about how resilience means flexibility, but I wasn't certain how I wanted to express that.  Anyhow, I couldn't sleep last night and, in my fever, induced nocturnal wanderings, I thought about this story.

In the mid 1990's, I worked with a woman I'll call Blanche.  Blanche was in her 60's and we worked for the phone company in a giant building called the direct marketing center.  Most of the building was a salesfloor where people sold phone services.  Blanche and I, and a handful of other people worked in a tiny back room where some people handled escalations (dealing with issues when the sales had gone wrong) and the rest of us worked at the "letter table".

Everyday someone would print hundreds of letters on a dot matrix printer.  The letters said something like, "Dear Whoever-Thank you for ordering your phone number.  It's 555-5555.  It will be effective on this date and here's a pamphlet that explains call waiting."  It would be a text message or an email now.  The job of the letter table was to separate these letters, tear of the dot matrix paper sides, fold them and stuff them in an envelope with the appropriate pamphlet(s) which explained additional services.  It wasn't very interesting, and it definitely wasn't rocket science, but it was a job.

The tedium and ease of the job meant that there wasn't much to do other than talk and Blanche and I soon became friends.  I was young, naive and liked just about everyone.  Blanche was much older, and extremely set in her ways, yet we found enough common ground to more or less hit it off.  We'd buy coffee for one another on the way to work.  We exchanged cards and some small gifts.  It was nice to have a friend at work.  

Blanche and I started the same week and worked at the letter table for about a year.  During that year, my boss asked me to learn how to handle customer deposits, so I started to do that.  I became a substitute receptionist and often handled lunches.  My boss also asked me to handle the "literature closet" which basically just meant straightening up the pamphlets and letting her know if we were running low on anything.  

One day, our boss called me and Blanche and the other 2-3 "letter table" people into the conference room.  The sales floor used the conference room extensively but none of us lowly letter table people had ever been near it.  One woman nervously quipped, "Well as long as you're not going to tell us we're all fired..."   

It turns out that we were indeed all getting fired.  Well, technically, laid off but the end result was the same.  As layoffs go, it wasn't terrible.  We had three weeks' notice and in a world before cell phones, we were allowed to use the office phones to look for a job. At the end of the "meeting", our boss asked if I would stay for a few minutes.  It turns out that they wanted to keep me.  They wanted to teach me how to run the auto dialer, even though the "letter table" was going away.  When I got back to the room where the letter table was, I didn't even get to sit down or open my mouth before Blanche said, "You're getting to stay, aren't you?"  It was not a question but an accusation.  It was said with such hate and contempt, I was dumbfounded.

I offered to help Blanche with her resume because I knew she wasn't tech savvy, but from that moment on, she decided that I was her mortal enemy and she wanted nothing to do with me.  She bad mouthed me. She asked a co-worker how she could even stand to look at me.  She called me a princess who got everything she wanted, which is truly hysterical (at least now it is).  I love collaboration and community.  I'm a huge fan of personal accountability.  I'm probably the least princess-y person you will ever meet.  One day, in the break room she dumped a paper bag of every card and small gift I'd given her, and she shouted that she didn't want anything that reminded her of "this whole huge mess."  Ummm...okay.

In retrospect, I probably should have seen Blanche's behavior coming.  When I first met her, she talked endlessly about some terrible person named Eileen who apparently had sabotaged her at her previous job.  She was never really clear about what Eileen had done and I finally realized that I would be that terrible Christine person at Blanche's next job.  Ouch.

One day in the break room, a co-worker had asked if I'd thought about doing the escalations job.  I said I was happy to learn but also didn't mind the letter table either.  This offhand comment, directed at me, sent Blanche off the edge.  She ranted for days about how no one ever thought she could do anything because no one had asked her about escalations.  

But here's the thing (and here we circle back to resilience, I promise) Blanche was hugely inflexible.  This was a woman who wouldn't put certain postage on the utility bill when she mailed it. Flag stamps only for Blanche.  This was a woman who came completely unglued if she had to drive a different way to work due to construction or whatever.  She ate the same things every day.  One day, she complained about being bored at the letter table.  I offered to teach her how to answer phones. They didn't care who covered the receptionist's lunch breaks as long as they were covered.  Blanche said "Oh no, I can't learn that.  I could never be that flexible."

In the end, when it all fell apart, they were going to keep me because I'd been flexible and willing to learn stuff that wasn't technically part of my job.  Blanche couldn't be that flexible.  Her inflexibility led to her not being resilient.  She behaved like a five-year-old.  She blamed other people (me, mostly) for her circumstances.  She couldn't roll with it.  She couldn't move forward.  Her anger and mean-spirited words got so bad, our boss had to call her into the office and tell her to knock it off.  This was a 65 year old woman!  

I don't write this because I'm calling Blanche out.  I long ago forgave her bitterness toward me.  I don't even know if she's still alive (she'd be almost 90 by now) but if she is, I hope she's found some peace.  I hope she's developed some resilience.

Life throws all kinds of crap at us.  If the worst that happens to you is that you get laid off from a job, then you should probably count yourself lucky.  It's certainly not the worst thing that has ever happened to me.   Expectations can break your heart.  But if you can be a little flexible, grow some, learn some new ways of doing things, when your heart does get broken (as it inevitably will) you can move forward a little faster.  A little bit better.  We think we are keeping ourselves safe by frantically clinging to the ways we do things; the ways we've always done things, when in fact we are making ourselves less resilient, not more.  

Today, I urge you to ask yourself, "Where can I be a little more flexible?"