For the love of the game:

Over the last few weeks, I've had the pleasure of working with many different people. This is one reason I love being part time! I love meeting my workers and spending time to get to know them.

That being said, occasionally you run into people who obviously hate their jobs. And when I say obvious, I mean OBVIOUS. To the point where I have to stop myself from asking them why they're even here.

Here's the deal... I love my job. I enjoy being at work. I enjoy (most of) my coworkers. We all have bad days. We have those calls or those crews that just rub us the wrong way and make us Cranky McCranky pants. But I'm going to say that 80% of the time, I thoroughly enjoy my job.

I do not enjoy working with people who do not enjoy their job. They stress me out and take all the fun out of what we do! But when you find those people that love their job, you can tell. It shows in their faces, it's in their tone of voice.

I consider it a great compliment when my coworkers tell me how much they enjoy working with me or how happy I seem. I actually had a fire medic tell me yesterday on a call that he had yet to meet an AMR medic as happy as I was. While I was stoked on the compliment, it bummed me out that people don't love this as much as I do!

Yesterday was a ridiculously hot and humid day (there was actually a flash flood that shut down several roads to several hospitals... That made life extremely difficult!! What should've been a 5 min drive took an hour!). The power went out in multiple neighborhoods (which made our last call of the night interesting, to say the least), the AC went out in some hospitals... Sure there were complaints, but luckily the crews at the hospital had good attitudes. It kept an already sticky situation (get it??? GET IT?????) from becoming worse.

Bill Watterson drew a wonderful comic about this kind of thing... You may have seen it. If you haven't, click here.

Attitude is everything. And when you're doing what you love, it doesn't feel like work so much as fulfillment of a calling. So do what you love!! Find a way to thrive on it or live more humbly. There is beauty in simplicity and joy in working hard.