angry

Have you ever had one of those days at work? You know the type; you get up and your day is going great and everything, then something happens and the proverbial shit hits the fan. Before you know it, your great day goes to hell in a handbasket and you didn’t even see it coming. Yesterday was one of those days for me, let me tell you about it and what I learned from it.

I seem to have inadvertently made someone angry yesterday morning. Funny thing about it is, I had no clue I’d done anything wrong, or for that matter even what my crime was. 

As I went to the wash bay to find out what the problem was, it was brought to my attention that while I was washing out some pipe we had loaded on a truck earlier, the rust and dirt from inside the pipe had completely covered one of our loaders in the debris.

At the time I was just trying to get my job done and had no clue what had happened. Once I realized what I’d done, I set about to rectify the situation. I’m not sure why I was getting a cussing to go along with it; after all it was just an honest mistake and I jumped right in to rectify the problem.

My first reaction was to rail back and act a fool about this injustice in my life, but instead decided to take it like a man and just fix the situation. 

As I’ve studied on this today; I first decided I would not let someone else’s poor attitude affect mine. I would take the high road so to speak, I didn’t do this thing maliciously, it was just an accident and accidents happen. Secondly, I’ve been working to figure out if I do things like this myself and what I can do to change this behavior too.

The bottom line was I had inconvenienced someone, which had happened because of something I did. I heard them say later in the day, “Dave done made me mad this morning.” which gave me a chuckle. I thought to myself after hearing this, “I didn’t make you mad, the situation presented you an opportunity to get mad and you jumped in with both feet.”

We are all going to have times where things don’t go like we want them to, but what we need to do in those moments is step outside of ourselves and look at the situations for what they are; distractions to get us off of our game and make our days worse. If we will stop, take a breath and face the challenge with a better outlook, it will not only shock those around us who don’t do this, it will cause us to rise to the top and make our days so much better.

No one can make you mad, you may be presented with an opportunity to get mad, but the bottom line is this; if you get mad, it’s because you chose to.

Now you know what I think, tell me what you think.