Give 150 percent. Work your fingers to the bone. Go the extra mile. Blood, sweat and tears.
Those are the things we say about our jobs and workforce. Those are the things we think we are supposed to live up to all of the time. Granted, there are times when everyone is expected to "step up," but how and when and for whom. How far do we take it or not take it?
My daughter was part of a play in high school this year. It was a small part in a group called the "ensemble." She loves drama and so never complained about the small part, and she was happy to have the experience, but the issue of a "small part" did come up a few times. We discussed the time and energy it took the whole family to get her to practice, staying up late to pick her up. We spoke about how little she might be seen compared to the amount of work she put in. One night I asked: 'Who's job is the most important in a hospital?"
And of course I got the obvious answers: a doctor, a nurse and so on until they ran out of answers.
I finally told them that in my opinion, the janitor's job was the most important in a hospital and I continued to expound on all of the reasons his job, while mostly unseen, was of utmost importance.
I tried not to glorify the position or exaggerate the point, and rather leave the obvious to defend itself.
While I shared this example, I was reminded of the times someone did not even do the basics of their job, when it meant the most to me. When time was of the essence or when the "law" and courts were involved. The way a police officer writes his reports, (imposing his assumptions/moral ideas on a report or just the documenting the facts) the way the secretary enters data (whether she capitalizes a thing or not, even where she places a comma), the five minutes a social worker stays to do a thing correctly (saving a child from only God knows) and so on.
It seemed to me that the heroes in my life had been and still are people who just did exactly what they were supposed to do, no more and no less.
Most people have experienced a delay in an order because an employee entered a wrong piece of information. These instances are usually corrected and it is not a matter of life and death. On the other hand there are times when sloppy work leads the customer down a road of horrific consequences, some that the original "mistake-maker" will never hear about.
It does matter in a court of law just how a word was spelled on the night of an incident, or how any given official perceives a matter and relays it. It does matter how a piece of information was taken down and recorded when a person is planning an estate. The people doing the details of these jobs don't always think that what they do is important, but it is. The teenager at the fast-food counter has an impact on the vice president, depending on how she rings things up or reacts to a customer. A person who is dishonest today, can be the reason another seemingly totally unrelated person is fired tomorrow. In our fast-paced world full of instant information, we tend to forget the actual human equation, the still permanent and very real connection we have to one another.
If a highway worker is too tired to search for the last few bits of debris, he may have a direct hand in who ends up stuck there in a snow storm months later. People who do their jobs and do them well, even taking pride in their tasks, no matter how "small," are the true heroes.
Being polite is nice, doing things the way they are supposed to be done is better, pausing once in a while to explore seemingly insignificant actions to their potentially catastrophic end, if done wrong. Most of the time people are not irate because it is fun. It is because they are in a panic, they have been let down on many levels, they need help and someone, to just do the necessary tasks that they cannot do.
They need any given thing in our various systems to be consistent and for just one person to be compassionate, no glorified positions and procedures or indifferent minimal requirements. Compassion isn't a thing 'above and beyond' the job description or call. It is required for just being human and it will be of use in every life -- usually surprising us depending on which end of the need for it we are.
Musgrove lives in Ogden.
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