The Grass is Always Greener...or is it???

Every once in awhile a person will have a bad day. But then you hear a story about some other poor schmuck that has it worse, and then you realize that you may have a pretty green pasture to lie in after all.

There are days that I want to pitch it all and come home from work and switch jobs on the spur of the moment. I left a job once before with no job lined up "on the outside" and it took me two months to find a pretty good replacement job. Two months of pity party was about all my friends could take and they almost threw a big party when I finally found my next job. I had put all of my eggs in the "work your way up through the production environment in the hopes to one day take on the Supervisory role for that deparment" basket only to find that I did not possess what the company was looking for in a Supervisor. It seems that in order to be a good supervisor you have to be a tough guy on occasion, and I was too much of a nice guy to be a supervisor. That was a long two months for me, too, and I will advise everyone to line up a job before telling your boss that you quit...especially in today's economy.

There are days that your spouse grates on your nerves and you wonder why you stick it out. Your kids can be major pains in the keister (especially the teenagers), and most of your co-workers can be idiots on a daily basis. But I have news for you: You also grate on your spouse's nerves, you are a pain in your teenager's butt, and you also can be an idiot at work. But let's take a look at our landscaping.

One day in particular started out as the previous one had left off. I can't remember specifics, nor are they important, but I must have had a run-in with my wife and oldest daughter the night before, and I was headed off to work with a company full of village idiots. Part of my job is to QC production tickets to make sure the scope of work writen in the job ticket matches what the final product should be. When I call a CSR to make revisions to the scope of work because there is something written incorrectly, I occasionally will be accused of singling them out or being too nit-picky. Yep, you write something wrong, but it is my issue because I have nothing better to do with my time than to point out someone else's errors. So off I wen to work waiting for someone to cross my path incorrectly and I heard a lady on the radio calling in to send a message to her husband who was stationed overseas. A few minutes later I arrived at work with a lady who married her fiance about a month and a half before he was deployed to Iraq for a 12 month tour that was exteneded to almost 18 months. After he came home safely, thank the Lord, they decided to start a family, only to loose their first pregnancy. Again, thank the Lord, they are expecting a baby girl in mid-January.

By this time I had alread stopped and thought to myself, "Hey, buddy, you may think you have it bad, but here I am able to go home and see my wife and family every day, where the lady on the radio and the lady sitting next to me may not see her husband ever again. Another lady I work with can't have kids of her own, so she'll never know what it's like to raise one of these human beings from an infant to adult; to teach them how to walk and to talk, and to walk them to school for the first time; to bear with them when they talk back to you, and to one day walk them down the aisle, or to see them walk down the aisle with their new bride as you did many years ago; and to pick up the phone when they call to say, "Dad, I used one of your lines on my kids today."

And how bad is my job, really??? I don't have to wear camouflage to keep from getting shot at. I work in an air conditioned office, not the middle of the desert where it is 115 at 11:00 pm. My work day is 8:30 am until 5:00 pm, and I don't have to pull guard detail, or get woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of mortars, only to the sound of a child crying from a bad dream.

So the next time you think you're having a bad day, stop and take a look around and ask yourself if you're that bad off. You may just see someone else making lemonade out of the lemons they've been dealt.

Or, if you subscribe to the Cowboy At Heart lifestyle, remember this little story and the moral that follows:

Two young boys were entered into a sociological experiment. One of the boys was placed in a room full of every imaginable toy; the other boy in a room full of manure. The doors were closed and a couple hours later the boys were checked on to see how things were proceeding.

The boy in the room full of toys was sobbing incoherently and all of the toys were broken. After calming the boy down, they found that he had no one to play with and he became bored with playing by himself and broke up all of the toys.

When the sociologists entered the second room they all had to duck to avoid the manure being flung hither and yon. The laughter and squeals of delight coming from the young boy was almost deafening. They calmed him down and in utter shock and disbelief asked him why in the world he was so happy about being placed in the most horrid environment imaginable.

Out of breath, the second young boy replied with a huge grin and a sparkle in his eye, "THERE HAS TO BE A PONY IN HERE SOMEWHERE!!!"

Keep an eye out for ponies. They're out there, but you may have to look closely to find them. You'll most likely find them where the grass is the greenest.