"What a Nightmare" "Business Relationships & Treading Water"

If you can't swim you need to be good a treading water. While employed you're surrounded by organizational resources and people who use you and you them. Once out in the open water, unemployed, that helping hand is gone.

I always told my employees to develop their skills and be immediately employable elsewhere.  That's easy.  In-service options abound and money can always be found for training and development.  The second part of being employable is to 'know people.'  Work harder on this part.  You're more likely to be employable if you actually have developed your network people.  Even with rusty or weak skills good contacts will help you get your work life together.

Social media is invaluable but real people, real handshakes and face-ed to-face conversations leave an impression.  This is better done while employed. Once unemployed your former co-workers become as weak as a 2nd level LinkedIn contact.

Work at treading. Survive.  Others sink.  Ships pass.

You brand, the part that gets you a new gig is swimming, not treading.

"What A Nightmare"

We've owned rental property for years.  It's still not clear if that makes sense but it is what it is.  A new tenant is coming September 5th.  Fortunately the previous tenant left a couple of days early.  You never know what you're going to find when you walk in the door.  This time is was not bad and the routine was the standard cleaning and light repair and adding to the list of what really should be done.  It's call the "after this tenant list."  After this tenant we'll re-do the kitchen and bath, replace the windows and carpet...make it really nice, spend $20,000 and get another $75/month in rent.

You work through the list in your head, the obvious issues, the likely issues and what you might find that you anticipate and the things that might be there that would be bad.  If you plan on making three trips it will probably be six.  You find that the tenant took all the light bulbs and you did not bring any or a work light.  

It's all good practice.  Scenarios.  Paradigm-busting.  "I've never had a tenant leave voodoo dolls of me with pins through their head."  Actually I have.  That was not a scenario that I'd planned for.  Now I open each cupboard, closet and drawer and look for the pin-through-the-head doll.  Business scenario planning needs to give thought to these outliers, too. Not every hole in the road is a 2008 recession.

Late in the evening Saturday I know there is one more trip on Sunday to finish painting and final cleanup.  One more pass at the tub/shower is completed but the water won't go down.  The drain open/close mechanism did work but has failed.  Thanks for YouTube.  It's simple, sort of to take apart.

As the part comes out it's clear that the linkage component is broken.  Skipping dinner (it's 8:30 PM) I head to Menard's in search of part(s).  The first young man responds that he is not a plumbing expert but will find one.  A jovial guy appears.  I show him the part.  His response "what a nightmare" is about what I expected.  Menard's is a 50,000 SQFT store.  "We don't have anything like that.  You'll have to visit xxx.  They are closed until Tuesday.

"Coming Home Crazy" was one of regional writer Bill Holm's works.  Written in the 1980s it inspired me to find words in each days passage and frustration.  He wrote of simple things, drawing in part from his Icelandic heritage and a simple life in Minneota, MN.  Once I wrote to him offering thanks that his example allowed me to write creatively about snaking a floor drain.

Now it's fifteen years later and I've not been as diligent about this writing challenge as I should have been.  I'm thinking that Bill was talking to me, the new plumbing breakage is a sign as were his words channeled to me "oh, what a nightmare."