I Think I Exhaled
One morning on the way to the office I was on the phone with a friend. She asked, are you doing okay? Side note: earlier this week, we had gone to breakfast and I told her, “I think my give a damn’s busted.” If you are unfamiliar with the expression, you can reference the Jo Dee Messina 2005 release of a song by the same name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o40fwZgSFPI . Back to the story…. This morning I guess the question, “are you doing okay,” hit me a different way. I took a deep breath and I think I finally exhaled, the first time since March of 2020. You see, as HR professionals we put on our game face, kept the spreadsheets, waded through the CDC website, read all the OSHA compliance BS, and just smiled and nodded when asked, “are you doing okay?” Why did we do that? Well….. Like a flight attended in a thunderstorm over Dallas in early spring – no matter how bad the turbulence gets or how many passengers think the plane is going down, your job is to smile and nod and let them k