Are you where you deserve to be?

Leave me alone, dammit!

It's a poorly worded question. Nobody deserves to work for the Plain-Dealer, but by golly someone has to work there and one of those someones should be me, dammit!

 

Well, I am queen of the universe. So it's hard to complain.

 

That's the MFing truth.

 

Yeah, I've never liked the word "deserve"

There are a lot of great people in this business who needed a big element of luck to get where they are, whether it's a key person leaving at a certain time and there are plenty of extremely talented people who never got their shot because of bad timing.

My second internship came about only after the two people who were supposed to be their summer interns failed to show up. They called me and told me I had to be there in 48 hours if I wanted to do it.

My first job out of school? The same paper. No luck there since I rocked my internship...

I got my first big promotion when one baseball writer quit and another couldn't move up because his wife was having a difficult pregnancy and couldn't do the required travel.

 

The third option?

 

I must be higher than I should be. Thanks.

 

I'm exactly where I deserve to be, stuck in nowhere Alabama while I finish my degree. Had I used my brain in my teens and early 20s, I would have finished college the first time and who knows. As it stands, I screwed up and I've been paying (making up) for it the past two years with 18-hour work/school days and learning to live on power naps.

Then again, I'm exactly two weeks from having said degree in hand, so.....life could be a helluva lot worse.

 

Deserve and should are both hot-to-touch words. Life is not lived on one track, and when competing interests come into play, choices are made that can stop or aid the career momentum. My most recent move was a step back in title to a destination that fits the Editudes' life at this point. And I'm fine with it.

 

I have no doubt there are a few folks on this thread who have the talent and the drive to be somewhere "bigger" and "better" than they are now.

I also have no doubt there are more folks on this thread who just aren't as good in real life as they are in their own minds.

 

I'm where I want to be, and that's the most important thing. It's up to the folks who do the hirin' and firin' to determine whether I "deserve" be be here or at a bigger/smaller paper.

 

It's hard to go lower than unemployed.

 

I'm quite possibly the oldest first lieutenant the Army has ever seen. So, lower, I guess.