Best wake up call you ever got

I've had a few, but the one that comes to mind was when I almost died a little more than a year ago.

That's when I thought: "Good, God. I'm wasting my time. I've been a member for almost a year and barely posted? Get your butt to work, young man."

I'm glad I got my priorities straight.

 

Two that come to mind:

1. In high school, my grades were so-so (C+/B-). I probably should have worked harder, but I have a short attention span. At a meeting to discuss the process of applying to colleges, my guidance counselor told my mother and I that I would be lucky to get into our local community college (nevermind that the community college accepted everyone with a HS diploma).

I ended up getting accepted to two state schools (I did real well on my SATs). Four years later, I graduated from college with a double-major.

My mom told me that I should have gone back to my high school with my college diploma and waved it in front of the guidance counselor's face. I didn't, figuring the guy wouldn't even have remembered me.

2. In college, I spent my first couple of years on the party circuit, striking out with the opposite sex, and getting the same mediocre grades in high school. I was starting to get depressed due to the lack of direction in my life, so I started seeing a school counselor. After a bunch of sessions, she told me to either get involved in other college activities that didn't have to do with drinking or to stop making appointments to see her, so I joined the paper and the radio station. It gave me a new spark, and sent me on my way to graduating.

 

My neighbors just woke up because I laughed so hard. They said, "Hey, keep it down, you loser. And Jesse sucks." I'm going to defecate on their doormat. Be right back.

 

I was specifically coming on this thread to say "Not from Pallister at 8 a.m. screaming about breakfast.

 

Best wake-up call...I had applied to be on the sports staff at my college paper my freshman year, but the SE told me to work for a semester on the news desk. The next semester, before I had even had a chance to apply for a desk position, he came up to me at a staff meeting and asked me if I still wanted to work in sports. I said yes, he hired me right then and there, I left the building, called my dad practically crying because I was so happy, and the rest is history.

 

Pall is lucky I didn't have a gun and that I was in a really good mood that morning.

 

My first, and to date only, supervisory job. The few months I was there was a constant wake up call, and the first time since getting in the business that I felt I had truly and epically failed. I don't know that I needed humbling, but by god, I got it.

 

Another relatively recent one: I'd written this column in which I was going in a lot of directions at once. I had a little to say about a lot of different things and it showed.

I sent the column to my former full-time reporter. He'd been the opinions editor at his college paper and he was excellent about pointing out the good and the bad in columns. He ripped this one a new one and gave me a lecture about my approach.

I ended up scrubbing that column and I wrote a different one. The replacement column was focused on one specific issue. He thought that column was much better. It became the one I used that week.

To this day, I still have his e-mail ripping the one column a new one. I keep it as a reminder of what I need to do differently with columns.

 

Did you also get involved in another activity that didn't have to do with drinking?

 

A big one was toward the end of my first year of college, when the fuzz got me and some friends in some underage activities, and I had to pay a bunch of money, spend six months without a license and be ashamed in front of my folks. It nicely put a cap on eight months of general irresponsibility, though I did go on to double major and work at the school paper.

Another one came right before my second cycling racing season. I had achieved so-so results at best the year before and constantly fell off the back, though never too far behind. I had the physical ability, just was getting completely psyched out. Noting this, my coach, a really phenomenal guy, walked up to me before the first race and said it was all in my head, and told me not to get ahead of myself. I finished sixth in that race.