A couple of times I’ve woken up too early in the morning, sorta panicking about the podcast, you know, making sure I have something fun to fill the gap after Gatekeeper while I’m finishing up polishing Griffin. I wake up thinking, “Oh no! What am I gonna do?”
And then I remembered back in the day, not long after we were married, definitely pre-kids, when I worked for a bakery. It was a baking company, you know, the one who makes Nanaimo bars and butter tart bars, and strudel and other kinds of stuff for the big grocery chains. I did filing and so forth in the accounting department, and there were all these sales guys who wore business suits and overcoats and had cell phones (this is nigh-on 30 years ago, remember, so not everybody had a cell phone, and these things were rather …weighty).
In any event these sales fellas were a bit self-important, and highly strung, and would always be in high-stress mode, and racing off to meetings hither and thither, and this one day one guy was kind of abrupt with my co-worker, “We are three days behind on this stuff, and we need it done now now now! I have to go I’m gonna be late,” and tears off, and after he left, she turns to me and says, “You know? He’s all stressed out and wound up and I want to point out to the guy: “We sell cake.” It’s really weird that these guys are so full of themselves and worked up… over dessert.”
I think of that story every time I need a reminder about my priorities.