i choose not greatness

Every year at work we have a "Journey to Greatness" meeting where the President of the company talks to us about what a great year we're having and what's on the horizon for the upcoming year. They put together a video or two of people in the company answering phones and smiling and pointing at computer screens and smiling. They do a pretty good job of putting together something pretty corny.

Last year the theme was "Agent (2)007." Kinda James Bond-ish where we focused on the importance of insurance agents and they put together a video of the higher-ups running around in tuxedos on top secret missions.

This year the theme was based on the Presidential election. The President of the company entered to "Hail to the Chief" and, throwing up the double peace sign, proclaimed, "I am not a crook!" The video had lots of employees smiling and then cut to scenes and sound bites of former U.S. Presidents like Kennedy, Eisenhower, Ford... and also Martin Luther King Jr. for some reason.

We were all given campaign buttons that say "i choose greatness" on them. One of my coworkers was really annoyed that the "i" is not capitalized.

For the past three months, along with other projects, I've been working on putting together materials for an upcoming class of new hire trainees. They are scheduled to start training in about a week, so we're pretty close to having all the training materials finally done. Or so I thought. Today I was given information that sabotages a lot of the work that I had been putting together. Much of what has taken three months to work on now needs to be scrapped and hastily redone in one week.

Anyway, this is how I cope with stress at work: