There is an AREA in which she has "grown" - and I use the term loosely. It is that she stood there talking to you in the kitchen yesterday and told you how she felt. She expressed herself. Anger, sadness, hopelessness, in THAT area - self-expression to YOU about HER feelings - she has matured A LITTLE. To say she has outgrown you was way over the mark so forget I said it. I stand by everything else I said.
Ok, thanks for clarifying.
She came home from her long day a little while ago and said she had a tough day. Asked me how my day was and I said it was busy. She came over to me and hugged me so I hugged her back. That's about it.
I'm having trouble with this. She comes in to eat with me in the dining room with a glass of wine. She doesn't talk much and seems kind of depressed. I made a few jokes and she laughed but she just seems depressed. A far cry from this mornings 'chipperness'.
Still distant. I'm not sure what to say / do. I know I'm being a little overly nice and trying to not be coming across that way but it's difficult. I know she's tired, maybe that's all it is.
I read all the notes from the various meetings and remembered how I was feeling like we were being dishonest in some of the things we were 'claiming' we could do. And some of the arrogance with notes like 'have to figure out why so-and-so takes so long to do xyz'. I remember thinking then 'why am I checking up on these people, they know what they are doing'.
Or 'got to set up so and so with access to servers' when I know that they are not qualified to run MY systems with MY staff.
But there was one meeting with a small company we were acquiring where I wrote some notes and I remember feeling "We're lying to them, we won't make their company any better, we aren't in the business they're in". I hated being in those meetings. We acquired them and tanked them in a year.
Overall, I could see all the things we were talking about over and over but never doing right. I had some notes on buying equipment that we never bought. It was always 'make a plan' so we could hurry up and not do it. But they got their big salaries.
Going from 'knowing' what to do to 'always asking' and being denied.
I let it happen. I should have stopped it but I let it happen.
Here is why I COULD have stopped things, or at least influenced them: They were afraid I would leave and a lot of our success was because of all the 'goodwill' I had created within the community. If I were to leave angry, that would destroy the goodwill. People were our customers because they trusted ME, not because they trusted the COMPANY.
I remember one of the guys saying to me "Why do you care about the community, they don't care about you? They'll jump ship if someone gives them a better price for the same service."
He said "I admire your integrity but I don't understand it"
Over the next few years he was proved wrong. Other services sprung up that were a little cheaper, but customer loyalty was high - because I WAS THERE.
Amazingly enough over those years they put more time and money into the community they said 'didn't care' - they even sponsor one of the local parades now. Unbelievable.
When I decided I had to leave because it was unhealthy for me they did everything they could to convince me to stay on part time as a consultant. Not because they really needed me, they needed my NAME to still be on the roster of staff.
How do I know this? Because they TOLD me. They said people would feel more confident in the company knowing that Frank was still involved. And I felt RESPONSIBLE for everyone and agreed 'that would be good'.
F*ckers.
I could go on. We got a big deal with a fortune 100 company because of a connection I had and it turned into a 'hey, let's bill them as much as we can, they can afford it'. We borrowed $100,000 worth of equipment from a friend who owned a similar company and kept it way past the time we promised to return it, and I had to keep taking his calls asking when we'd return it. This was so we could save money!
I gave it up, instead of holding on to my integrity, my honor, my ethics I allowed them to be compromised. That was the end of me. And for what? The mistaken belief that I would have more money and more peace in my life because I wouldn't be alone running things. But THEY didn't have integrity.
And I'm the one who suffered. Always feeling 'less than' and really, just plain 'bad'. I knew I was doing things I didn't believe in but I felt like I had no choice.
I want it back. I will have it back. Starting now.
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I also found some notes from 10/99 during the first 'db' period where my W filed for divorce. I had gone to a 'kids in the middle' required class.
I wrote: Older daughter says 'Dad used to make mom feel better when she was sad'.
I don't know why I wrote that, but it meant something then.
--
This is the 3rd cycle through this and it's going to f'ing end here. My wife has tried to leave me twice now and this it the third time. I can understand why, I compromised my integrity, my heart, my souls purpose. And I couldn't live with myself because of it.
I came out of it long enough to save my wife each time, but it's still a heavy dark stain on my soul.
So I don't 'take responsibility' any more because that way I can't 'fail' or 'be a liar'. I can blame someone else instead.
So yeah Amy, I lost something and now I found out what it was.
Maybe my wife will not stick around because she's lost the faith. One thing is for sure, I can't hide from this any more. I cant hide from my souls purpose.
It sounds to me like for too long you have massaged your feelings and adapted them to do what you thought was the best for/ required by, others - both in business and in your M. You appear to have not been completely true to yourself and now all these compromises or decisions you made against your 'inner' judgement are coming back and biting you.
It's time to be true to Frank and see what evolves from that. It will be a hard journey I expect and many will see a side of you that they weren't expecting, (especially perhaps your W). But if you can be true to yourself then ultimately you will be happier and that happiness will spread. You have to do this to save yourself and in saving yourself you may well 'save' your M, because at the moment, the course you are on seems to be heading toward destroying that.
BTW, if you have a drink problem, WTF is your W doing drinking in front of you? That is just so inconsiderate IMHO.
Saffie me 46 H 46 M in 1986 D20,D18,S16,D13 H's A 01/05 to 07/06 H recommitted to M 07/06 renewed vows 09/06 Going from strength to strength
I put some more thought into this whole 'compromising' my values. Several years before this business I was in another one with a partner whom I thought was my friend. As time passed he started to get really weird, spending money on personal stuff and talking to customers in bizarre ways, promising stuff that was not a good idea.
Eventually I spoke to the 'investor' about my concerns and the short story is that this 'friend' convinced him that I was the one who was stressed out and I needed to be put in my place - so they put me on PROBATION in my own company!
A month later I stood up for what I believed to be the right thing, and they fired me. I won't even go into details about the long, convoluted and blathering 20 page document he tried to get me to sign before they would give me a 'severance package. I still have it and it's amazing to read. I had to go to the labor board to get my vacation pay and other stuff and he tried to tell them I was 'insubordinate' so they were justified in firing me.
The guy at the labor board listened to my side and told me after talking to him that he had no doubt there was a loose screw there and forced them to pay me without that stupid 'agreement' being signed.
I tried to find a lawyer who would help me prove they were wrong and nobody would take the case because there wasn't any clear evidence that he had done anything wrong. Even though I had seen the American Express bills with $10,000 per month of expenses on them - him taking his family on trips. Even though his wife was on our salary as an 'office manager' for $30k per year but never came to the office. Our staff didn't have desks, they had folding tables. One of our programmers was a woman who was also athletic and he would say to me 'doesn't S have great legs'.
The last lawyer I talked to was a kind gentleman who said "Let it go, it was a learning experience and you know that it was all your creation. Go do it AGAIN and learn from this".
This wasn't the first time I stood up for 'the right thing' but it was the most severe response I'd ever gotten. My Wife was pregnant at the time (this was 17 years ago) and I went from a comfortable income with a lot of stress to no income and the humiliation of being fired.
It took me about 6 months to pick myself up again - on my own - but I did have a few friends around who I could talk to about how I felt and it helped. I ended up at a 100 person technology company where I couldn't use him as a reference and they (rightly so) said they couldn't hire me until they talked to him because it was hard to believe MY story. They did and it was abundantly clear to them that I was telling the truth, that he was nuts.
after only being there a few weeks I was called into the presidents office. Of course I'm terrified, thinking that somehow the past had gotten to me again. Instead, they are telling me that they looked at my resume and saw that I had 'some' background in VAX/VMS systems engineering. See, I had wanted to do more work in computer graphics, and I got a book on programming in what was then Microsoft Windows 3.1 and absorbed it, tried some programming and got a job for several months so I could learn it. I hyped it up in my resume so I could get THIS job doing what I thought would be fun. I played down the VAX/VMS part of my history but the reality was that there was pretty much nobody who was better than me.
I don't say that lightly, I could 'see' things that other people couldn't when working on these problems.
So, what they wanted of me was to tell them more about my background so I did. I told them how I had written a system to emulate another computer operating systems on VAX's and how some of our clients for this system were people like Chase Manhattan Bank.
So, they showed me a project that they had paid a consultant to write that was 'almost done' but he was leaving the area to go to Silicon Valley and could I look at it and estimate how long it would take for me to finish it.
I did, and in the process I realized he had faked the majority of it. Think of it this way: It was supposed to 'look like' a Windows program but on an old style DOS / Ascii text display. Instead of building a library to create menus or screens, he wrote a program to display each screen individually, and if a 'menu' needed to be displayed he just copied the program and made the changes to draw he screen with the menu displayed.
In other words he had maybe 20 copies of the same program with slight changes to display the screens differently. What had happened was that when you need to change the behavior of one of the screens, you have to change all 20 copies to mimic the same changes. To hide his bad design he would make sure that when they did demos, only HE would run the demo.
Well, I spent all night agonizing over this discovery. I was afraid of what would happen if I told them that this was all fake, that it needed a rewrite to be done correctly. I had already been through a lot just to get this job and I didn't want to be looked on as 'negative'.
But I told them. They asked a lot of 'right' questions and I showed them examples to support my belief. I proposed a better way and a timeline I was sure I could make.
In the end it was a success and over the next few years the tech support people said of all the products they had, mine was the one that they did the least support on. I ended up becoming friends with the President who was a good and decent man and could never understand why I was so hard on myself.
Once he asked me why I didn't start another company and I told him I just wanted to work in a cubicle in the back and be obscure. I didn't want to be the center of everything.
Eventually he sold the company and it was he who encouraged me to strike out on my own because - as he put it - you were never meant to be 'obscure'.
When I went through the sale / loss of my last company and lost my integrity I know that I FELT like I had to suck it up when history seemed to be repeating itself because I was afraid to 'leave' or to stand up for my values. I'm sure there is a connection between both bad events. It was the good event in between them that I've lost touch with.
I'm internalizing more of this. I can see that it's been about fear - fear of authority, fear of failure. Fear of standing up for what I believe in - no matter what the consequence.
after posting last nights post about reading my old stuff I went to bed feeling very angry but also hopeful. My W was sleeping and I put my hand on her back, silently letting her feel my love for her.
It was hard to sleep because of the thoughts in my head but I was ok.
This morning she's up and getting ready to go for her walk and I say 'good morning' and she says she's been up, the newspaper is downstairs, she's already clipped the coupons and now she's going for a walk. Much more information than I needed to know I guess.
Anyway I said 'did you sleep well?' and she said she had lot's of 'weird dreams' and I said 'oh, like what?' and she got angry and said 'I don't remember them, I just had weird dreams'.
She said she was going for a walk, and she was going to go to the sunday session at the spiritual church. I said I'd like to go because I know he (the pastor) has been doing a series on finding your lifes purpose and growth, and she says in a sarcastic, angry tone 'yeah, growth'.
Frank - What strikes me about your most recent posts is what a mismatch your work is with your personality.
A mismatch because you strive for complete honesty and transparency, and let's face it, 99.99% of modern American big business is incompatible with that goal.
A mismatch because the way to get around that might be to own your own business, but deep in your heart you'd rather be "in your cubicle" than out juggling all the balls involved in running a business?
Could you be happier working for a firm with avowed better ethics? (Thinking like the old Ben and Jerry's here, although often things are not really what they seem). Or bringing your business skills to a large charity?
Or maybe you'd be happier in a smaller business? Or in a different career altogether, like consulting or teaching?
Just trying to encourage some "out of the box" thinking.
If money was no object, what job would you love to be doing right now?
