Never Ever Enough

One lesson that my parents taught me which I've carried with me through adulthood is this: good is never enough.

On friday five of my coworkers decided to quit, leaving me and two other people to close the store. Now I cannot begin to emphasise how large this store is. Or how insane the task of cleaning up while providing oustanding customer service on a Friday night at the mall is with just a 3 person team (excluding the manager of course). I'm pretty sure you can imagine it's crazy. Never the less, there I was as racks upon racks kept piling up, feverishly trying to be a class act juggler of the multiple tasks laid out for me. Needless to say we were unable to clean the entire store by the end of shift.

The following day came, more busier than the proir. Even with additional bodies working on shift, the combination of the previous night's mess compounded on top of the chaos of a Saturday afternoon had the entire store looking like a scene out of Jumanji. It was ugly.

My ears were burning with complaints from coworkers. They gossiped under not so low breath about how this mess was the fault of the people who were unable to clean up the store on Friday (that's code for me). Finally my manager walked up to me demanding an explanation for last night's fiasco. Although I tried to reason that under the circumstances we did as much as we could to leave the store looking good, she quickly dismissed it as an excuse. Bottom line is the store should have been clean understaffed or not.

I walked away from the store that evening feeling defeated. I tried my best to be good at my job, and yet good was not enough.

I took on this job simply for a paycheck as I continue to build my business. But somewhere within the last 3 months I lost sight of the objective. This simple part time job became a pet project. A challenge for me to be favorited, well recieved, and respected as a result of doing good. And so I worked hard at being really really good but not to the satifactions of my collegues.

When I was young my parents always thought I could do better. My mentors always pushed me to do something better. My professors, advisors, supervisors, whoever... always the same thing: "you should have done better".

It leads me to wonder: either I've been half assing everything my entire life or there are people out there whose expectations I may never meet. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. But over the last 12 hours or so my mind keeps asking the same question over and over again: will good ever be enough?

xxx
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