Recently (OK, it’s been a couple of weeks, because summer, yo!) sonofabeach96 was kind enough to nominate me for a Liebster Award:

This feels a little bit like cheating, because I actually won one of these before, and wrote about aliens and my cat.  But this one is a different COLOR, and like shoes THAT MAKES IT TOTALLY DIFFERENT so I’ll make room.

Before I dig in, lemme tell ya about sonofabeach96 – he writes about life and family, and seasons his posts liberally with great music.  He’s a good read, so go check him out. kthx

DA RULZ:

1. Make a post thanking and linking the person who nominated me and include the Liebster Award sticker in the post.
2. Nominate 5-10 other bloggers and notify them of this in one of their posts.
3. All nominated bloggers are to have less than 200 followers.
4. Answer the 11 questions posed by your nominator and create 11 different questions for your nominees to answer.  Or, you can repeat the same questions.
5. Copy these rules into your post.

And now for the questions, which are sure to provide fascinating insight into the mental supply closet that is my psyche….

(Some of these are repeats, so I hope y’all don’t mind some backwards links.  Actually, I think I’ll list those questions first, just to get them checked off.)

What is your favorite movie and why?  I have two:  Hitch and The Incredibles.  You can read why here. 

Do you believe in an afterlife and/or ghosts?  Oh yes indeedy.  Here’s THAT post.

Describe your family and its dynamic.  I think most of it, and how it plays into the hot mess accomplished, mature professional I am today, can be found HERE.  

And now, some new stuff:

What is your career and is it what you’ve always wanted to do or did you just fall into it?

I work in Human Resources.  NO ONE wants to work in HR when they grow up.  No one even really knows what that IS, honestly.  I think “human resources” comes from an ancient Gaelic term meaning “shoveling employee drama that stinketh like elephant droppings”.

Getting into HR was a total accident.  The kind where you’re juggling hot coffee and a plate of danishes, and your stiletto catches in the sidewalk, thrusting you rather violently and ungracefully into the cement, resulting in 1) hot coffee all over your white blouse, 2) scuffing your heel up beyond any hope of repair*, 3) tearing holes in the knees of the ONE pair of pants that don’t make your thighs look like they need their own zip code, and 4) all the pastries you were carrying landing sticky-side down in the dirt.  (Krispy Kreme redefined.  Bleck.)

*what nail polish and a Sharpie can fix.  (Don’t judge.)

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a meteorologist.  (OK, to be fair, not a lot of kids have THAT dream, either.)

I started college with no idea what I wanted to do for a living, and ended up gravitating towards education.  (Hey, I’d spent twelve years in school, it was the one thing I knew about.  I really wanted to study diet and nutrition, since that was the OTHER thing I knew about, but as a fat freshman, I didn’t think I’d be all that believable, so…. Voila!  Education it is!)  Unfortunately, after a fairly significant investment of four years and 175 credits, I learned in my last semester (during student teaching) that, while I enjoyed the actual TEACHING part of the job, I just could not stomach school politics.

The last straw?  I gave a kid a D in music class, and his dad threatened to kill me.  Note – the kid EARNED that D, refusing to participate, or listen, or do anything.  Essentially, he was a little a$$hole.  And his dad came to the school and told me I’d better think twice about keeping his precious little groinfruit off the honor roll, because he’d hate for me to be found dead in the park across the street like that 13-year-old girl they found there six weeks ago….(and I’m like, yeah…that totally just happened.)

I’m SURE this kid is enjoying a lucrative career now, thanks to Daddy’s stellar influence.  Somewhere that serves french fries.  If he’s not in prison.

The kicker?  The principal said I should consider the guy’s offer.  Uh no.  Little Lucifer got his D, and I washed my hands of the mess of trying to mold tomorrow’s society.  (Epilogue:  it broke all by itself without my help.) 

Unfortunately, when you study teaching but decide to pursue other careers, you really don’t have too many other readily marketable skills.  However, I had worked in college for the Conference Services department, managing the ins and outs of various camps and classes in the summer. (Yes…”band camp”.  And cheer camp and choir camp and art camp and robotics camp and football camp and pretty much everything else camp.)  So, with the handy skills of distributing keys, collecting payment, and working holidays under my belt, I got a job working the front desk at a hotel.

Hotels are crazy businesses.  Because people stay there, and people are nuts, especially after dark, and times fifty when you add in “I’m on vacation!” and alcohol.  For example – did you know that the reason there’s no roof access from hotel stairwells is because people go there to jump off?  There’s a whole book of “wow, people are totes craybeans” procedures around all kinds of stuff like that.

Unfortunately, employees aren’t much better, so eventually we had to fire someone for absenteeism or stealing food or sleeping with a guest or something, and no one wanted to deliver the message.  Which stumped me.  I mean, with all the crazy sauce the guests were slinging everywhere, employee discipline seemed like a fairly logical progression:

Simple.  No guesswork here; I was just telling them they had arrived at the end of the chart, right?  This wasn’t complicated, or difficult…yet no one wanted to do it.  I guess they were afraid the person would be…angry?  Cry?  <eyeroll>  Whatever.  Just gimme the phone, Nancy-pants.

And that is how I got into HR.

Quickly, I became a pro at terminations.  Which served me well, career-wise – after working in manufacturing for 20 <gulp> years, and with all the ups and downs of the economy, and its myriad permutations of rightsizing and downsizing and layoffs and restructuring – not to mention the occasional employee bad behavior (and yes, there are some GREAT stories there…but we’ll save those for another day) I have had to fire literally hundreds of people.

At one company, we (read:  I) went through six rounds of layoffs in fourteen months.  And I sat through them all.

One by one.

It was…sucktacular.

If you could be anything, career-wise, what would you choose to do and why?

HR, of course.

I actually have a plan for this.  Once I can afford to retire HAHAHA who am I kidding win Powerball and become independently wealthy, I’m totally quitting HR for good.  I’ve told my coworkers, and my boss, this very thing – the moment I can afford to no longer work, Kate will turn into a puff of smoke and a screech of tires.  <poof>

My actual exit will be more subtle, though.  Because once I’m a bazillionaire, I need to fade into the sunset so people aren’t hitting me up for cash.  So one day, I’ll leave for lunch (which I have done maybe three times in as many years) and simply won’t come back.  My coworkers will start to miss me later in the afternoon:

“Uh…where’d Kate go?”

“Gosh, you know, I haven’t seen her in a few hours….Wait.  Didn’t she say she was going to lunch?”

“Yeah…which is weird because she, like, never goes to lunch.  She usually eats her six Cheerios at her desk.”

Eventually, one of them will text me, and I’ll simply reply “still at lunch.”  Which, a week later, will be freaking hilarious.  Right??

But I digress.

So my dream job?  I’ll learn to play guitar and sing folk songs in coffee houses and wine shops around the city.  I guess that isn’t really a job.  But I don’t care, because I’m independently wealthy now, and your rules no longer apply to me.  Neener neener.

I’ll continue answering the rest of the questions in another post….because by now, your nether-regions have likely fallen asleep, and you probably need to get up and stretch.

But without further ado…here are my nominees:

• Mr Know Body
• luvbearlvx
• Lyma’s Life
• Rachael’s Creative Outlet
• Figure Eight
• peaceof8
• Cat in the Cactus

NOTE:  This is a zero-obligation nomination.  I swear my feelings will not be hurt if you don’t do this.  It’s just a way to give y’all a shout-out and say thanks for hanging your mental skivvies out on the line for all of us to gawk at.  Heh.  😉

But if you’re game….here are YOUR eleven questions – certain to provoke riveting and inspiring trinkets for conversational fodder…. 😉

1. Describe for me your favorite piece of jewelry.
2. Regarding #1, tell me where you got it, and who gets it in the will.
3. What food should be made illegal, and why?
4. In exactly fourteen words, tell me how you feel about clowns.
5. Tell me how you got that scar.  (Pick your favorite.)
6. What’s something you enjoy eating that others might find odd?
7. What’s your favorite thing to look at/see in the sky?
8. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve found while outside?  Jewelry, money…?
9. What’d you do with what you found in #8?
10. Have you ever stolen anything? Besides my heart.  <barf>
11. Have you ever won anything?

Enjoy, kids.  😀