Selfish

Have you ever seen the episode of "Friends" where Joey is a volunteer at the PBS telethon, taking pledges? He gets into a debate with Phoebe, who blasts Joey for being selfish, saying that he only wants to help with the pledge drive so that he can be seen on television, which would be good exposure for his acting career. He argues that there is no such thing as an unselfish good deed. He claims that even Phoebe acting as a surrogate for her brother was selfish because it made HER feel good to help out her family. And I think I have to completely agree with Joey's side of the argument.

The last few weeks at my job have been really busy for our small group of 14. We have so many projects going on simultaneously and not enough people to get everything done by the deadlines in a normal 8-5 workday. So in an effort to get our project schedules back on track, we've been asked to work a lot of overtime, which is visibly stretching everyone pretty thin. I've been working 6 days a week, averaging about a 10 hours per day, and we are pretty much all in that same boat. So people are coming to work tired, sluggish, not smiling as much, just pulling the mood down. And by Friday morning, I was pretty bummed about it. There was a lot of TGIF talk on my favorite morning radio show, discussing weekend plans and events going on around town. But for me, my Friday wasn't much to celebrate since I still had two more long work days ahead of me.

Walking to work, I decided to stop at Corner Bakery for a bagel. But when I got there, I walked past a display table of coffee cakes. I selfishly bought one to share with my coworkers.

I am usually the 2nd person into work at 7:00 a.m. as was the case on Friday. I set up the coffee cake next to the coffee maker and went to work. And as I expected, within minutes of others arriving I could hear talk about "Who brought in the cake?"

One guy came over to my area of the floor and asked, "Is anyone over here celebrating something?" I replied that I had brought in the coffee cake, just feeling like doing something nice for everyone. And he went around and spread the word that I was the source of the breakfast treat. He even mentioned it at our daily morning meeting in which we discuss the status of our projects. People started appearing at my desk, cake in hand, not only to thank me but also to just take a break from their day and talk to me. So for a few minutes here and there, we all got to set aside our piles of work to indulge in some sugar and some friendly conversation. And everyone seemed to enjoy it so much that I was (selfishly) even a little hopeful that my generosity would spark others to do the same and take a turn to provide breakfast for the rest of us.

But I guess karma didn't care for my selfish breakfast-sharing intentions. No one else brought in breakfast on Saturday :(