Thanks for giving me a job, Thanksgiving edition

I’m thankful for a lot of stuff. Mostly, the wonderful things that, day-to-day, I completely take for granted: husband, kids, parents, siblings, friends who overlook that I could be a better friend.  

I’m also thankful for having a nice place to live, a car that gets me where I need to go—if not in style at least in one piece—a fridge full of food, health insurance. All that nice material stuff that stems from one of the other things I’m grateful for: my job.

A while back I wrote a blog proposing a new holiday, “Thanks for Giving Me a Job Day.” Sadly, it didn’t catch on, but it did allow me to use the Planet Blue pulpit to reflect on what getting a job at Intel 7 years ago meant to me.

Since then, I’ve come to realize that for a lot of people—people who were mostly invisible to me before I met Dan—a job isn’t a profession or a paycheck. It means something else entirely.

Dan is my stepson. He’s 22; I’ve known him since he was 16. A couple of years ago, a small army of people were involved in helping Dan find a job. He’d finished the post-high school program that helped him and another dozen or so developmentally disabled young adults learn the skills everyone told him he needed to become an employee someday.

While Dan often has a hard time concentrating and moves at a rate that can feel glacial—especially to someone used to Intel’s frenetic pace—he’s eager to please and tries hard to do any task he’s given, although truth be told he’d much prefer to click through internet pages for hours picking up new facts about his favorite subject, rock music. Before I met Dan, I didn’t know what a hair band was, who Slasher is, or the difference between hard rock and heavy metal. Now I know better.

A couple of years ago, his dad and I went to a meeting about programs to help special needs kids find work. Surrounded by a diverse mix of special needs young adults and their anxious parents, I was struck, hard, by two things.

One: All those years that I was raising and launching my own kids, the parents in this room had been on a parallel track, dealing with the daunting and infinitely harder challenges of raising a child who didn’t learn, look or behave like everyone else’s kid.

Two: The terrible odds that someone like Dan could actually land a job, any kind of job at all. The presenter visibly jolted the audience when she told us that the unemployment rate for developmentally disabled people was 58%. Not 8%. 58%.  And why not, really? In a sellers-market economy, why would you hire someone who’s limited, when you can easily hire someone who’s not?

I haven’t yet asked Jade that question directly. Jade owns and runs a shop that makes, of all things, handmade bicycle wheels. She’s also Dan’s boss.

She says on her website that Dan is “the reason the shop looks sparkly clean and I have my sanity.  Dan also bundles spokes for our team of builders so that we can reduce the time it takes to lace wheels.  Dan loves talking about hair bands and rock n’ roll.”

That’s a manager who knows her staff. That’s also a person who overlooks what doesn’t work so well and chooses to celebrate what does.

So why did it matter? Why was it so important to all the people who worked for months to help Dan find a job at which he only works a few hours a week, doing menial tasks?

Maybe because they knew, as Dan does now, that a job makes you like other people. It signals that you are a grownup, that you have a place in the world. It says that someone believes in you and trusts that you can do, that you will do the work. 

Even if it doesn’t give you much of a paycheck, a job gives you purpose. It gives you a reason to get out of bed and put on your work boots and your big yellow coat and patiently wait for the bus that will drive you to work. It gives you something to say when people ask, “So Dan, what have you been up to?”

As we prepare for the holiday that’s all about being thankful, I want to say, thank you Larry, for hiring me at Intel back in 2005. And Jade, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving Dan a job.

Let's make a deal

So here’s the deal.


Before you get behind the wheel, you do not drink, you do not inhale or ingest or inject anything that messes up your judgment a single iota.

You don’t cross that solid yellow line. No matter how slow the RV in front of you or how late you are. You keep your wheels glued to the asphalt in your lane until the dotted line shows up.

You don’t hit or punch or slap anybody. Ever. Walk away, walk to China if that’s what it takes. If you’re in China, walk to Albuquerque. Or run, hard, if that melts your mad faster.

You don’t say cruel things. You don’t wrap a right hook in “just kidding” and pretend it’s a friendly slug. Clamp your jaw shut, bite your lip bloody, chew gum, whatever it takes to keep those hurtful jabs masquerading as jibes inside and unspoken.

And top of mind today: you do not touch that cell phone while you are driving.

I don’t care if it’s the Pope calling to invite you to communion or Britney asking you to sing lead on her new single or your spouse telling you your winning lottery ticket showed up in the wash.

Because we both know it’s not. We both know that whatever is making your phone vibrate or that red light flash is nowhere near that important.

Here’s the other part of the deal: I won’t do any of these things either.

What? You don’t remember the deal? You don’t recall promising never to do any of this stuff?

Know it or not, you did. With the first breath you took in this lifetime, you promised. It’s called “the social contract.”

It means that you drive clean and sober, stay on your side of the yellow line, keep your nasty remarks unremarked and your fists at your side.

It means that you bring no pain or injury to me or my family or my friends or my co-workers or that friendly lady at my dry cleaners or the neighbor boy with the mischievous brown eyes.

And I will do the same for you.

Because if we both keep our promise, neither of us will have to spend a cloudless summer afternoon as I did last Friday at a memorial service for an 18-year-old boy. A boy who exactly one week earlier was walking down a road with his older sister.

A boy still figuring out what kind of man he would be. An outrageously smart, funny kid, who questioned the rules and lived by his own, full of bravado and hopes and doubts and a future that spread to the horizon. All of it gone, simply gone, in one unthinkable thud.

In that instant, when a text seemed way more urgent than keeping your hands at 10 and 2 and your gaze straight ahead, you ignored the deal. Maybe you figured there was some fine print in the contract that said it was OK to take your eyes off the road for a split second.

But in that microcosm of time—that tiny universe of bad judgment that will always be with you—you swerved. And you changed everything. Your truck hit the boy – his name was Cassidy Ringwald -- and he flew 15 feet into the intersection and landed hard, broken in too many places to fix.

Your text broke a lot of other people too.

Cassidy’s dad, Scott, worked at Intel for something like 25 years. He retired at an enviably young age a couple of years ago. Instead of working as a manufacturing manager in TMG these days he heads the parent-teacher group at Cassidy’s small alternative high school. He teaches math there, too. He and his only son liked a lot—but not all—of the same music.

I don’t know what Mary, Cassidy’s mother, is up to these days. When she was my neighbor all those years she was one of those smiling moms whose dining room table was always covered with her kids’ latest art or science project. I couldn’t bring myself to ask a woman with that much pain in her face what she’s been doing lately.

So, that’s the deal: You don’t mess with me or my family or anyone I care about, and I don’t mess with you or yours.

It’s the price you pay for the privilege of being alive. It’s the golden rule. It’s the social contract.

Sign it.