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.
