Grown Up Stuff in New Beginnings

I’m travelling this week to finish a fixed asset audit for our plants. I’m in Gleason, Tennessee right now, and I’ll travel to Crenshaw, Mississippi tomorrow. I booked my hotels, I rented a car, I planned my audit, coordinated with my contacts, and so forth. I’ve even treated a few of my contacts to lunch.

I had my realization that I’m an adult, now. I thought that switch would flip on when I graduated college. It didn’t. Instead I felt like a kid again. Especially at my first job out of college, everyone was so put together, so professional. They knew so much and so many people relied on them. I felt in over my head, almost like child who everyone presumed was an adult based upon appearances. My unemployment period didn’t do anything to help my self image as an adult. When I was finally able to rejoin the work force, I felt like I had to rebuild myself from scratch. However, just this past week, it occurred to me that I’m a guy people rely on. I’m a person they’ll call when a particular problem needs to be fixed, and they trust I can do it based upon word of mouth.

It’s a surprisingly surreal experience. What’s still a little scary is there are times when I still feel like I’m faking it a bit while others seem to be light years beyond me. Case in point, I have to prepare the report every quarter. Doing so normally takes a couple of days, but this time it took all week. Thankfully, my manager took some of my other responsibilities off my plate that week, so I could focus on it, but I still needed his help fixing some problems at the very end. He was able to do it, but I was a bit discouraged considering he’s been at my company a year less than myself. How can he know so much more when he hasn’t been here as long as I have?

Nonetheless, I’m used to feeling like others are better than I am. What completely took me by surprise was being on the opposite side. I have a coworker, C.S., who my manager asked me to train on some of my responsibilities. My manager wants to eventually transfer some his tasks to me, so he asked me to transfer some of my tasks to C.S. so I’d have room to absorb them. I made notes for C.S., complete with pictures and textboxes pointing out the step by step process for doing this process, and he still struggled to do it. I’m worried it’s ultimately going to be transferred back to me at some point, and I’ll clean up his work to get it back to a manageable condition. I guess I’ll just have to trust that he’ll get the hang of it eventually. I presume that’s what others did regarding me.