Home is not so foreign

 

Subject: Home is not so foreign.

How do you cope with coming to the end of your working life. Much of course depends on your attitude to work in the first place. Is it a chore. Well yes it can be but is it also a part of your social standing as well of course, an essential as regards your economic standing.

Going to work for most people is the basic ingredient to life. Getting up early, joining the commuters in much the same way, week on week, year on year, the routine of time spent and the part it plays in all our lives. Time to merge into the traffic and hopefully miss the peaks if you are driving, time to catch the bus or the train seeing the same tired faces each morning, the same inevitability, for most the boredom of doing the same old thing each year.

Most people work for a wage, some for a salary the difference being that with the one the time of your arrival and departure is noted whilst for the other there is an implicit agreement that your best endeavours are not essentially time reliant but assume a certain sense of corporation between management and worker.

Irrespective of what you are, people are expected to fit in and perform tasks rather than be part of the creative force within the company, that role is left to management and for the people who attend work and are classed as management the whole emphasise of time spent working is very different. Perspectives are wider than the job, the objectives are substantially more imaginative and the sense of belonging, much more entrenched. Working, for some people becomes the reason for being, they identify themselves with the work they do and the company they work for in a way which is totally different from the person doing a job and whose eye is on the clock for them, life begins outside the confines of work, in their family and their play.

Who is the happier, the devoted company man fulfilled with his quota of responsibility, his eye on promotion his life distilled by the demands of others who then depend on him or her to obtain their own promotion, or the person who downs tools at five and shuffles off for a pint before catching the train home and a different set of responsibilities.

At any rate, for the wage earner, the guy or girl who have not been hoodwinked by the glamour of the executive floor, for them the company is a temporary sojourn, a passing ship in the night and if, and when the company is merged and the inevitable  demand for redundancies is made to make the economics of the merger fit, then home for them is not so foreign.