My new manager at work appears to be one of those truly decent people. You know the ones, those who are actually, genuinely kind, which leads to them getting taken advantage of repeatedly and in a million different ways, yet they still mostly remain themselves. I gravitate toward those people, even though I by no means consider myself one of them. (I have my days of grace, though.) People like that, and I maintain an ever-growing mental list, are the only people on earth who I give a shit about.

Don’t get me wrong, I try to assume goodheartedness in every person I meet, but if you’ve proven yourself to be otherwise, you no longer exist in my mental landscape of the world. I’m just like that, always have been. I can easily dismiss people, their opinions, their very existence — and it’s one of the reasons I don’t number myself among the genuinely kind-hearted. That and the fact that I’ve really never had any desire to change this aspect of my personality, as it’s served me well many more times than it has burned me.

So now, a dilemma. I’ve never worked for a person like that before. A person I actually like, who I think actually makes the world better by being in it. Not once in all my years of sporadic employment. And it’s leading me to examine a lot of things, my work ethic and motivations for going in to work every day among them. Well, that and the fact that I’ve now been employed there long enough that my monthly passwords, just yesterday, cycled back to the originals I had when I started with the company, which is just mind-boggling to me.