• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Hard days at the office

In most careers, if you are obsessed with the job, spend too much time at the office and keep taking work home with you, these days you are likely to be told to get some perspective, put some balance in your life, as in, "You wouldn't put 'Should have spent more time at the office' on your tombstone. would you?" But if you are an NFL quarterback, you are praised for your drive and focus:

Huard knew exactly where to find Manning last week — poring over Bears game video at the team's complex. And when he returned home at night, Manning would study more down in his state-of-the-art home theater teammates call "the Bat Cave."

"His wife, Ashley, won't be seeing much of Peyton," says Huard. "Peyton's desire to win a Super Bowl is unspoken. You don't even have to have that conversation. When Peyton said after finally getting over the hump against New England, 'I'm not going to play that vindication card,' that's because there is more vindication for him. I guarantee he'll feel that way if he wins the Super Bowl."

Manning's world is hard for me to comprehend. The working life is so short, but the money is so good, and there is a specific goal that will validate his entire career -- a Super Bowl win -- that very few can attain. If he doesn't get that, then all the statistics and all the records he will have broken won't matter. But I still wonder: Will he want "Should have tried harder to win the Super Bowl" on his tombstone?

Posted in: Hoosier lore, Sports

Comments

Steve Towsley
Sat, 02/03/2007 - 4:04pm

>In most careers, if you are obsessed with the >job, spend too much time at the office and >keep taking work home with you, these days
>you are likely to be told to get some
>perspective, put some balance in your life...

Not where I come from. If you won't take responsibility to assure results for your company, if you grab your coat at 4:59 pm and lay the problems off on somebody else no matter what crisis is in progress, if you won't leave your home number with your executive supervisor and take his calls at any hour, if you think "good enough" is good enough, if you are willing to settle for being continually late in delivering products, or making excuses, or even lying, in your bids and in your excuses for frequently failing to delight your customers (whether those are clients, consumers, or co-workers who depend on your output) -- then, either somebody like me will never hire you (for cause) to begin with, or you'll never survive the cut, because somebody else WILL not only take responsibility for apologizing for their own mistakes and dropped balls and promising not to do so again, but will strive to achieve near-100% customer satisfaction -- in order to assure that their company has the highest reputation for quality and professionalism.

That point came up so quickly in my mind that the relationship of this level of performance to Peyton's situation got swept aside. There probably are lessons here for sports as well, I guess.

roach
Mon, 02/05/2007 - 4:39pm

type a workaholics, like the previous poster, I have found to be cheapskate, tightwad, slave driving bosses, and owners, who in another time would make perfect ruthless plantation owners.
Greedy Gordon geko types who wont let their workers have a life outside the office- 9 to 5. The act like they own you, and beat you like a horse, and when you die from exhaustion, find anothe r one to replace, and work to death.
Meanwhile they enjoy the wealth extorted from the sweat of their workers brow, while taking all the credit for the creativity, and labor of their proletariats.
a fine recipe for revolution.
usually assholes like this have high turnover, burnout, divorces, family problems, and soon go out of business once word gets out.
life is abalance. even god rested on the 7th day.
it is easier for a camel to pass thorugh the eye of a needle than a greedy man to see the kingdom of heaven. I wouldnt doubt that the previous poster is a republican, and deludes himself as a so-called "christian". I dont know where these cold hearted, ruthless persons come from, but the sooner we take back the wealth exploited from the brows of the working class, the sooner we can all live in a "compassionate christian society...
and I dont even know this dude...

Quantcast