Mediocre is the new Black

I don't know if it all started in kindergarten exactly but the truth is that I had the coolest kindergarten teacher ever. It was her first year teaching and her name was Miss Swansen. I am pretty sure she would still remember me. I was an A student right out of the gate. Whether it was picking up those paper-clipped nose fish with a magnet fishing rod or building block towers, I was an ace. I had my lapses of course, thank goodness they did away with handwriting in the fourth grade because it was bringing down my average. And mind you I wasn't one of those girls like Lisa Cookson who would argue a 98 to 100.



Flash forward 35 years and I am sitting here baffled by the fact that I am a solid C minus employee. And I am learning day by day to be okay with that. Considering that in my last job I was a solid D, I feel this is a minor improvement. The other girls in my "class" at work seem to think I know a lot more than they do but the truth is that I have made a lot of mistakes, not all of which can be linked directly to the fact that I was never really trained. It's hard complicated work that deals with details of taxes and benefits and small details that are easy to misinterpret. I asked for help via email today and the person in charge of answering sent me a four hundred page manual.



I don't want to be a D employee but I credit some of my original school success with my teacher's dedication and willingness to help. If I struggled with a subject, I learned to stay after school to get it right. Teachers were always available and willing to help.
At my current work environment when I asked a question about how to do something complicated I was told by my supervisor to "look it up on the internet."
Now in the working world, "after school help" is paid at time and half. So why is this a bad thing? We have some deadlines coming up and no one at my work seems concerned. I am keeping my mouth shut and my hand down. Mediocre is the new black.