“The pressure was incredible,” Randy says. “The pace was impos-
sible, nobody could keep up. Everything was top priority. They’d
assign you one project, then change it the next day, and then
act like that’s what they wanted you to do all along. Like
maybe you were a mind reader or something. To make things
worse, once a month you’d have to give an oral report in front of
the management team, where they’d ream you out for everything
you didn’t get done because they told you to do something else.”The job from hell, right? That’s the way Randy saw it, but to other
people who labored away in those same fiery pits, it was business as usual.
Randy was devastated by the stress that his coworkers took in stride
because he saw it as devastating. There’s no question that Randy’s job
stressed him out. What was questionable was how much of the stress came
from the job and how much Randy was creating for himself. The stress in
his job wasn’t all in his head, but what he imagined stress to be made it
much harder for him to cope with it effectively.
First, he believed that stress was the result of somebody or something
messing up. Every new crisis would provoke an internal tirade about whose
fault it was and how damaging their incompetence was to him. Sometimes
the tirades were external.
The I’m So StressedExplosion
Actually, this explosion is more like a perpetually sputtering fuse.
In the break room at about 10 a.m., Randy pours his fourth cup
of coffee. He smiles weakly. “The doctor says I ought to cut back
on this stuff,” he says, “but I don’t know how I can get by with-
out it. I swear, you’ve got to be a mind reader around here to
know what they want. When I came in this morning, Jim asked
me to check on what was happening with the EnCom account.
No sooner had I gotten started on that than he e-mails me that
headquarters wants my monthly contact figures right now. Then,
ten minutes later, he pops in saying he’s having a project
managers meeting in an hour.
“So, which one does he want me to do? Who knows?Generalized Anxiety Disorder ❧ 129