By Moina Arcee, edited July 3 2018

You know you are really a worker when you have spent at least half your life employed full-time. At that point the vocational desert stretches before you – a yawning landscape of toil and tedium. You wonder if you will live until retirement. Or perhaps you are one of the lucky few who really enjoys their work. Then you are more in the moment, and less inclined to view the future in bleak.

You choose your career like you choose a spouse, although perhaps with more care. In any event, you control your choice of job and spouse, but you can’t control who your boss, co-workers, or children are. You get potluck – some come out of the oven well done; others half-baked, and some are a gooey, sticky mess you can’t get off your fingers. The workplace is another family: a mirror of familiar and familial loyalties, hatreds, and dependencies; a crock pot of simmering manipulation and dysfunction. And you, dear reader, are another carrot dropped into the stew. Good luck.