At Least They Didn’t Fire Me: Reflections on Work and Learning
David B. Cohen, NBCTJanuary 2, 2019
My earliest experiences in the workplace occurred back in high school, and each setting provided some memorable failures. As a volunteer in our local hospital, I made mistakes like goofing off in a wheelchair trying to improve my speed going up and down an isolated basement corridor. A more unsettling mistake was my clumsy and protracted effort to tell an elderly, agitated, blind patient why I was delivering a newspaper to her room. My first paid work was doing some filing in my dad’s medical office. I developed a crush on the office accountant and when work was slow I…