Work the Love

In the 1990s, I worked for a start up and ran a group of Oracle PL/SQL developers and DBAs. One day, one of my DBAs, a very shy and soft spoken woman from China, slowly shuffled into my office in tears. I stood up and asked, "what's wrong?". She answered, "I deleted the database". I attempted to qualify: "You deleted some data?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a table?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a schema?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a tablespace?" ... "No" ... "Then what?" At this point, the tears accelerated, as she said, "I deleted the database file on Unix". Indeed, she had nuked the database, our eCommerce site was down, restoring our archived backup was not going to be straight forward, due to the manual cleanup we would need to perform first, so getting things back online was going to take 8 to 12 hours and the database would be out of sync from the get-go. One of the founders told us that "we just drove a spear through the heart of this business", while the other founder immediately left to buy a gallon of ice cream, in keeping with his habit of stress eating. Meanwhile, my shy, teary-eyed DBA stood at my side, paralyzed. I turned to her and asked: "Did anyone die?" ... "No" ... "Did anyone get physically injured?" ... "No" ... "If we both get fired, do you think we'll find new jobs?" .... "Yes" ... "Then cheer up! and go delete the rest of those database files so we have a clean slate to restore." The relief on her face and near-joy in her step as she made her way back to her desk was enough to make me fully satisfied in the job ;-) I would venture a guess that, for most of us, job satisfaction transcends the job and is rooted more in the empathy and assistance that we are able to deliver to our fellow travelers, so while I do believe that it is important to love the work that you do, I would say that it is equally important to 'work the love', and this can be done across a variety of jobs.