Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
I studied law in England. After I graduated, I immediately came back home. The reasons were that I did not feel at home in England; I felt like a second class citizen. My dad was ailing at the time and I thought my help was needed. There was also my mother’s issue.
I joined law school, got admitted to the bar and was employed for 5 years before I started out on my own. I was afraid of starting out on my own but I was also not prepared to let my boss determine my destiny. The pressure I was getting from paying my mum’s medical bills and still survive was great and my salary just wasn’t enough although I was working my ass off and had thankfully lost all the weight I had gained in England. It was clear to me that after 5 years, the position I had reached was the farthest I was ever going to get no matter how hard I worked or how much I made for the firm. Yet I needed to make more money.
The issue that was eating at me was not so much that I needed more money but that I felt trapped. How could it be that the money paid by the clients I was working for was not accessible to me? My boss did not even know what was happening in most of the files I was working on yet he was the one holding the money and I was the one fighting to make ends meet. I thought that this was very unfair almost criminal, he was stealing from me as far as I was concerned. But the world’s view is that he was in a superior position since he had given me the opportunity to thrive. And that is true. He deserved the money because in essence, he had allowed me the opportunity to work for him in a city where jobs are scarce and the salary I was getting was considerably more than my peers.
I was not going to allow myself to end up like my co-worker who had been in the same position since I joined the firm and was always moaning about how oppressive our boss was. I, the lawyer, understood that I was a trespasser. I could not go into someone’s land, cultivate it, and then expect to reap the rewards as if the land was mine. No matter how well I cultivated and how much produce I harvested, the important point was that the land was not mine, its owner was well aware of my presence on his land and finding another piece of land to cultivate in was not easy going by the unemployment statistics.
Leaving my job was another of my decisions made without caring how much money I had or how much I could make. I would rather have died than lived as an employee. The feeling is like being unable to stretch out in bed because your precious little daughter insists on joining you in your bed and is herself stretching out her hands and legs the farthest they can go while you are doing all you can not to move a muscle trying to sleep lest you wake her and she starts another crying marathon. Ironically, in the employment situation, the bed belongs to your boss and in the baby situation, the bed belongs to you. Yet you are still the one begging. Why can’t you be the boss for once??
Being in employment for me was the same as allowing someone to control my life. And let’s face it, that’s what employment is. Relinquishing control of your destiny to someone who knows nothing about you and your life and doesn’t really care. The problem that keeps us chained in employment is that we are unable to see that there are in fact TWO beds, not one. There is the bed which represents the money and there is the bed which represents the work. The money belongs to your boss BUT the work is yours. Money and work are inextricably linked. Without work, there is no money and without money, there is no work. Each of them is equally important. But we employees always think that the money comes first. We let money decide what we do with our work. We let the guy with the money decide what to pay us for our work. Shouldn’t it be us telling our bosses how much we are selling our work for? Why should we allow our bosses to jump into our beds and make themselves comfortable while they won’t let us anywhere near their beds? Now how unfair is that?! Think about it.
I told myself to wake up and realize that my bed is as good as my boss’s and if he can get a good night’s sleep in his, so can I. Get out of your boss’s bed, throw him out of yours and go. Your bed is made specially for you. You can never be comfortable in someone else’s bed and you cannot sleep in your bed when you are busy making sure your boss is comfortable in his. That’s what I did.
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
I studied law in England. After I graduated, I immediately came back home. The reasons were that I did not feel at home in England; I felt like a second class citizen. My dad was ailing at the time and I thought my help was needed. There was also my mother’s issue.
I joined law school, got admitted to the bar and was employed for 5 years before I started out on my own. I was afraid of starting out on my own but I was also not prepared to let my boss determine my destiny. The pressure I was getting from paying my mum’s medical bills and still survive was great and my salary just wasn’t enough although I was working my ass off and had thankfully lost all the weight I had gained in England. It was clear to me that after 5 years, the position I had reached was the farthest I was ever going to get no matter how hard I worked or how much I made for the firm. Yet I needed to make more money.
The issue that was eating at me was not so much that I needed more money but that I felt trapped. How could it be that the money paid by the clients I was working for was not accessible to me? My boss did not even know what was happening in most of the files I was working on yet he was the one holding the money and I was the one fighting to make ends meet. I thought that this was very unfair almost criminal, he was stealing from me as far as I was concerned. But the world’s view is that he was in a superior position since he had given me the opportunity to thrive. And that is true. He deserved the money because in essence, he had allowed me the opportunity to work for him in a city where jobs are scarce and the salary I was getting was considerably more than my peers.
I was not going to allow myself to end up like my co-worker who had been in the same position since I joined the firm and was always moaning about how oppressive our boss was. I, the lawyer, understood that I was a trespasser. I could not go into someone’s land, cultivate it, and then expect to reap the rewards as if the land was mine. No matter how well I cultivated and how much produce I harvested, the important point was that the land was not mine, its owner was well aware of my presence on his land and finding another piece of land to cultivate in was not easy going by the unemployment statistics.
Leaving my job was another of my decisions made without caring how much money I had or how much I could make. I would rather have died than lived as an employee. The feeling is like being unable to stretch out in bed because your precious little daughter insists on joining you in your bed and is herself stretching out her hands and legs the farthest they can go while you are doing all you can not to move a muscle trying to sleep lest you wake her and she starts another crying marathon. Ironically, in the employment situation, the bed belongs to your boss and in the baby situation, the bed belongs to you. Yet you are still the one begging. Why can’t you be the boss for once??
Being in employment for me was the same as allowing someone to control my life. And let’s face it, that’s what employment is. Relinquishing control of your destiny to someone who knows nothing about you and your life and doesn’t really care. The problem that keeps us chained in employment is that we are unable to see that there are in fact TWO beds, not one. There is the bed which represents the money and there is the bed which represents the work. The money belongs to your boss BUT the work is yours. Money and work are inextricably linked. Without work, there is no money and without money, there is no work. Each of them is equally important. But we employees always think that the money comes first. We let money decide what we do with our work. We let the guy with the money decide what to pay us for our work. Shouldn’t it be us telling our bosses how much we are selling our work for? Why should we allow our bosses to jump into our beds and make themselves comfortable while they won’t let us anywhere near their beds? Now how unfair is that?! Think about it.
I told myself to wake up and realize that my bed is as good as my boss’s and if he can get a good night’s sleep in his, so can I. Get out of your boss’s bed, throw him out of yours and go. Your bed is made specially for you. You can never be comfortable in someone else’s bed and you cannot sleep in your bed when you are busy making sure your boss is comfortable in his. That’s what I did.
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