Feeling Unappreciated?

A friend forwarded me an email with the subject heading ‘Feeling Unappreciated Lately?’ this week. Before opening it I thought it might be one of those ‘lovey-dovey’ emails with huge lists of reasons why the sender is your friend and they are really sorry that they don’t tell you this often enough. I couldn’t be more wrong…

In it was a newspaper cutting describing how a man had been left dead at his desk for a whole 5 days and no had realised that he had passed away. This happened despite the fact that he worked in an open plan office.

His boss said no one had noticed his death because he was a conscientious worker so ‘no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn’t say anything’.

Not saying anything is one thing but the poor guy hadn’t been breathing for a week. In fact it wasn’t even his fellow colleagues who realised he was no longer of this world – but a cleaner who asked him why he was working on a Saturday and got no response.

I work in an open plan office and always make a point of saying hello and goodbye to people, even if I am sinking fast under a pile of work so I find this report completely baffling.

However, I can’t work out what is more depressing – actually dying at your desk surrounded by mountains of work or the lack of manners that was demonstrated in this particular office?

We spend the majority of day working so it would make sense to be courteous enough to at least pass the time of day with each other and notice when people’s hearts have stopped beating. I may not be the fastest thing on two legs but I’d like to think people would realise that I hadn’t moved an inch for the past 120 hours.

But it got me thinking about how appreciated we are: not just in our work relationships but also in our personal relationships.

I can’t enter into a discussion about appreciation without referring to depreciation (the curse of being a qualified accountant).

An interesting way to look at relationships is to compare them with cars. Cars depreciate in value when they are not looked after properly and get damaged. If things are really bad they may have to be written off and scrapped because they are not worth keeping and have no value left in them.

 A car which is looked after, however, can actually appreciate in value. Now, while this is a rare occurrence and only happens when a car becomes vintage or classic. This can only happen when a painstaking amount of time is put into to realise a investment.

So cars are a lot like relationships: sometimes we have to take care and have patience to realise the true worth of a relationship and other times we have to know when to cut our losses and invest in another one.

As Mary Kay Ash, founder of May Kay Cosmetics said ‘Everyone wants to be appreciated, so if you appreciate someone, don't keep it a secret.’ I think it’s time we all shared some secrets and show our appreciation when we can.

 On the plus side though what I have always suspected is true – don’t worry about working too hard, no one notices what you do at work anyway!