Don’t Ruin My Breakfast
Negativity is Contagious
One very early Saturday morning about a decade ago, my swim team was going through warm up stretches, prepping for the meet that day. My coach would, predictably, spend about 5-10 minutes before the meet began, orating an inspirational pep speech.
This particular morning, instead of telling us how we were going stay focused, determined, that we “had been training for this moment for months,” he led off with a story:
I decided to go to Denny’s. I wanted an enormous, delicious, terribly unhealthy meal. I ordered the special. I was literally salivating at the thought of the banquet of cheese, egg, and sausage ahead of me.
When my highly anticipated feast was finally served, I dug in with zeal. And, thank the heavens, it was incredible.
That was, of course, until the guy in the booth next to me opened his mouth. I heard his complaints — the eggs weren’t cooked well,it was too salty, and, my favorite, “the sausage is still oinking!” Until that moment I hadn’t stopped to consider that my food wasn’t that great because it had been practically orgasmic. I almost turned to ask him to kindly keep his thoughts to himself, until I really thought about the food I was eating.
The eggs were sloppy, still clear in places. The potatoes seemed so salty that I couldn’t force myself to eat any more of them. And while I disagreed that the sausage was still mostly pig, it tasted burned. “This does taste like shit.” I was so disappointed.
After I’d left, I kept wondering to myself if the food was really that bad. 30 seconds before my neighbor’s outburst, I was tempted to marry my food. It took less than 12 seconds for me to break up with it. I left unhappy, my desired meal destroyed by someone else’s comments.
“Don’t ruin my breakfast. Don’t walk around on the pool deck complaining to your teammates about how you don’t want to be here, that it’s too hot, that you’re tired, that you swam horribly and end up hiding in the locker room. No fucking negative nancies. Don’t destroy everyone else’s excitement with your crap. Got it?” We all nodded in stunned silence, and the phrase “don’t ruin my breakfast” became a regular addition to pre-meet speeches.
Recently, I’ve heard a lot of murmuring amongst coworkers at one of my jobs about their unhappiness. “I don’t want to be here” and “I want to go home” and “I’m so hungover” are commonplace. For awhile, I’d respond with, “Oh I totally know how you feel” to everything. And then I started to feel like I didn’t want to be there, that going to work was such a drag. It wasn’t until yesterday,when discussing this downward trend with another coworker at my other-other job, that I remembered my coach’s story. My coworker had said, “You’ll eventually feel that way about this place, too, you know.”
“No I won’t. I’ve been here almost as long [as that other place] and I still get pumped to be here.”
“Yeah….but that will change. I’m just preparing you. You’ll definitely burn out eventually.”
I dropped it because I wasn’t looking for a fight, but I wanted to scream, “BITCH, PLEASE! Let me enjoy my job and don’t “prepare” me for how I will “definitely” get burned out. Don’t ruin my fucking breakfast!”
Negativity is a fatal pandemic: it spreads quickly and touches everyone. The cure to this is really simple:
A piece of advice: even if something has been ruined for you, don’t ruin it for anyone else. That’s entirely unfair to the rest of us who are enjoying the ride. Don’t be the guy at the 5 am morning practice, carrying on incessantly about how stupid it is that we have to be up that early. Don’t be that coworker who keeps saying, “God I hate Mondays/deadlines/management/working.” We all feel that way some days, but if it’s “bring your angsty black cloud to work day” every day, it starts to hover over the rest of us.
You control your life, your reactions to the world around you, who you share it with, and in what context. You’re having a bad day? I get it. You’re having a month of bad days? It happens. But, please, if you find yourself ranting about the same things over and over again, find a way to fix it. And just because you don’t love it, doesn’t mean someone else can’t.
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