A New Life (Part 3)

In January 2016, I left a 30 year career in radio to find a new path. Fear, doubt, and anxiety filled the vacuum at that time. I had no idea where life was going to take me. These writings are about my experiences and how I landed back in radio, but I truly hope they are inspirational to those who are going through something similar. The fear, doubt, and anxiety can all lead to a tailspin. I knew that. I also knew that I had to keep moving toward something.....and hang on.

For reasons that would take too long to explain, I found myself going door-to-door with a dairy salesman. It was a job shadow excursion. As I mentioned in the previous post, I was at point that I needed to do something to help keep the house, the car, and the life that me and the family had grown to love in Northern Colorado. Also, my unemployment benefits demanded some job seeking action to keep those funds coming.

For the job shadow, I was paired up with a man named John who has worked for this Dairy for a while. He was super nice and laid back. I think you'd have to be to find joy in his line of work. The benefits of the job, as he put it, were: independence (not being in an office with a boss breathing down your neck), exercise (with all the walking), the challenge of selling the product, and meeting new people. I could tell that he believed all of that. I can't say that I have ever wanted to go door-to-door to sell anything, and I was mostly certain I didn't want to do this job. I was there because my choices were limited and who knows....maybe I would love it. I had to try.

We left the Dairy in Longmont in one of their panel trucks and headed South. He did the driving and was traveling down roads I had never been on before. I was sitting on a "jump seat" in the front cab but not paying much attention to where specifically we were going. I would guess the drive was about 45 to 55 minutes when we finally got to the neighborhood he was assigned. It was a nice neighborhood that was north of Boulder. Medium to upper-class homes, but not upper-scale. We started our walk at about 10 a.m. and began knocking on doors. There were a lot of no-answers. Could be they weren't home. Could be they were hiding in a backroom. We met and talked to a few residents. They were all nice in their own way, but they were also not interested. There were no sales that day, but there were some that John felt he could go back to and make the sale. And there were others, many others, who claimed to be lactose intolerant. I'm talking about 80% of that neighborhood was lactose intolerant. If you ran that against the national average, then there's an epidemic in this community. Of course, I'm doubting this is the case. It is a creative way to get a dairy salesman off your porch.

By 11 a.m., I had decided this is not for me. I appreciated John even more after spending one hour of going door-to-door. He was still enjoying his job. That's good, because I had enough dislike for it to make up the difference.

There had been many ups and downs since my career change in January. The down times were tough. It felt like I had been hit in the gut. I don’t know if the hits were getting harder each time, or my sensitivity to them was getting worse. Walking with John that morning, I felt another blow to the gut. “I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. There must be something else”.

I believe in the power of prayer. I have seen its power and I have seen its results. When we pray for something, we must believe that it will be so, right? I also believe that prayers are always answered, but sometimes the answer is “no”. My prayer for “something else” was going through my head for close to an hour. Shortly before noon, my phone rang. It was a Denver number. A very friendly voice on the other end said she was from Southwest Airlines. The words, “welcome to Southwest Airlines” rang through my head.

(Part 4 coming soon!)