Blogocentric Formulations

Two Sides

"30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  | May 9

Prompt ▼

Choose an event in your life that someone else remembers differently. Describe both memories and debate the differences. Who do you think is right? Why do you think you remember it differently?

Regardless of the event or the different perspectives on it, I feel like the answer to the last two questions are pretty clear. Unless you have some reason to doubt your own memory, wouldn't you naturally be inclined to believe your own recollection of events rather than someone else's? And there's ample science on the inconsistency of the construct of memory. Our own biases and assumptions and desires and experiences mold and reform the details in our mind, sometimes to the point where people are truly shocked when they discover that the objective facts are very different or even contradictory to what they truly believed in their own minds.

The most recent event in my life that this happened with was my last job. I was hired to help a rapidly-expanding company consolidate their administrative processes across their various business units: animation, features, television, and interactive. The biggest challenge of the position was that I had responsibilities that spanned all four divisions, but most of the people I worked with only had responsibility to one of the divisions, including each of my two bosses. It quickly became apparent that my bosses (one of them in particular) and a few others at the company were getting frustrated that I wasn't focusing more on their needs. Their perspective seemed to be that I wasn't getting the work done... but from my perspective I was working full days, and a lot of overtime, trying to address the needs of four separate businesses.

Ultimately, I ended up leaving that job after only nine months for other reasons, but that disconnect wouldn't have been a tenable dynamic to continue, where an employee feels like they're working really hard to handle a huge load of work, but none of the other stakeholders felt like they were getting the attention they deserved or their work completed in a timely manner. And there's certainly merit to both positions, even if I don't agree with their perspective. Obviously I feel like my perspective had merit (I was the one working all the hours and feeling pulled in all the different directions all the time), but employees at a company need to feel like they're getting what they need out of their coworkers and if they aren't, that's something that needs to be addressed.