Beech Tree News Network

When we went to Western together, my friend, John, used to gripe all the time about how bad his timing was.  It had improved greatly by the time he completed his master’s degree at Austin Peay.  A couple of years after that, he walked into the professorship in the guitar department just as David Kelsey exited that position.  Don’t get me wrong, John worked hard for both those degrees—they don’t just hand them out—but, a few years later, his timing would adversely affect mine.
    This is how that happened.  I applied for a job at Western.  I had the educational requirement, as well as the experience needed for the job, and come to find out, John was dating a girl in that department.   When I was short-listed, I chalked it up to that connection, but before I could make it through the final interview segment, he had broken up with the girl, and there went my job.  Had I known what was coming down the pike, I would have paid him to keep dating her until I secured the job, but he gave me no heads-up, and thus, I had no job.
    Things like that have happened to me a lot throughout my life.  I have had good friends and worked with good people, but I have never been able to really work my way into a career.  I seem to be more of a fill-in-the-blank person, a take the place of someone till someone else can get there person.  I’m sure I can lay most of it at the feet of my misdirected choices, but some of it is my timing.  Sometimes, I haven’t been prepared for opportunities that came my way; at other times, I was prepared, but couldn’t take the opportunity because of family obligations; at still other times, something would come out of left field to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” as in the case of John’s girlfriend.
    At first, I was afraid my daughter, Natalie, had inherited my untimeliness, but things have worked out for her in the face of nearly insurmountable odds.  She gave me permission to tell the following story.  After Natalie’s daughter, Sabria, was born, Natalie went back to school and got a degree in medical billing and coding.  She worked whatever job was available while in school just to pay the bills.  After she graduated, she got a job in her degree field in a physical therapy office in Bowling Green. 
    Natalie is one of those conscientious people who works really hard on the job, so it was a shock to her, when after a few months, she was called into the office on a Friday morning and fired.  She left that office and went to see one of her teachers to see if she could offer any advice or direction.  The teacher told her that Vanderbilt, in Nashville, had contacted her and wanted some of the college’s recent graduates to fill some positions.  She encouraged Natalie to send in her résumé, which she did, and Natalie had a new job by Wednesday, making five dollars per hour more than she had at her previous job, with an opportunity to work from home after she completes her training.
 HR at Vandy told Natalie that she got one of only two slots left to be filled.  If Natalie hadn’t been fired on that Friday, she would not have gotten the opportunity to walk into a much-better job that next week.  Sometimes, untimely things are the most timely of all.  Maybe, she’ll rub off on me.