The Truth About Me

Dave Caven: Core Value - Humor. This was what a colleague, with whom I have worked for several years, took away from our day of culture-building as a staff. Interesting, since I would have imagined that was as obvious as wearing a badge on my chest with that word emblazoned on it as a reminder. Which is essentially what I did.
This was an exercise in which participants were asked to take a list of one hundred values and select the twenty that you felt applied most to you and your world view. Simple enough. Then we were asked to split that in half, picking the ten that even more closely defined our character. That wasn't much of a chore either, since many of them were merely shadings of something similar: dedicated and tenacious. Could I let one go? Sure I could. Once we pared that ten down to five, things got a little more clear. Did I want to cling to tenacious or hang on to honest? I was able to make the cut, but I was left with some questions. Will these remaining adjectives adequately describe me? If I were stuck on a desert island with these words, would I live to resent and eventually discard them? If I were going to introduce myself at a cocktail party, would I be able to say, "Hello, I'm Dave and I'm efficient?"
Finally, we cut it down to three. I kept fair, primarily because my niece had once made a point of telling me that she thought that I was. I am happy to think that I show up in someone's world that way. I stuck with dedicated because it seemed to describe a person who has stuck around most of the jobs he's had until the businesses themselves have closed, or nearly. I come early. I stay late. I get the job done: dedicated. The last one was the one that I didn't think about much. It got circled early on and didn't ever really reach the brink of being crossed out. Humor. Ha ha or tee hee, I tend to look for the laugh in just about everything. Sometimes to a fault. There are those who would tell you stories about that, but if you've kept up with this blog at all, you can probably pick your favorites. That's the one that I put on  my post-it. My badge. My identifier. I am the Good Humor man. Sometimes the tasteless, rude and offensive humor man, but most often the trying to put a smile on someone's face please humor man.
Funny that my colleague hadn't noticed before. Not funny: ha ha, but funny: really?