Five to Ten

I'm not even really sure what to say about the story I heard this morning. It's times like this I realize that I'm working with, and in charge of, people who are so totally different from me and have totally different backgrounds.

As I'm doing my morning walk through of the plant to make sure everything is up and running first thing, I get stopped by one of my employees who is requesting next Tuesday off. This particular employee is usually very upfront and honest with me and his intentions. He says that on Tuesday, he wants to go see his step son's sentencing. He wants to make sure to go because this will probably be the last time he sees him in 5 to 10 years.

So this peaks my interest and I simply ask, "What did he do?" To which my employee replies, "Murder". Now I start to think to myself, how did I get to this point in my life where I'm associated with the guy who has a murderer as a son. He says it was in self defence.

I'm thinking to myself that you don't generally get 5 to 10 for self defence. So I asked him what happened. He said that apparently him (the step son) and his two friends were getting robbed by a few guys at gun point. So he dashed into a back room and got shot in the back as he did so. He then came out with a gun and killed the guys. He says that if he didn't kill them, they would have killed his friends. I'm thinking that to get 5 to 10 would require many multiple shots to be fired into the victims to finish the deed, not just enough to disable them.

I constantly have to remind myself of my employee's socio-economic status to realize that building more chairs in a day is the least of their worries. I may try to make them think that it's the most important thing in the world, but the truth is, they have much bigger issues.