Stephanie's Dilemma

         "It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."


Failure is a hard lesson to learn from. When failure happens, picking ourselves back up is difficult.
We're not sure whether or not we will survive it. Knowing where to turn to for help can be confusing when the walls have crashed down on us. It's taking that first step. The uncertainty of signing up at different offices when you need help, can be unbearable. You don't know what to expect. Their lack of understanding toward our particular situation can be frustrating as heck. They appear to know all the answers. They put pressure on you to do something we're incapable of doing. This is especially true when you have a mental disability. Certain limitations hinder our energy level. Stephanie Turner has. She was just fortunate enough to have put in enough years to get disability. She put in a full day's work and had to put in extra overtime hours as Still, she was not able to put in the quota that was expected of her. in a day. There was a lot to do. She was a hard worker. She had an assistant supervisor once. When she became the supervisor, she had it in for her for some reason. She made her work unbearable, because she was slow. She was not a fast worker. She would come home in tears. She would do her best, but it wasn't good enough for her.

Stephanie was put on a six-month probation to improve her speed at work. Processing ten business and sales tax licenses per day didn't sound like much. Her co-workers would call her to wait on customers every time one would show up. As if this wasn't enough for her to do, she had other duties, or responsibilities to do. She had to work with correspondence, answer phones, and file papers. She was slow, but was thorough in what she did do. Her motto was, if you do things right the first time, then you don't have to go back and do it over again.

Six months had passed. She found out she was terminated from her job. During that amount of time, work was extra hard; the pressure was just to much. When she was photo-copying her discharge papers, her trainer saw what she was doing and was very excited. He said, "Stephanie, you got a promotional! She looked at him and responded sadly, "No Douglas, I just got terminated from employment". "You what?" Douglas's jaw seemed to drop to the floor. He couldn't believe what he just heard. He knew she worked hard.

The co-workers got together and bought her a pretty flower basket with artificial flowers in it, and received some money. The person in charge of the gifts and money received for promotions, etc., mentioned that nobody has received more money or gifts than she did. She was taken aside, and was told that the woman wasn't supposed to tell her that.