Hug that job!

     

     Hang around long enough, you may even become fashionable.
     I have that thought every time I read something about the new hot trend toward non-alcoholic cocktails.
     "Look at me, I'm a trendsetter," I'll tell Edie. "Beat 'em by about 20 years." (Next month, in fact. How the time does fly).
     I meant to get a six-pack of NA White Claw — aka flavored seltzer — so I could write something using Wood Allen's bit about buying the rights to "My Fair Lady," removing the songs and turning it back into "Pygmalion." 
     But that seemed a lot of effort to recycle a joke

     Saturday I glanced at my email and saw that clinging to your job has finally become fashionable.

     "Job hugging" is the fab new Gen Z term for not hopping from employer to employer.     

     Next they'll be discovering monogamy.

     "The newest career trend," FastCompany reveals, citing a report from "global organization consultancy" Korn Ferry, which seems agitated at the prospect.

     “At an alarming rate, more and more employees are displaying what is colloquially known as ‘job hugging’—which is to say, holding onto their jobs for dear life,” the report reveals.

     Korn Ferry never explains why the pejoratives — "alarming," "dear life." Perhaps we're all supposed to instinctively understand why staying in one position is inherently not a good thing, though they go on to limn those.

     "Experts say that employees putting down roots is not all doom and gloom, and can in fact bring companies some opportunities, beginning with a financial boon: Without pressure to match outside salaries, organizations face less of a need to raise wages. At the same time, with less turnover, recruitment and training costs dwindle."

    You can pay barnacles less, and don't have to constantly explain to newcomers where the bathrooms are.

     Myself, I'm going to miss the job-hopping trend — not that I ever partook. But ... choosing my words carefully ... there was always a certain comfort in knowing that, should you bump up against a bumbling manager — and sometimes there doesn't seem to be any other kind — that if you wait three years, they'll be on the road again, heading for another gig.

     Still. The arrival of "job hugging" does make me feel a little stupid for staying at the same job for ... 38 years and counting. In my defense, I do like my job, most of the time. And did quit, once, though allowed myself to be lured back. And was poised to quit another time, when the New York Daily News started running my column in 2005, which focused the attention of my bosses at the Sun-Times in a good way.

     Plus I took almost two years away from the paper, aggregate, between paternity leaves, time off to write a book, rehab and various surgeries.  Absence makes the heart grow founder, in both directions.

     Still, loving your job (and, if I may, being extraordinarily good at it) does make one vulnerable to experience the pain of job hugging. Sometimes when I really should have at least pretended to be poised to split. But I just couldn't do it.

     I remember some head hunter pairing me with some executives who were — if I recall — breaking away from Sunbeam and forming a carbon dioxide detector company. We had a lovely lunch at RL and afterward they offered me the job as a the communications head of the new enterprise. In on the ground floor, as Sam Wainwright would say.

      I told them I'd need to discuss it with my wife (again, what George Bailey does in "It's a Wonderful Life") and as we were leaving one of them said how impressed they were that I had worked for the Bohle Company in Los Angeles. 

     I froze, like Jimmy Stewart shaking Mr. Potter's hand. I'd hated the Bohle Company.

     I'm sorry, I said. I don't need a day. I don't need to talk with the wife. I can't go work for you. I can't sell carbon dioxide detectors. 

     I walked down Michigan Avenue to the paper, kicking myself, I was a slave. I didn't even try to wrangle a raise out of it. Some of us were designed to stay put. No point in beating myself up over it now.