Teams!

Find your ButterCream Gang.

Magic can strike.

For me, it wasn’t my first professional gig. But it wasn’t long after. Same company, different office.

I left Scranton and stumbled into a junior HR admin role. One of three. Was there really that big a volume of work to legitimize us? Unlike my municipal government days - ohhhhh yeah there was. We’d drown in the day to day and rarely find time to update employee files. Back when filing wasn’t fun. Wait - filing still isn’t fun. Anyone hate SharePoint as vehemently as moi?

It was a seminal experience though because, I was having fun(?) I was learning and growing and laughing and yes, being extremely goofy and somehow, that flew. I’d stumbled onto the Blue Jays roster circa 2025. It was a dream team, each personality complementing the next. Each joke met with seriousness, each teachable moment met with hangin’ loose and remembering that there was more to life than the four walls that held us 8:00am to 4:30pm.

Eventually: compensation. I was making the same dough in Brantford as my counterparts in Toronto. Yeah square that one away for me please…. not to disparage Wayne Gretzy, Phil Hartman or Alexander Graham Bell but, I’m pretty sure all three left Brant County the moment the local gravy train dried up. (If there ever was one in the first place).

Was a shame, I often look back on that period of time as perhaps my first career mistake. Taking the payday for the payday, only to walk into something that lacked the abracadabra vibe I was accustomed to.

But a funny thing happened.

Lightning struck TWICE. Not right away but, eventually.

Pulling a Jerry Maguire backfired, but the bounce-back from the backfire was worth the bravery.

‘Bravery’? Really guy? You betcha. I've worked with enough complainers-going-nowhere to recognize that making the move to leave a bad situation is a bold maneuver worth commending 100% of the time.

And you know what - when the glow of the lightning blast faded and I was left with the “what now?” feeling again, I moved on and tried my luck elsewhere.

There's no ‘I’ in team, but there is an ‘am’ - as in, am I a part of this ensemble or is it time to take my chances elsewhere to win a Cup.

-Matt