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You are essential
The announcement over the corporate campus-wide speaker system blared: All nonessential personnel leave the buildings immediately. We’d heard the sirens as fire equipment raced to the office complex where our headquarters were located.
The fire was on the roof of a building hundreds of yards away, a safe distance from the building where I worked with my staff, and I’d received a call with details from security a few minutes before, so I knew we were not in immediate danger. But as I heard employees filing out of the building, I was curious to find out which staff felt they were “nonessential.”
More recently I was reminded of that experience when the United States government decided that, because of Congressional deadlock, “nonessential ” personnel would stop coming to work until a solution was reached.
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