My job’s leaders have been really trying to get our teams back in the office. I’m talking once a week they give us incentives like massages, professional headshots, free lunch, contests, and prizes. It’s been ahmahzing.
For Halloween, they threw a party with a bartender, a costume contest, and a tarot card reader.
Now I love tarot card readers. And not just because the last two readings I’ve had have proclaimed that while I will wallow in obscurity, my husband, Ernesto, will hit it big and make us rich. I’m totally fine with that.
I also know that tarot card reading is just a bunch of vague statements engineered to make you think the reading is about you. Like “Oh…I see a problem. Do you have a problem in your life?”
“Ohmygerd. How’d you know?”
In this particular reading at my office, though, I lobbed the tarot reader a softball which, in retrospect, probably was a bit too soft.
When we sat down, she was like, “Okay, I want you to ask a question.”
And stupidly, I said, “Oh, I want to know how my independent business will do next year.”
She’s like, “Ooooh. Okay. Let’s see.”
She proceeded to flip over roughly 8000 cards, which I have never seen before. Usually, they do a few or several but stack them in a way that makes it look official. In this case, she just piled about 25 cards on top of each other, most of which had some kind of sword on it.
“Oh! I hope those swords aren’t dangerous!” <<< I did say that. That embarrassing thing I did say.
Then she goes, “Oh, it’s not what you think.”
She glanced at the cards for a minute and then looked up at me: “You aren’t happy in your job, right?”
I mean…a bit on the nose considering my initial question, but, to be honest, I was happy with my job. I’d literally just told people the day before that I thought it was fine. It’s not perfect, but I can deal with the mess and kind of enjoy it.
“Oh,” I said, “I guess.”
Then she goes, “So. It’s taken you a REALLY long time to figure out what you want to do in your career.”
It was then that I realized that my asking about my independent business gave her carte blanche to just go after anything about my work.
Also what was with her saying “REALLY long time”?
How old does she think I am? I mean, yeah, it took me a min to discover book coaching and the work I love doing, but I’m not like 100 years old. I wasn’t Grandma Moses hobbling to the table and saying, “I want to make art!”
So I am feeling doubly bad because I am evidently finding my vocation in life VERY late, but also, how much do I need to moisturize? Do I look like sixty? I realize I’m no longer a spring chicken, but…Tarot Girl, “REALLY long time”?!
I was stuck on being old and wasting my entire life when she continued:
“So you need to get out of your job.”
“Sorry?”
She looks around: “Yeah, so, I don’t usually talk work at something like this, but you need to GET. OUT.”
Back in the day, when I first started in corporate America, my company opened a satellite office in San Francisco. During the first months, the SF office didn’t have furniture, so fifteen people sat in a room with a concrete floor. The webcam was positioned really high above them, so it looked like a room full of hostages.
This was the image that flashed through my mind when she whispered for me to “GET. OUT.”
She recognized it obviously wasn’t great to sit and talk about how my job was trying to kill me (or something?), so she immediately turned the subject to my married life.
“I see like, a situation, or something. Have you run into trouble or like a rough patch or like, you know, do you…? Is there something going on that’s like negative or you’re like…”
She was really struggling with whatever “situation” I was supposed to be having, so I go, “Yeah, I guess.”
“I knew it,” she said. “So that’s going to get better.”
“Great.”
Then she shifted to some good stuff (finally). This is where she told me Ernesto is going to be rich.
“You’ll be fine, but he’s going to do great. It looks great monetarily.”
“Sure.”
Then the cherry on the cake was the finale. This consisted of her waving her hand in front of me and making eye contact.
“Your chakra is blocked. It’s dirty.”
“Oh.”
“I do cleansings. It may be something you should look into.”
Once again, I felt pretty badly that I am a very old man with a dirty chakra. But at least I’ll be rich? I guess that was a great takeaway.
I didn’t have time to meditate much more. With a wave of her hand, I was given a card for her chakra cleaning services and pushed out the door.
When I got back to my desk, I wasn’t feeling great, per se. I mean… I was going to be rich, but it had nothing to do with my independent business. My chakra also needed washing and waxing.
I sat down next to my coworker, and she immediately turned to me.
“How’d yours go?”
“Well, I might be rich. She also told me to quit?”
“Oh, well, at least you aren’t going to have financial troubles and you’re not spiritually empty.”
“Damn. Spiritually empty?”
“Yeah.”
As with most of my blog posts, I don’t know if there’s really a moral here. I didn’t quit my job and I think my chakra is still the “before” in a Tide commercial. If anything, I left with a few more, apparent, problems than when I came into the tarot reading. But things could be worse. I could be spiritually empty.
The one thing I do know is that even though absolutely nothing about the reading was correct, I do plan on being rich. She nailed that. So be nice to me. I’m evidently REALLY old with no heirs, so I’ll need someone to leave it to. If no one shows up, it may all have to go to those poor hostages in San Francisco.