|
By Glen Baity
The Dispatch
Every day, working people seek fulfillment in all manner career-related duties.
Tammy Bullin gets to live a little bit of her dream at work.
“I think it’s a really good job me,” said the City of Lexington ’s sanitation superintendent. I’m sort of a clean freak, and I get to clean the city every day.”
And so she has, since 1997, when she came to work for the city as the sanitation services coordinator on the heels of a year career in finance with Davidson County Community College .
Bullin leads 18 full-time workers and five contract laborers in the service of 8,500 households and 275 community businesses. She works with annual budget of about $1.9 million and has tackled an array challenges, one of the biggest coming with the ice storm of December 2002. That project required the removal of between 90,000 and 100,000 tons of downed tree limbs.
That job took considerable time and effort, but on the whole, the North Davidson High School graduate said her work life satisfies her desire to see immediate results.
“You know you’ve accomplished something at the end the day,” she said.
It might be fair to say Bullin has grown used to the feeling accomplishment: She received a human resources technology degree from DCCC in 1997 and started attending Catawba College in 1998 with an eye toward a degree in business administration. She graduated from that program in 2001.
“I wanted to move up in management,” Bullin said. “I wanted to lead people.”
If job satisfaction is any barometer, Bullin seems to have found her calling when she talks about how much she loves her current position.
“I never have a day when I don’t want to come to work,” she said with a smile.
Her personal life will take a happy turn this year as well, as Bullin prepares to marry fiance Gary Michael, whom she calls “my best friend.”
Having contributed 27 years to the local workforce, Bullin said she hasn’t even considered retirement yet. She does, however, confess a long-held ambition: One day, she’d like to get her substitute teacher’s license.
The avowed bookworm said she wants reading to be as important to young people today as it has been to her for her whole life.
It’s a laudable goal, one that speaks to a concern for others that transcends her position. When she thinks about her work with the city so far, Bullin sums up her time with the city in a typically altruistic sentence.
“If it comes time to retire,” she mused, “I just want to make sure I leave this place better.”
|
