American religious leader, Brigham Young, once said "Life is best enjoyed when time periods are evenly divided between labor, sleep, and recreation...all people should spend one-third of their time in recreation which is rebuilding, voluntary activity, never idleness."

Young would have a difficult time explaining this to the majority of people who hold down jobs today. Returning to the workforce after fifteen years as a stay-at-home proved that to me.

I quit my job as a pharmacy technician in 1991, to stay home and raise my children. I wanted to stay home with them until they reached what I thought was the appropriate age. They reached that age two short years ago.

In my former job, I worked in the pharmacy of a hospital where everyone pulled together to give the patients the care and medications they needed. We completed some tasks on a daily basis. We performed other aspects of the job during downtime. If one of us got behind in our responsibilities, other employees chipped in to lend a hand. It felt good to help others in order to get the job done right.

Back then, when a coworker became ill and had to stay home, the rest of us would work harder and faster to get everything done. We saved the things that could wait until we had a full crew again.

So when the opportunity arose to go back to work at the same place, I jumped at the chance. However, I had no idea how much everything about the job had changed. As was the case with every business, the hospital pharmacy began to incorporate a computer system during the time I was at home, raising kids. I knew learning a new way of performing certain duties in the pharmacy would be a challenge, but as I found out, not nearly as challenging as the rest of it would be.

On one of my first days in the pharmacy, my coworkers complained because the boss was not compensating them for training the new person, me. One went as far as to say in front of me, "I don't know why I have to train the new technician". Things progressively got worse.

One of the jobs of a pharmacy technician is to deliver meds to the nurses' stations. I assumed because I was the new person, they elected me to make all deliveries to the floor, and the nurses were used to seeing me every hour for eight hours a day.

The real reason that I made all the deliveries became clear to me. More often than not, I would return to the pharmacy to find my coworkers checking their personal emails, socializing on their Facebook pages, sitting down eating and hunting for houses online. They did this periodically during the course of what was supposed to be an eight-hour workday. I guess they did not read the part about the 'work'. What angered me more was that our boss knew this was going on and yet, never said anything to them.

After so many runs down to the floors of the hospital, the nurses became friendly with me. They began to say things like, 'you're the only person from the pharmacy who ever says hello to us', and 'we're so glad you're working in the pharmacy because we always have to battle with them when we ask them to send something down'.

One day, a nurse asked me for an IV that a patient needed right away. I did not have it with me, so I offered to go back up to the pharmacy and bring it back down right away. When I completed my rounds, one of the pharmacists reprimanded me for helping the patient and nurse. I argued that the patient needed it right away, while the pharmacist argued that it could have waited until the next round, in an hour. She did not want it to become a habit, because no one ever did that before.

After that incident, I knew would I be in for more trouble, and I tried to make a few adjustments in what I believed to be my good work ethics. After a few months working in the pharmacy, I realized I would not be able to accommodate them. I worked in retail years before I became a pharmacy technician, so I was used to helping people, whether they were customers, nurses, or patients.

Something else changed during the time I was not working outside the home. The supervisor assigned specific jobs to us, which changed from week to week. One week I had extra time and offered to help the other pharmacy techs. They were clearly behind in their work but proceeded to tell me that I did not have to help them. My surprise turned into shock the following week when I got behind in my duties because of the hours I worked.

I did not come in until 9 o'clock and there were things that we had to do before 9 o'clock. To correct this, the supervisor asked one of my coworkers to complete to work on those things until I came in to take over. The coworker then said to the supervisor, "We never get any help. Why should we help her?" What made this worse was that the supervisor told me exactly what my coworker said.

Another thing that irritated me about my coworkers was their excessive absences. The pharmacy supervisor suspended one girl a day without pay, three times in five months, for taking sick days beyond the allotted sick leave awarded to employees. I soon after learned from someone in an administrative office, that excessive absences were a hospital-wide problem. Administrators tried to come up with a disciplinary action plan for supervisors to cut down on the number of call-outs. Most of them were against it because they would have to suspend so many employees too often. After talking to other people working elsewhere, apparently a lack of work ethics was of epidemic proportions.

Whatever happened to putting in a full day's work and feeling good about it at the end of the day? Many people no longer think it is noble to work hard, or to work at all for that matter, for their paycheck. They do not want their coworkers to do any more than they have to, because they fear their bosses will expect them to do the same.

To think that when I decided to return to work, I worried that employers would think I was too old or that I had been away from the working world too long, for any company to hire me.

I went from being a stay-at-home mom, to a mom returning to work, and back again to a stay-at-home. This time I think I will try self-employment so I can keep my work ethics intact.