Surviving the Workday

Dear Ms. Theologian,

Sari

Dear Sari:

Ah, what a good question! Ms. Theologian has written about jealousy in the workplace before, but in that case, the jealousy was person-specific and not in the context of workplace culture. She’s written about offensive corporate culture before and shallowness too. But your question has a new twist–a jealous and shallow culture that you find offensive and deeply affecting.

Ms. Theologian’s first inclination (and that is often the one that is absolutely wrong) is to say that you have two options: actively work to make this workplace a better place to work or 2. look for a new job. The current path of just trying to survive through positive thinking and prayer seems to be making you alienated in a community of jealousy and mistrust.

But here’s the problem with Ms. Theologian’s first inclination: the first option is all about changing others to make the workplace better. And we all know that changing others rarely works. In the times where Ms. Theologian has tried to use the shear force of her will, her positiveness, her energy to invoke change, she has always ended up tired and depressed. Does this mean it doesn’t work? No, but it does mean that organizational change is tremendously difficult, if not impossible, without buy-in from others.

So what does Ms. Theologian believe now that she’s had some time to lambast herself for her first inclination. She thinks that you have three options: 1. changing yourself; 2. doing exactly what you’ve been doing; 3. finding a new job.

How can you change yourself so that you can work in this place? (setting aside the question of whether or not you should). You might try Tonglen meditation, which Ms. Theologian uses for all of her painful intrapersonal situations. This style of meditation can help you be more compassionate toward others, but also toward yourself. If you use this regularly, you may find work interactions less painful.

You could also continue to tread water in the job. Many people do this for years. It’s not actively killing you; it’s just wearing away at your soul. You could let it do that for a little while longer while you get your ducks in a row for your next move.

Now let’s take up the question of whether you should attempt to change yourself to be less affected at work. Should you? You seem to know yourself well. Is this job worth changing for? And most importantly, do you want to be the person that you will have to be to have this job?

-Ms. Theologian

P.S. If you’d like to write a letter to Ms. Theologian, send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com.

If you struggle with firm answers to the big questions, read and listen to this lovely essay, Utterly Humbled by Mystery, by Richard Rohr on NPR.

My favorite paragraph is excerpted below:

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It’s the people who don’t know who usually pretend that they do. People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is — quite sadly — absent from much of our religious conversation today. My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.

If you travel frequently, you might want to pay attention to those in-flight snacks. You feel as though you’re starving, but they’re loaded with things you don’t necessarily want to eat. Read best/worst airline foods here.

Any ideas of foods to bring with you? Sometimes I bring trail mix.

Speaking of travel tips, here’s the Transportation Security Administration’s web site on what you can bring on with you. Particularly amusing is the video of the “female business traveler” and the “male business traveler” who go through security, but actually appear to be the same person. How modern and progressive of the TSA in their thoughts about gender!

I’ve been watching The Corporation, a documentary about the construction of the modern corporate enterprise and its control on modern life. It’s very scary to see the reality of corporations as plunderers.

A considerable amount of time was devoted to the Corporation as a Psychopath, which is a terrifying thought as well. A psychopath, as you recall, has no feelings, no conscience, no moral view of the world.

For example, you could say that Harper Collins developed a conscience when it fired Judith Regan yesterday, but you’d be terribly wrong. I’m sure that a number of focus tests led executives at Harper Collins to believe that the O.J. “Here’s how I could have done it” fiasco would have affected sales through the end of the fourth quarter. So a head had to roll. Good bye, Judith.

Resources to turn to when you’re annoyed with corporations:
Corp Watch
Citizen Watch
Ad Busters
Znet

A list of corporate baddies (click to read about some badness):

Monsanto and Corporation’s Suck’s Report on Monsanto
Kodak
Dow
Nestle

Dear Ms. Theologian:

-Thoughtfully Giving

Dear Thoughtfully Giving,

No, I haven’t mentioned that recently. Please note that many employers will match your charitable contribution. The caveat? You should check the requirements of your employer before giving, because often giving has to be done through the employer or in tandem.

Charitable donations are deductible if the organization qualifies according to the IRS and if you itemize your taxes. If not, well, it’s still a good idea, but it doesn’t have a tax benefit. Check the IRS guidelines on charitable contributions for more.

Not all non-profits are equally good. Use the Charity Navigator to help choose an appropriate charity or to evaluate one of your options. You want to see that much more money is used for programs than for administrative expenses. You can also compare peer organizations.

And, don’t forget to check with your employer for a matching contribution!

-Ms. Theologian

A new article in Reuters, Holiday No Holiday for Stressed Out Women, tells us what we already knew. This is a really stressful time of the year.

The holidays are a time for fun, food, family, gifts — and stress, with more women tending to suffer than men and turning to food, booze and the couch to get over the holidays.

Nearly half of all U.S. women experience greater stress during the holidays, according to a survey by the American Psychological Association.

I realize the long-term effects of continued couch-time are adverse, but sometimes it seems better than dealing with Aunt Millie. Here are the strategies of the 277 women surveyed with the accompanying percents:

37% Hide out: stay home and lie around– watching TV, reading
22% Calling a friend
8% Pig out
6% Going to a day spa
5% Making out
3% Working out

But if I’ve worked out, made out (the day spa is out of the question and my teeth are unable to pig out), and called a friend, aren’t I allowed to read on the couch? That only seems fair.

According to the women surveyed, the biggest stressors were lack of time and money as well as pressure to give gifts.

Sound familiar?

Dear Ms. Theologian:

What do you think of this.?

-Mmmmm… chocolate…

Dear Mmmmm… chocolate…:

I like this a lot.

The last time, Ms. Theologian commented on the theological implications of kitsch it was in relation to dogs and a nativity set, but she also thinks that marshmallows are equally kitschy. What is kitsch? According to Milan Kundera, “it is the absolute denial of shit.”

Kitsch is that vision of the world in which nothing unwholesome or indecent is allowed to come into view. It’s the aesthetics of wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Kitsch excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency.

In other words, kitsch is marshmallows–both utterly sweet and disgustingly fake. That’s the nature of kitsch. Now the nature of Christmas is about mingling the sacred (Jesus, birth, light, hope) and the profane (a v. poopy stable). Christmas is about the unwillingness of strangers to provide for one another and about the unexpected acts of kindness. And on the much bigger scale (take a deep breath), it’s about letting your child come to Earth only to be painfully slaughtered. That’s what Christmas is about. It’s about birth amid pain.

So, in other words, kitsch is in absolute contradiction to Christmas, which is what makes marshmallow smores as a creche brilliant.

In summary, Ms. Theologian doesn’t mind the marshmallows. She might even buy it.

–Ms. Theologian

P.S. If you’d like to write to Ms. Theologian, send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com.

I’ve had some interesting times volunteering. But from the water board to the nature center, volunteering was never what I expected.

Sarah Erdreich writes of this phenomenon in Volunteering 101:

When you show up, you’ll be expected. Organizations that use volunteers are, by definition, understaffed, and the friendly person you spoke with over the phone might not be the same person who’s at reception on your first day. Patience and a sense of humor are invaluable, both for staff and volunteers.

Apparently airlines don’t recycle your cans, plastic cups, and newspapers. They throw it all away.

A study by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that airplanes throw away 4,250 tons of aluminum cans a day. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars that they could save by recycling.

Read more here.

In Striving to keep Teleworkers Happy, I learned that I was not alone when I worked at home and felt isolated from the corporate world, even though I supposedly worked in it.

In an effort to connect teleworking employees at IBM, the IBM club was created. It’s a club in which employees of the same company, who work at home in the same geographic area, get together for intramural sports (yikes!), picnics, or movies.

But it’s not just IBM. Read more here. And, of course, telework isn’t for everyone.

You might be interested in reading an article in New Southerner that describes ways to shift your thinking away from consuming during the holiday season. I was interviewed for it, along with some other folks you might find familiar, if you visit Zoetrope.

Vatican officials have identified the tomb of Saint Paul. It may or may not contain his remains.

Paul never knew Jesus, but was one of the most important disciples in Early Christianity. He wasn’t one of the original disciples, but he did interact with them.

Paul wrote significant portions of the New Testament including 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Philippians, and Romans. However, his most important contribution was that the belief in Jesus as the son of God was enough to save you from your sins. This was a shift in thinking that the right actions and behaviors were all that was necessary. Paul added the belief component, and because of that, some believe he was the true founder of Christianity.

Paul FAQs

Take a Quiz about Paul

I’ve always chosen jobs in which it was relatively easy to be an Unitarian Universalist, even though I was always in a religious minority in a more conservative group. When I taught at a Catholic school, I often went to Mass. When I worked for an Indian organization, I often went to celebrations on the pueblos. And when I worked for Houghton Mifflin, I said nothing at all vaguely religious. We did make textbooks, after all, and we all know that no religion is allowed there. In any case, I don’t find that participating in other religious traditions limits my own spiritual growth. In fact, I think it has the opposite effect.

Unitarian Universalist principles, such as the inherent worth and dignity of every person, seem to be the most easy to affirm in the non-profit workplace. However, I’ve often found that non-profit workplaces were the most tricky. I think that often when people have a “mission” that they may see the mission as receiving priority over all over needs. It is, after all, a mission and it doesn’t necessarily include the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. Then again, corporate structures aren’t necessarily friendly to principles either.

In the end, I’ve found that only by having my own business was I really able to make choices that affirmed my own religious beliefs. I’m curious if others have found that as well.

But do I talk about this at work? Absolutely not. Even if someone asked about my religion, I would probably not talk deeply about it. Why? For me, it’s like talking about say sex or drug use. It’s just not appropriate. But can I apply my religious principles to the workplace? Absolutely. I can try and treat everyone with dignity. I can use compassion in dealings with other people (and myself). I can honor my conscience. These are all religious values, and values of Unitarian Universalist, which I can bring into the workplace.

Read more in the Unitarian Universalist Blog Carnival.

Thomas Merton was a famous Trappist monk, theologian, and poet in the last century. Here’s my favorite quote for this season:

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

I’ve had a couple of incidents recently where I really felt it was necessary to stand up for my ownership of my own time. That made me hugely uncomfortable (having to stand up for myself and go against corporate culture) and I’m not even sure things worked out in the end.

The first incident was an urgent work request via email to me while I was on vacation. This was not the first time this had happened.

The second was an urgent work request to me on Saturday morning. This was not the first time this had happened either.

I do realize that in business culture in the United States people do work while on vacation and during the weekends. But when I do that, it is almost always by choice on my part. Because, of course, if I work during the vacation or the weekend, then I lose downtime. And if I lose downtime, I lose my productivity because I become sort of aimless and exhausted. Web Grrls, a technology web site, affirms this experience over and over again.

As many of us know, white collar work does not involve being paid for overtime, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Part of the problem, as I see it, is that many jobs involve more than 40 hours a week, but that this is not part of an open dialogue with management. The implicit assumption is that you will work as many hours as needed.

Now sometimes working weekends is actually helpful because it is more peaceful (less emails, less phone calls). Young Female Scientist affirms this, and I’ve certainly found it to be true.

But here’s the problem—most of the time when you work weekends, you don’t get time off during the week. It’s not that you’ve shifted your weekend to other days. It’s that you’ve eliminated it entirely.

The next time software casually asks me if I’d like to try to the beta version, my answer is going to be a resounding no.

Could Beta Blogger suck more? Seriously. It’s hard to post on other blogs and impossible to post on some, I’ve had any number of parts of my normal log-in disappear (the English language replaced with German, the icons for inserting photographs)….I hate it. I’m a hater.

I absolutely loathe conflict. I’ll do whatever it takes to avoid it. I’m sure this is one of my “growing edges” as a human being.

This week, in order to avoid making a conflict-producing phone call, I’ve done the following:

made the bed everyday
cleaned the bathroom
washed everything in the house
read several books
read 100 blogs that are regularly updated

And yet the conflict hasn’t gone away with my endless mental puttering. So I went to make the phone call and met only with voice mail.

Sigh.

You might be interested in taking the Consumers Union’s quick extended extended warranty pledge and saying no to extended warranties.

I’ll offer this. I bought a HP laptop with a three-year warranty, which I’ve used to have two lame hard drives and the motherboard replaced. And now the lovely beast is still so sick that it cannibalized its own RAM. But can I get HP to fix it under the extended warranty? Absolutely not. I’ve spoken to umpteen people in India on the phone, I’ve dragged it to now two repair places, and no one will touch it because it’s a total lemon.

So, in short, extended warranties for me? Fairly useless. Consumer Reports agrees.

Take the pledge here.

Dear Ms. Theologian,

Been Scrooged

Dear Scrooged:

First, GhostGirl doesn’t like Santa either. We can blame her and your CEO for this fine mess. Also, I apologize for shortening your letter somewhat.

Second, you’re not going to like the rest of my answer. Again, feel free to blame GhostGirl and your CEO.

Santa may not be a “religious figure” in the same sense that “Jesus Christ” is a religious figure, in that he’s not intrinsically a part of scripture, but he definitely is a religious figure. He doesn’t visit in the middle of July and break your legs for flirting with his sister. He comes on Christmas Eve to give presents for Christmas, the birth of Jesus. Like the Wise Guys. I mean, Wise Men.

Santa’s importance has increased in the history of Christmas. Though Santa is as much an invention of writers and illustrators as an actual saint (Saint Nicholas of Myra in the fourth century, to be precise), he is now at least the understudy for Christmas (in case Christ gets a sore throat and can’t show up). There’s a story that Santa was invented by Coke, but that simply isn’t true. He was based on a saint, and then riffed upon by writers. And here we are.

So, in Ms. Theologian’s opinion, if the holiday party is supposed to be non-religious than the Big Red Guy can’t be there. Ms. Theologian offers you some baklava instead. She knows that you like holidays a lot and that you put a lot of effort into party planning.

So what’s really going on at work? Ms. Theologian suspects that it’s not the Jews and atheists (Ms. Theologian absolutely does not think it’s a good sign when we start blaming the Jews and atheists as the CEO did for not allowing the party.) Ms. Theologian suspects that it may be an issue of the CEO wanting to control things more (and cut down on surprises in his life). She thinks that he wasn’t into Santa, so he pulled the plug.

The problem with not going to the party is that it’s sort of in the same school as kids who take their toys and go home if you don’t want to play with them the right way. This never happened to Ms. Theologian as she was so poor growing up she didn’t have toys, only frozen foods, which she pushed around the floor and pretended they were her dollies. Ahem. In any case, you should go, stay for an hour, have some appetizers, drink one drink, talk to people you don’t normally talk to, including the CEO, and then go home.

–Ms. Theologian

P.S. If you’d like to write to Ms. Theologian, send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com.

Adoration, by Dick Detzner