Surviving the Workday

Dear Ms. Theologian,

P.S. I already took a walk.

Dear Urg,

We’ve emailed back and forth a bit, so Ms. Theologian thinks it’s probably best to let readers know that a. you’re a writer, b. under deadline, c. you’ve been working steadily and are exhausted, and d. you’ve napped recently to address the exhaustion issue.

Procrastination is actually much more complicated than it seems. It’s not a matter of buckling down usually to address the problem; you need to figure out why you’re procrastinating first.

Writers of all sorts procrastinate from perfectionism, which leads to a fear of the shitty first draft. We want our work to be good! And good soon! But there is always a shitty first draft, so it’s better to get it written earlier than later. Often procrastination is a way of avoiding that first draft. But then Ms. Theologian often has a shitty second draft. Indeed the entire blog is a shitty second draft for her. So writers often want to avoid this too. So they just stop working.

Fear of the shitty drafts is linked to fear of failure, which may be one of the larger challenges here. Ms. Theologian has had a number of projects where she received mostly negative feedback at each stage, and after a while could only procrastinate because she knew the negative feedback was coming. Why continued to work toward it?

Ms. Theologian has a little trick: the three-minute rule (not the three-second rule for food on the floor; this is much different). This means you only devote three minutes to the project. It can be a painful three minutes of work, but often that is enough to get you back in the groove. Just three minutes. Really.

Also, for what it’s worth, when Ms. Theologian really wants to get something done, she turns off the ringer on the phone and flips the switch on the side of the laptop that disconnects her from the office wireless network. No phone, no email, no Internet, and just the work.

And then there is kindness to self. Important stuff that. Work can be hard and there is no need to punish oneself. Possibly ever.

Anyone have other procrastination tips?

-Ms. Theologian

P.S. To write to Ms. Theologian, send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com.

Really.

Why do I dislike Al Gore so much? It’s an almost visceral reaction of dislike, almost hatred (but not enough energy is expended). And let’s be clear: I voted for him, and I’m quite green. But still…I feel strong feelings of dislike toward a man I’ll never meet, and a man who seems to have truly found his calling as an environmental prophet, which is admirable.

Why do I feel this way? I have at least three possibilities:

a. Do I hold some sort of resentment against his wife, Tipper, for when she tried to protect me (and other adolescents) from music lyrics in the 1980s? Possibly

b. Do I sense Al is condescending, even when he tries not to be? I think so.

c. Do I think An Inconvenient Truth was a terrible movie? Yes, I do, but it seems to have done a lot of good. At least people are talking about global warming. But the movie seemed like a tribute to his narcissism, really. Of course, I fell asleep in the middle of it after I tired of watching him work at the computer, so perhaps the second half was less about him.

d. Is it some sort of larger dislike of mainstream environmentalism? Or of having corporate allies? Possibly.

In fact, I just remembered what triggered my Al Gore-a-thon: Boing Boing’s Live Earth music industry benefits made stupid and evil by terms and conditions. Yup, that was it. The idea that someone (namely an Al Gore affiliate) owns the term “live earth” is perhaps the stupidest thing I’ve heard all month.

Keeping Bob Sutton’s advice in mind, I have really tried to understood Al Gore. I’ve read a lot about him, I’ve tried to understand the tremendous amount of grief he must have felt in 2000 when he won the popular vote, but not the election. But still, I come up short as a human being: I still greatly dislike him.

Why? You may answer the question. Do I secretly want to be him? Marry Tipper? Listen to obscene lyrics? Lead my own fluorescent light bulb movement? Why such strong feelings?

This post also uses the word “asshole” multiple times. If that offends you, you might want to read about scary baby toys instead.

One of Bob Sutton’s talents in The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t is that he doesn’t simply rail against all assholes all the time. He admits he can be one occasionally, and that we should be careful how we use the label:

First, resist the temptation to apply the label to anyone who annoys you or has a bad moment. If you apply the label to everyone, it means nothing.

Second, be slow to brand people as certified assholes just because they act like temporary assholes now and then or have a gruff exterior….

Third, the best way to overcome a negative stereotype of someone—unfounded beliefs that a person or all people in some category are evil, lazy, stupid, or whatever—is to work on a task with that person that entails mutual and successful cooperation toward some goal.

Of course, there are some people who fail all these tests; the more we know about them, the more evidence we get that they are certified assholes.

Indeed.

One thing I’ve noticed in the past 18 months as 6 friends and family members have had babies is that there are some really cool baby toys out there. And I’ve also noticed that I don’t actually have the judgment to tell whether these are just cool for me (and my inner child) and possibly scare the bejeezus out of babies or whether they are just cool for everyone. I suppose it depends on the child and age. Here are a couple I’ve seen on Treehugger:

Cotton Monsters, handmade by Jennifer Strunge

Ragamuffins, handmade by Crispina Ffrench (I think there are two f’s in her last name, but that might be a typo on the web site).

I gather from reading their bios that these women are both artists, both with a lot of training, and that they are now applying their skills to toys, which, frankly, are art.

Via TreeHugger

Warning: This post contains the word “asshole.” A lot.

I’ve written about Bob Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule before, but I hadn’t read the book in its entirety. Now I have. It’s a great book. Bob Sutton is a professor of management science at Stanford, and this is a research-based book on how to identify, avoid, and manage assholes in the workplace.

I discussed The No Asshole Rule at lunch today with my neighbor in reference to a certain attorney we both know. After only four total interactions (a two-minute introduction at a public meeting, one cup of coffee with him and others, one conference phone call, and a lovely abusive email), we determined that he is a certifiable asshole.

That is to say that this person consistently used the dirty dozen of everyday actions of assholes (personal insults, invasions of personal space, unwanted physical contact, threats and intimidation, sarcasm, email flames, status slaps, public shaming, rude interruptions, two faced attacks, dirty looks, and treating others as if they are invisible). Actually, in only four interactions, he managed to use eight of the dozen. Just imagine if we actually had to work with him!

What I found interesting about interacting with this asshole is that he brought out my own asshole nature. Honestly, after he tried to put his arm around me (unwanted, trust me on that), interrupted me, and treated me like I was developmentally disabled in some fashion, I acted like a total asshole to him. I interrupted him right back, used a little status slapping, and lots of sarcasm. It was classic asshole poisoning.

Bob Sutton writes about asshole poisoning, which is one of the reasons you don’t want to work with an asshole. It’s contagious. He also writes about those rare times when you may need to act like an asshole. Here’s his concise summary of the book:

We are all given only so many hours here on earth. Wouldn’t it be wonderful
if we could travel through our lives without encountering people who bring us
down with their demeaning remarks and actions?

…If you are tired of living in Jerk City—if you don’t want every day to
feel like a walk down Asshole Avenue—well, it’s your job to help build and
shape a civilized workplace. Sure, you already know that. But isn’t it time to
do something about it?

Amen.

And here’s a link to send an arsemail.

I love Found Art in the form of notes. And here is a blog devoted to it, much of it from the workplace.

You will especially enjoy this one on an office chair, which I could have penned at almost any other time in my life, and this one from a (no doubt) smelly office kitchenette.

This may take the cake though….

When I worked under a long-term contract for a large corporation, a coworker-friend, also under contract, became pregnant, and eventually asked to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave post-baby under the Family Medical Leave Act.

Our employer said, basically: No, but why don’t we lay you off and then rehire you when you’re ready? You don’t really need health insurance, do you? You have a husband, after all.

My friend said: No, that’s illegal.

And it went back and forth, and finally when she retained an attorney, the corporation backed down and let her take her leave. Her unpaid leave. Keep in mind that this was a corporation that was lauded as being a great corporation for people with families.

So, it’s not a great surprise to hear that reported pregnancy discrimination is on the rise. I think it’s been underreported for a long time. And it’s illegal. Here’s a summary of what you cannot do as an employer:

You cannot refuse to hire a woman because she is pregnant.
You cannot fire her because she is pregnant.
You cannot demote her or dock her pay because she is pregnant.
Even if you ask a woman about her child-rearing plans, and don’t do the
same of your male job applicants or employees, that’s a no-no.

Resources: Are you a victim of pregnancy discrimination? and Employment Law Guide: Family and Medical Leave

Via Feministing

College students leave good stuff behind at the end of the year, and much of it ends up in landfills. My office chair is from one of the undergraduate house dumpsters at Harvard from 1998 when my brother graduated. I also took a computer printer right from the trash.

For my own Wes graduation, I do remember my poor grandparents struggling to get out of the elevator in our university-owned dorm because of the amount of trash coming out of the nearby trash chute. Now that’s a way to impress your grandparents with the 100K education.

The amount of excess at universities at the end of the year seems like a classic example of poor planning (I could blame the less than final form of the frontal lobe of the twenty-two-year old brain) combined with middle class (or upper class) excess.

In Trashed: Much left behind at colleges, I learned how Davidson College students collect year end materials for local charities rather than the dumpsters. Other colleges are named as well. Penn State has raised $200,000 with a sale of the materials left behind.

On a purely practical level, it seems to me that the problem is providing enough space to store everything left behind until it is given to charity. That’s got to be a challenge.

Seeing Pia Ehrhardt pull out one of these at our Tin House writing workshop with Jim Shepard filled me with envy and started a journey away from The Franklin Planner and toward The Moleskine and hipster pda. *

Why? My Franklin Planner was bulky, the refills were expensive, and it was filled with lines that bothered me. Seriously, the ruled lines really bothered me. And then there’s the whole Stephen Covey-Franklin Planner alliance that makes me cringe.

But at least two centuries of artists have found The Moleskine satisfying. Jim (my husband, not Jim Shepard) and I both have the small notebooks, which fit in back pockets. He has smaller soft cover squared notebooks too, and I just filled a large notebook with the sort of brilliance that occurs when you just wake up (total rambly drivel).*

It’s made in Italy.* And, yes, it’s probably pretentious as all hell, but when you live in a shack, you are allowed this sort of pretention. When you have denied yourself the pleasure of Ann Taylor, and J-41 (both products made in China) due to self-imposed No China Diet, perhaps the Moleskine has to satisfy.*

*Disregard everything I’ve written. The love I feel for Moleskine is real. And so is the betrayal! Read the comments. These puppies are printed and bound in China. My fault, my fault, my fault. I’m a sloppy, sloppy girl, and this game of No China is much more difficult than it seems.

Do you have any ideas for questions for my survey on attitudes in the workplace about parents and nonparents? Please post in comments or email (ms dot theologian at gmail dot com).

GhostGirl informs me that this topic is au courant and emailed me Avoiding Sparks Between Parents and NonParents, which brings up a number of the issues this letter and this letter discussed. Here’s the gist:

Some of the best companies in America go to great lengths to accommodate employees with kids. Generous paid maternity and paternity leaves, on-site or backup child-care assistance, options for flexible work options, and even scholarships to send employees’ offspring to college are just some of the popular benefits touted by employers. This aggressive emphasis on the family-friendly workplace is great for working parents, great for employers and great for society.

But when you ask another group of dedicated employees — those without kids — for their take, you often get a different perspective. There is growing resentment in cubicles everywhere from workers without children who are fed up with what they perceive to be too much coddling of their parenting peers.

I’m in favor of “coddling” everyone. Any questions for my survey? I reserve editorial rights.

Staples will now recycle your computer equipment for $10.

You know how you have some friends who are such good friends that you have the same conversations over and over and don’t care? The conversations change slightly with new insights, but they are essentially the same.

One of my favorite conversations with a friend who freelances is: What are all these people doing hanging around this restaurant at eleven o’clock in the morning?

Now, what are we doing? We’re networking. We’re having brunch. This is a business expense, a meeting between two professionals, who just so happen to have partners who are busy. We give each other work and 1099 each other. This brunch is actual work, baby. And one of us is going to write it off.

But what are all these other people doing? Really.

We don’t really know. We have discussed it endlessly though. Did they take sick days? Do they bartend and not have to work at eleven in the morning? Are they simply self-employed? Do they have partners who support them? Are they “flexing” their schedules? What are they doing?

Chris Colin in The Mystery of the Daytime Idle: Why aren’t you working? took our conversation one step farther. He actually interviewed people. Here are some of the reasons people weren’t at work:

Quit Job
In Hospice
Traveling for Pleasure
Have the Day Off
On Disability
Unemployed
Interested in watching the grass grow

The list goes on and on.

Most writers have some sort of fetish. I have a fairly common one: the pen fetish. It began with a Waterman in high school, and then I sort of moved up the Waterman line, while the pens leaked all over my hands. Because you were not supposed to let anyone else write with the pen, I had to come up with all sorts of inventive excuses on why I couldn’t share my pen. And then there was an absolutely glorious period of my life at a publishing company where they bought good pens for everyone. They were excellent, except twice (not once, but twice!) the pens exploded on my hands during airline travel. They did not like high altitudes.

Now that I actually buy my own pens, and am on the No China diet, I’ve been a bit concerned about where to go for pens. I realize that for most of us, well, we just don’t care about the pens. But it matters to a writer. I just learned that my ultimate in pen fantasies, The Fisher Space Pen, is Made in Boulder City, Nevada. It writes smoothly, on all surfaces, and at temperature extremes. I suppose the carabiner is unnecessary for some….but some models come in purple.

Read the ebay review of the Fisher pen.

in my job
you see i’m a tv newscameraman
and when there isn’t
any news
then I sit around
a lot.
i’ve sat around queen’s park
listening to the gaggle
of political winds
i’ve cruised up and down
bloor and yonge and even queen
watching the t&b (which is
a tv newscameraman’s term
for tits and bums,
newscamerawomen
call it c&b)
and watching the street people
hassle cops while the cops
hassle them right back.
i remember once waiting
for two hours on a rug
outside a boardroom in
the tortonto ed building
while the metro zoo board
floundered about inside in
parliamentry procedure and
the only procedure i had to
worry about was how to
shift my weight from one
cheek to the other.
i’m even writing this poem
waiting for a phone call
in our city hall office.

all this you know for a fast seventeen-minute headline
of the day’s events.
but believe me, every minute of it
was punctuated by hours
of waiting.

-Brgoramu in Going for Coffee: poetry on the job, an anthology by Tom Wayman

It’s a collection of water samples from Chinese rivers.

What does water pollution in China have to do with you?

Water pollution is a result of textile dyes (from clothing), paper (from paper products), fertilizers (from growing food), metal processing (from making metal products), all of which are sold to those of us not in China.

Water polluion is an absolute classic negative externality. The cost of cleaning up the pollution is not included in the cheap good that you bought at Wal-Mart. The cost, I fear, is felt by the people of China who can’t use their own water. And, frankly, are being poisoned by their own water. But it’s not just industry that pollutes China’s rivers. The Yellow River, the second longest in China, is 10% sewage.

Thus speaks the Paranoid Harpy of Doom. Again.

Since beginning the No China Diet, I’ve been trying to track where my food comes from. And if you’ve been playing along at home, you know this is more difficult than it seems.

We buy most groceries at Trader Joe’s. I was under the general impression that most of our food came from Southern California, but I’ve been proven incorrect: originally most of it was either unlabelled or came from Mexico. When I deliberately began to check labels, I can often make most of the fruit and vegetables come from California. But I can’t actually tell you where the rest of it comes from because it has a label that says, “Distributed by Trader Joe’s, Monrovia, California.” I fear that it comes from a mysterious location, and is then sent to Monrovia (sometimes Needham, Massachusetts). I fear it’s China for one reason only: it’s cheap.

Now why am I becoming the Paranoid Harpy of Doom about Food from China? Because you have no idea what’s in your food if it’s from China.

1. China uses more pesticides than any other country, so if it’s not organic, chances are pesticides were used. And these aren’t ordinary pesticides, but the especially toxic ones that are often illegal in this country. Frequently the farmers don’t use or can’t afford protective gear. This is bad news for everyone.

Resource: Pesticides Next Frontier in China Food Safety,

2. China has a booming organic market, which is wonderful, except that human waste is used as a fertilizer. And while I understand that some of this is a cultural thing, it also falls into the category of stuff I don’t want to involuntarily ingest.

Resource: Sea of Pesticides Surrounds China’s Organic Farms

3. Speaking of things you don’t want to ingest, China has widespread mislabeling of products, so you don’t know exactly what’s in your food. Like toothpaste, which you’re not supposed to swallow, but you probably assumed that your toothpaste didn’t have poison (antifreeze) in it as many people did in Panama.

Resource: Poisoned Toothpaste in Panama is Believed to be From China, China Urges U.S. Not to Punish All Food Exporters (from Pet Food Recall)

Why is this even a problem? Congress does not require the food industry to label the country of origin of products. So unless you grew it, unless it is voluntarily and correctly labeled, you simply do not know what’s in it.

And so speaks the Paranoid Harpy of Doom.

I’m going to continue writing about the No China Diet for a long time because I think it’s important.

I’m trying to trim the amount of items that I consume that come from China, not remove, because that may be impossible.

Recruiting? I’m not really interested in you going on a No China Diet or living out my own values. A world full of Ms. Theologians would be a very odd place, full of old-school organic vegetables, Greek food, and devoid of Hummers (the car kind). It would, however, please me greatly if you considered where what you buy comes from and how it is produced. You probably do already. You are, after all, reading my little blog.

Vote With Your Wallet Here is what I think: Not only do I vote in elections, I vote with my wallet. Where and how I spend my money matters. I don’t want to support institutions, corporations, and countries with values contrary to my own.

Resource: Vote with Your Wallet

Boycotts Do Work There’s a fair amount of rhetoric around the idea that Boycotts Don’t Work despite that our country was spurred to independence with a boycott of tea, and that Gandhi drove the British out of India with a boycott of salt. Still there’s the very prevalent idea that boycotts don’t work today. Why? I fear it’s because corporations say they don’t work. And they say it over and over again. It’s entirely in their interest to say this despite the fact that some studies demonstrate that boycotts do work, and that corporations, such as Fidelity, respond to public criticism by changing their policies. They just don’t want to let consumers know that they actually do have power. But they do change due to boycotts all the time.

Resource: Consumer Boycotts Work: Just Ask French Winemakers and Fidelity Says It Did Not Divest for Darfur

Ethical Consuming Scott has written quite a bit about the idea of ethical consuming. It’s at the heart of my vegetarianism. I think ethical consuming is mainly about the principle of Do No Harm. Do not harm to self, to others, to the world around us. Ethical consuming is in keeping with affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every human being and encouraging justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.

Rather than helping the people of China, buying products under the current regime with policies of egregious human rights abuse, including executions for “ordinary” crimes, animal torture, and a free for all of toxic pesticides affirms that this is the best way to a market economy and globalization. And it’s not. It can’t be.

Resources: Human Cost of China’s Economic Miracle, Death Penalty Statistics, China’s Animal Torture, Pesticides and Environmental Health Trends in China, War on Intellectual Property

Why I’m Writing about China at Surviving the Workday I think the desire of most of us is to be treated with respect and to do meaningful work. And although I find a number of workplace situations in the United States to be pathetic, yet solvable (e.g., lack of health care or reasonable benefits, including paid maternity leave), I find the conditions in China to be absolutely unbelievably wicked. Workers are paid pennies. They have no rights. No health care. They can be fired without cause. They can have their wages withheld for months to keep them in virtual slavery or pensions taken away for no reason after decades of work. It is a crisis situation in a country with more than a fifth of the world’s population. And it will not get better without external pressure. To buy from them is a violation of many of the principles I hold dear.

Resource: Human Cost of China’s Economic “Miracle”

I’ve mentioned how much I don’t like Disney before.

Much of my dislike of them stems from being a writer and understanding that there may only be a few stories in existence but that no one “owns” the story. You can own your version of the story, but not the story itself. Unless you’re Disney.

Disney takes classic stories in the public domain, makes a film with them, and then thinks that they own all iterations of the story because they have expensive lawyers. That means that although Ali Baba and A Thousand Nights existed as a story for thousands of years, now Disney literally owns it because they made a movie called Alladin out of it.

But here’s some excellent subversion with fair use. Here’s a link to Bucknell Professor Eric Faden’s explanation of why Disney is the Wicked Witch of Intellectual Property: A Fair-y Use Tale.

Via Boing Boing

Work issues for the week?

Breastfeeding at work

Clocking in For Equality

The Parent Card and Flex-Time

The Pernicious Recommendations of the Beauty Industry to Douche with Lysol

Big Whiners.

Female-Only Floors in Hotels

I’m still on a No China Diet, but spent most of the week researching human rights abuses in China. Meanwhile, if you are interested in ethical consuming, you might check out resources Scott has provided here and here.

it’s time for a quiz!

Take the BBC Religion and Ethics Quiz about slavery. You can post your score here along with any comments.

I got 9 out of 15 right in 120 seconds. I got all the Greek questions, but missed Augustine and Aquinas, and some others. Obviously.

A hotel being constructed in Grand Rapids will have a women-only floor to accomodate female business travelers. The hotel spokesperson said that 50% of business travelers are women, that women may not feel safe in a strange city while traveling, and that they get harassed in lounges.

There’s quite the discussion over at feministing about this. Yet, on a totally practical level, as someone who travels on business, I would totally stay on a female-only floor voluntarily.

Would you stay on a female-only floor (if you’re female)? And why?

Via Feministing