Surviving the Workday

I’m going to write the fifth draft of this increasingly troublesome Halloween post as bulleted questions and observations. You can add your answers or observations in comments if you wish.

1. We all wear masks to work and uniforms of a sort. How is Halloween an opportunity at work to take off the masks and uniforms? Is celebrating Halloween at work really an excuse to replace one mask with another? And do I really want to see my coworkers without their masks and uniforms?
2. Halloween is a religious holiday (Samhain) for some pagans. Is it celebrated religiously for pagans in the workplace?
3. Halloween is a cultural holiday for others. Is it celebrated in a cultural way at work? And does the cultural way of celebrating the holiday degrade the religious way?
4. And what to make of all the costumes for women that are different versions of the same old sexism? and the racist costumes? What can we make of these opportunities to cross boundaries that are not normally crossed in the workplace?

Resources

Examining the Workplace Mask
How do you celebrate Halloween at Work?

Does Affluence Fuel Spirituality? on Beliefnet explores the idea that with increased wealth (from increased work) comes increased consumption and the search for meaning.

Architects go green at the office in the New York Times introduces one of the most beautiful workspaces I’ve ever seen in an (originally) conventional office. Big windows for everyone. High Ceilings. Views. A green roof for birds. And it’s just what you expect for the offices of green architects.

If Not ‘Made in China’, Then Where? (here’s Part 2) explores one woman’s experience trying to evaluate how to consume ethically. She likes American Apparel, and that seems a tad misplaced. I don’t think trading one sort of human rights violations is another. But boy does she have resources including, ShopChinaFree, a new blog. I also came across Not China Made while poking around.

I’ve been working on sort of a theology of work document and came across a few resources: OSHA’s Employee Workplace Rights and the ACLU’s take on workplace rights.

Apparently I am amping up ethical consuming posts this Consuming Season.  

Please read the excellent in-depth post Slavery Conditions for Indian Children making Gap Garments by Sisyphus. As much as everyone likes a good deal on clothes, I would also like to believe that we don’t want a good price on our clothes because they were made by children in slavery.

Resources
Sweatshop Free Clothes (a short list I compiled earlier)

One of the biggest factors that affects personal resource use is home size. According to Size Matters, we have seen average home sizes increase in the United States from 1,100 square feet in 1950 to 2340 square feet in 2002. And the number of household members has dropped from nearly 4 to close to 2.5. 

A note on small structures:

“Building small makes ‘natural sense.’” says Duo Dickinson, a Connecticut architect and author. “First, you build what’s needed and then what’s wanted. The problem is that many people don’t know the difference.”

It would be impossible to get universal agreement on how “small” a small house should be. Prison cells are small, but hardly livable. “For the designer, the key is to make the house fit the clients,” says Dickinson. “A house fits when living in it is effortless.” Like a tailor fitting a garment to the exact dimensions of a human form, a designer should strive to size building elements for the occupants’ values and way of living.

After attending a Little House on a Small Planet workshop at the Crestone Sustainable Energy Fair, I’m not actually a fan of the idea of “building” anything, but I like the general ideas about small spaces. I think most of what we need is already built. Shay Solomon, workshop leader (and author of Little House on a Small Planet) gave great tips that work even if you live in a big house.

Space use is a tough sell because you can’t go out and fix it today (like a leak on a kitchen sink to decrease water use or like unplugging a cell phone charger to decrease electricity use). And small spaces aren’t without some actual costs. It was a pain to get a mortgage for our small space (the amount of the mortgage and the size of the space made it difficult). And it looks as though it’s a bit more difficult to adopt children in a small space. However, I think the size of our homes is something that should be on your mind (and my mind) as we make choices in the future in our resource use.

Resources

Global Ecological Footprint Calculator

Carbon Footprint Tips

Calculate your impact

This is the second in a series of posts on resource use.

It’s my belief that most people just don’t understand the water cycle and this is to blame for just about most of our problems with water policy and practice (that and outright greed) in the United States. And I say this as someone who majored in earth science in college, who has edited a considerable number of hydrology chapters on groundwater and surface water for textbooks, and someone who has been on the local water board. I think about water a lot. I’ve talked to people about their water quite a bit. And I think that many people don’t get where water comes from. They don’t get how scarce it is. And they don’t get that we are going to run out.

Take a good look at this diagram from the USGS. Where is most of the water? It looks like most of it is stored in groundwater or freshwater or the atmosphere. However, most of the water in the water cycle is stored in the oceans as salt water. How much? Like more than 97%.* (The diagram is misleading in hopes of being illustrative.) And then just about 2% (or less as they are melting) is stored as glaciers. That leaves 1% divided between groundwater, surface water, and soil moisture. That’s 1% of the water that’s available for our use.

Why do I care? I basically came of age in a drought, so my habits are naturally thrifty with water. As a teenager in Santa Barbara/Goleta, I took 3 minute showers with our low-flow shower head, turned off the water while soaping and shaving, let the lawn die and planted cacti, and just about never washed the cars. We only did full loads with the dishwasher and laundry and we never let water run down the drain if it could be repurposed.  Unfortunately, to “alleviate” the drought, Santa Barbara voted to import “state water,” which is really water stolen…um…removed from other places.

Our current home is rather unique in California in that we actually use community well water. Several years, all of a sudden, the wells couldn’t provide enough water for the community and we had to truck water in.  Trucking in water for a few months was expensive, we had to raise the water rates, and everyone had to learn to conserve.

Conservation  is a really good idea, but domestic water from wells and public water supply is only about 10-12% of the water used in the United States. What uses the rest? Check out the scary bar graph from the USGS, which indicates that as of 2000 roughly half of all water in the United States was used in thermoelectric plants. See the connection to yesterday’s post on electricity use? Use less electricity and you actually use less water.

So how do you know how much water you use at home (or at work for that matter)? It should be recorded in cubic feet or gallons on your bill. You could also just read your meter, though most meters are the property of the water service provider so you don’t want to tamper with it. You can play around with this calculator from the USGS to get an estimate of how much water you might use. And check out the resources from your local water company. Many offer a free “water audit” in which someone will come to your home and give you suggestions for how to conserve.

Resources
Save Water in 49 Ways
Water Saving Tips by Region
Water Saver Home Tour
Everyday Water Saving Tips from Consumer Reports

*According to F.W. Fetter’s Applied Hydrogeology

GhostGirl wrote about how Jesus does not have street cred, the development of guides for understanding world religions, meeting anxiety (which I think is a sign of our alienation from one another at work), a congregation writing letters of love to Britney, and what is apparently legal genital mutiliation in order to control the sexual behavior of a thirteen year old. That wins the sickening post of the week award.

Anne P wrote about longing for a vacation. Anne P really wants one. And she wants to travel.

 I wrote first about the high winds in Agua Dulce, how media resources seemed to focus on fires in Malibu rather than Santa Clarita (at least at first), how people who questions resource allocation were called angry, negative, hateful, ignorant jerks, and then I took photos of the aftermath of the Buckweed Fire behind our home. I wrote about my recent pain and suffering in light of the fire as well. And then GhostGirl conducted a post-disaster wrap-up.

A few non-disaster notes: I pledged to buy handmade goods for Christmas. Thank God the goods don’t have to come from my own hands. And, I have an article in Science & Spirit on Finding Meaning in the Workplace.

I’m sure there was more, but that was exhausting.

I think this is a series of posts on resource use. I have another post on water coming soon. But onward to electricity!

A while ago, we were discussing phantom load, which is the electrical power you use from having something plugged in, but not turned on. I suggested based on my experience with burning out a generator in the wilderness that having a few simple items plugged in (but not on) that all items used power when plugged in.

Anne P. and Scott wondered if phantom load only existed with items with the “wall wart,” like cell phone chargers or fancy lamps, not simple items. So, eventually, I borrowed a Kill-a-Watt from my dad to measure energy consumption of simple items.

Here’s the Kill-a-Watt measurement before I plugged in anything. It shows just around 120 Volts (120.1Volts) right at the outlet, which is appropriate.

Now I plugged in my cell phone charger, which has a “wall wart.” The Kill-a-Watt reads 123.4 Volts, which is what we expected. There’s nothing at the end of the cell phone charger. No phone. Nothing. The Kill-a-Watt shows that the cell phone charger is just using electricity because it’s plugged in.

And then I plugged in a series of other simple objects (all set to off), including a lamp. This cheap lamp apparently does use a little bit of electricity when plugged in, but off (120.9 Volts). Not as much as a cell phone charger, but still some. And this explains how I was able to burn out a generator in a cabin in the wilderness having only simple appliances plugged in and not on (a CD player and coffee pot without any visual displays).

Now this wasn’t particularly scientific. We have an old house with some old wiring. And the Kill-a-Watt seemed to record different amounts when I ran this little experiment again. So with my dad’s permission, I can lend you the Kill-a-Watt through the mail to expand our sample size of items with and without wall-warts. It’s made in China, of course, and is the sort of toy you can use for a couple of weeks before you’ve measured everything in the house three times; it’s ideal for lending. Just leave a comment here if you want this great device.

And why does anyone care about phantom load? Many people are trying to reduce their use of electricity because most electricity power plants in the United States burn coal, which releases greenhouse gases, which in turn warm the planet. So by using less electricity, you are trimming your own electricity bill as well as contributing a bit less to global warming.

How can you apply your knowledge of phantom load to the workplace? I’ll tell you what I do, and you can adapt from there. I simply unplug appliances that I rarely use (like the dreadful fax machine and printer). If you share an office with many people, you’ll need to check before doing much unplugging. Being mindful of your energy use seems part of general mindfulness at work.  

Apparently, it’s okay to pierce your thirteen-year-old daughter’s genitals and shave her head if you tell the court that she was a promiscuous slut. How is this not child abuse?

Here’s the part that got me:

When the defense case began Wednesday, Day called the girl’s 20-year-old brother, who choked up tearfully while describing his sister’s promiscuity and his mother’s inability to control her, despite grounding her and other restrictions. He said he urged her to get pierced to gain her mother’s trust and she agreed.

It sounds too much like there’s a cycle of emotional abuse wherein the daughter acts out because she’s being abused, and her older brother manipulates her into allowing her mother to do abusive things.

There’s also an implication that the girl was being raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Yet, she’s the one who is a slut and therefore they mutilate her genitals and shave her head to make her ugly. Then, they blame the government because they couldn’t get any help.

And somehow, they managed to convince a jury that it’s a matter of parental rights. Read an earlier story here.

-GhostGirl

I’m not quite sure how I feel about a church in Kentucky asking their congregation to write letters of love and support for Britney Spears.

On the one hand, she is one messed up girl and I feel more sad for her than anything. So do a lot of other people (like how I slipped in yet another Tori Amos reference there? Steph is going to KILL me one of these days if you all don’t do it first.) Writing letters of love for Brit is a good exercise in finding empathy for someone who isn’t exactly the easiest person to love right now.

But I’m not entirely certain if it’s a church’s place to provide such public loving care and support for a washed up celebrity misfit, no matter how in need of it she is. I can’t help thinking a better exercise might be for them to volunteer at a homeless shelter (lots of mentally ill people there) or create a mentorship program for young mothers. This just smells like a publicity stunt.

-GhostGirl

First, does anyone remember an Austin Powers movie with Fembots? Because I think that’s really where I first heard the term. The term is, however, being repurposed here on the Today Show in a non-story about ”fembots” . And, glory of glories, the story manages to conflate all of the following under the term “fembot”:

• women who don’t eat cupcakes;
• women who don’t have feelings;
• women who have careers;
• women who are confident; and
• women who are child free.

Yes, fembots. All of them. I’m sure you know a fembot or two.

Via Feministing

Once a disaster is starting to wind down, there comes the inevitable let down for the media. Everything turns from “OMG horrible things are happening” to “What else can we milk out of this?” And honestly, there is a little bit of a let down for the rest of us as well. The adrenaline stops pumping, we are free to think more seriously about what happened–and suddenly, we almost wish it would go back to the mind-numbing excitement.

But for every story about bureaucracy in in-action and rising death tolls, there are human interest stories that help give us a personal connection but more importantly, move the question from “Why?” to “What have we learned from this?” and “Am I the only one who is going through this?”

For one thing, we’ve learned that volunteerism can be an important factor in helping a community deal with grief. It’s a natural reaction to want to do something rather than sitting around feeling powerless. This time around, the opportunities for volunteerism led to a lot of creativity and perhaps even a little bit more understanding of the importance of distraction.

We’ve also learned that the feeling of powerlessness extends in all directions and that we have the means to provide comfort through technology. Just as on 9/11, when cell phone technology came to the forefront, technology is helping people far away  and not-so-far-away keep abreast of the situation. And during Hurricane Katrina, we saw that the loss of technology did serious damage to our ability to deal with the situation.

Post-disaster let down is actually a very normal reaction. Read more about how to deal with it here and here.

-GhostGirl

and I’ve run out of steam.

For a little work fun, consider taking the Organizational DNA quiz. It’s actually not bad in terms of looking at management practices. I particularly like the question on contradictory messages. Feel free to post your answers or favorite questions here.

A conference last week in Southern California brought together religious scholars to reconcile problematic texts in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These passages are often (infamously) used to disaparage the religions of others.

I’ve quoted the selections and paraphrased and quoted the commentary*:

Deuteronomy: For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples of the earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people.

Hebrew Scripture (Deuteronomy):  He [Rabbi Reuven Firestone, director of the Institute for the Study of Jewish-Muslim Interrelations at Hebrew Union College] believes the origin of “chosen-ness” stems from the structure of tribal religion in the ancient Middle East. “Each of Israel’s neighboring communities seems to have had its own ethnic or national God,” he said. Firestone said that all monotheistic traditions are confronted with the problem of chosen-ness and that “we all need to work through this absolutely basic notion in each of our religious systems.”

 New Testament (Mark): “Go into the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.”

Commentary on Mark: Rt. Rev. Alexei Smith, said that the troubling portion was appended a century after it was written — when the four Gospels were compiled. He said the longer ending, which added 12 verses, was written at a time when Christians either were questioning their faith in the resurrection of Jesus or defending it against skeptics and nonbelievers.

Koran (Chapter Five, v 51): “You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as allies: they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them — God does not guide such wrongdoers.”

Commentary on the Koran: And Muzammil H. Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh (Islamic Law) Council of North America said. “Some extremists among Muslims use this text to say that Muslims should not trust non-Muslims. Some Islam bashers use this text to claim that Islam is an unfriendly religion.” He said the verse was revealed to the prophet Muhammad after the Battle of Hadh, when Muslims of Medina were overwhelmed by a larger number of nonbelievers from Mecca. “After that, Muslims were very frightened,” he said. “Some, who were weak in their faith, said, ‘We are going to make alliance with Jewish people, in order to find protection there.’ Some said, ‘We are going to make alliance with Christians, so we’ll have protection there.’ ”

It seems to me this particular conference could use a lot more discussion in the public sphere.

*I’ve used the spellings (e.g., Koran) and labels (e.g., Hebrew Scripture) that the article used.

The idea that it would be better to dress as a vending machine than outrun pursuers on the street is so bizarre to me and illuminates how big some cultural differences are.

Work gets very little play in the arts. There are work poets (Tom Wayman), work TV shows (The Office, Ugly Betty), work novels (JPod) but in general, much of art seems to ignore the world of work, not entirely, but not in terms of the proportion of time we spend at work. So here’s a quick note about a film that takes place mostly at work.

Bubble is a quirky drama about three workers in a doll factory in a depressed Ohio town. The actors are all people from the community with no acting experience and there is no script, only an outline. Bubble is essentially a love triangle in which someone in the triangle ends up dead at the hands of another. And of course because it’s in a doll factory there are many disembodied dolls, which is oddly thrilling.

A very bizarre trailer here. The movie is much less bizarre.

Some years are just hard. 1992 was one of those years. I’ve written a lot about it, mostly in fiction, and I’m not going to write about it here. It was horrible. How I suffered.

2007 has set itself up similarly to 1992, but with an immensely different outcome that I’m trying to figure out. Work has been deathly slow until recently forcing us to make some hard choices. And then in August, I was hit by a giant pipe while driving down the 405. Then a miscarriage. And then the fires.

Here’s my insight—I may have turned a corner with my own relationship to suffering. All of those incidents hurt in one way or another. Being hit by a pipe was emotionally jolting, mostly. It felt like my own death could have been very close. Having another miscarriage was really disappointing. And the fires were just plain terrifying. But I don’t think I suffered as much as I would have at other points in my life.

I don’t have a conception that God acts personally in my own life. At least not in the sense that God threw a pipe at me to get my attention or took a fetus from me because I was bad or turned the fires away from our home because we prayed enough. I just can’t go that way theologically.

The big difference between 1992 and 2007 (other than 15 years) is that I didn’t expend that much energy wondering why this had happened to me. Why did a pipe hit me and the car next to me? Why did the fetus die? Why did the fires burn right up to our house and then stop? Why? I don’t know. I never will. Taking the why out of the equation seems to have made all the difference in how much I suffered. Not that there wasn’t pain. There was definitely the sensation of pain. But there wasn’t that prolonged excruciating whole body suffering that often accompanies pain.

Resources

The Problem of Pain and Suffering

Earlier this year, Jim and I decided to make gifts for each other’s birthdays. I made Jim an elaborate meal for his birthday. I don’t have any idea what he’ll do for mine. But it was satisfying to think that we didn’t need to go to Target in order to make each other happy.

I don’t buy a lot of Christmas gifts, but I’m going to do my best to buy handmade goods this season and I took the Handmade Pledge through Buy Handmade. Most of our friends are artists and artisans and I would much rather buy their stuff (or stuff from artists and artisans that I don’t know) than stuff made through questionable means in questionable conditions.

Buy Handmade is a consortium of crafts makers that you may have heard of, including Etsy, Craftster, Indiepublic, Craft:, Austin Craft Mafia, BurdaStyle, and Interweave.

Via Treehugger

This has been a scary week.

On Sunday, after 24 hours of high winds (and no electricity in our home), the so-called Buckweed Fire (What is buckweed, anyway?) burned right up to the edge of our neighborhood of 70 or so homes in Agua Dulce, California. We were protected by the firefighters on the ground as well as the Super Scooper airplanes in the sky that kept flying between the fire and the resevoir.

This is our roofline and trees, the plane above, and smoke below.

The neighborhood filled with smoke. Some people evacuated, especially if they had horses, but wasn’t especially clear what was going on. The fire didn’t have a name at this point, we didn’t know how close it was (and that it was literally directly behind us), there wasn’t any news coverage, and we weren’t told to evacuate.

And, yes, this photo of our street during the fire just looks like a bad day of smog.

Now, here is the disappointing part of this photo essay: I avoided walking right up to the fire to take photos of flames. I know that I’m not a great photographer and risking my life for yet another crappy photo seemed like a weak reason to die. So please assume that the fire burned all the backcountry behind us while we packed things to evacuate.  And waited. And waited. And then the firefighters left and we were alone in the smoke.

After the fire moved south to Canyon Country, and the men in the neighborhood went up to the top street and backcountry with shovels and began covering the embers with dirt so they wouldn’t fly onto homes. This is possibly the weirdest detail to the story because it demonstrates how few firefighters there were around and probably leads to my Malibu Resentment Complex. The firefighters that were here did a great job, but I really didn’t feel that the neighborhood should be smothering embers. And thus began the worst night of sleep of my life.

Today, Wednesday, four days later, I took some photos of the damage along the street that marks the northern boundary of our neighborhood. As of this morning, firefighters were still patrolling the street.

This is basically what the landscape looks like for miles and miles:

I found this partially melted privacy fence at the end of the road particularly sad.

Patches of homes survived, like these homes (though the one on the top left had its attic on fire on Sunday night, so I don’t know if it’s truly all right):

And then there is this home, which you can’t see, because it’s totally gone except for the chimney and surrounding trees. 

Ooof.

I think other homes were lost on this street, but I was beginning to feel like I was gawking so I turned around. As far as I know the Buckweed fire is now contained, although there are fires elsewhere in Santa Clarita, and we remain on high alert with firefighters patrolling the neighborhood and planes overhead.

Our dog, Mia, has placed herself under the kitchen table near our emergency evacuation supplies (a backpack of clothes, a briefcase for laptops, a crate of financial documents, a planner, and, of course, Mia). You have to love the German shepherd. Always on alert. Always prepared. Always ready for action.

There’s a phenomenon I have noticed since becoming a people manager five years ago that I am at a loss to explain. It happens in people below management level when they have to go to a meeting. I like to call it “Meeting Anxiety Disorder.”

It begins when I send out a meeting request and they accept. Within fifteen minutes, they will generally be at my desk confirming the meeting. “So we have a meeting, huh?”

One day before the meeting, they will be at my desk asking if they need to do anything for the meeting. Also they will ask me to check my own calender to confirm the day and time. They will ask me which conference room it is in, then seemingly contemplate their route as well as alternates, just in case.

On the morning of the meeting day, they will go through this same process all over again.

About an hour before the meeting, they will come by my desk again to let me know they are (going to the bathroom/cafeteria/working on a report/ready for the meeting.)

About ten minutes prior to the meeting, they will come to my desk and hang out until I am ready to head to the conference room with them.

This has happened in two separate companies with at least ten different people. It seems to be a universal trait with people who generally aren’t in meetings all day. It doesn’t matter if the meeting is about them, about a project they will be or are currently working on, or for planning a BBQ. Something about the fact that there is a meeting makes them nervous, afraid to miss it and unwilling to go in alone.

So I throw it out to you, dear reader: Have you ever felt or encountered this? Am I somehow generating undue meeting anxiety in the people I manage? What is it about meetings that is so stressful and how can it be alleviated? Is it simply because they are unused to meetings or is there something else going on?

-GhostGirl

I wrote a feature article, Finding Meaning in the Workplace, in the current issue of Science & Spirit. It’s not available on-line, which is unfortunate, but you could always buy it at a newstand or subscribe. It’s sort of an NPR-listener sort of magazine.

For the article, I had the opportunity to interview:

a.  Jordan Rosenfeld, author of Make a Scene and Write Free;

b. Doug Hicks, Presbyterian minister, associate professor at the University of Richmond, Pluralism Project affiliate, and author of Religion and the Workplace;

c. Lewis Richmond, Buddhist teacher (and former UU), software entrepreneur, and author of Work as a Spiritual Practice

In the article, I write about various definitions of spirituality and specific challenges of implementing spirituality in the workplace.

That “angry, negative, hateful, and ignorant jerk(s)” comment is from Sarah, quoted in Fires in Malibu ignite rage on the Web, regarding people who question allocation of media and fire fighting resources in Los Angeles County. I am generally-speaking probably “angry” on some issues, sometimes “negative,” I’m not so sure about “hateful,” but I am “ignorant” of many things. So there you go.

As you can see in the article, I was not the only person yesterday who noticed that it seems like Malibu gets tons of resources for recurrent problems and that firefighters seem to be spread a little thin elsewhere:

“Why are there enough fire assets to park a fire truck in every multi-million dollar, 10,000 sqft home in Malibu, but not enough fire fighters to save several neighborhoods in Canyon Country?” asked Mike in Northridge.

“When isn’t Malibu on Fire?” asked CaliforniaBeachGuy. “The City of Malibu and the County of Los Angeles have done absolutely nothing to deal with the brush all over the Malibu hills this year.”

The class issues in Southern California always loom just below the surface, but, if anything, I can say that there is definitely a sense in the community of being treated unfairly, not by individual firefighters, but by how the system has allocated resources.

And I would love to be proven wrong about that.