Surviving the Workday

This weekend, my parents emailed to say they have made reservations for us to spend a week at the beach in March. I nearly jumped for joy, and had to fight the urge to start making packing lists and looking at maps for the best route to drive. Clearly it has been too long since our last vacation - it will have been almost 2 years.

Why does a yearly vacation feel so essential to me? Is it just a habit, because my family always took a summer vacation? My husband didn’t have regular vacations for most of his pre-me adult life - partly for financial/job reasons (most of his jobs weren’t the sort to offer many vacation days) and partly, I think, because his family never took many trips when he was growing up, so he didn’t expect it (though he’s quite into the idea now).

I find vacations to be very renewing, even when they are not entirely relaxing. It’s like the train of my life is picked up and dropped onto a different track for a week or two. Which is not to say that I go wild in Vegas or whatever. It’s just… ahhhhh. Not only is it a break from work, but also from the rest of daily life. Taking time off to stay at home isn’t the same.

Some folks I know are not into vacations - they don’t like to travel. Do they get this sense of relief and change of pace from something else? Or do they just not need it?

–Anne P

Granta Publishing’s “What Do We Believe?” series attempts to explain various religions in 100 pages or less. So far, they run the gamut from Christians to Pagans (with Hindus and Catholics soon to come.)

Says editor George Miller, who conceived of the series:

From the start, the brief to the authors was to explain rather than seek to convert. We told them that we didn’t want neatly packaged solutions to difficult issues where none existed.

This sounds like a great way to teach kids about world religions. The books are published by Walker & Company in North America and some at least seem to be available on Amazon.

Read a little more about these books here on the British publisher’s website.

-GhostGirl

I realize that making an issue of media coverage of fires into a class issue may be misplaced (and tacky), but I can’t help it. It’s not really that a fire surrounding our tiny rural neighborhood of old shacks is newsworthy in and of itself. We saw KCAL yesterday; we ran in the other direction to avoid questions like, “How do you feel seeing a giant brush fire approach your home?” So the media were here. Briefly.

But I’d really like not to hear about Malibu’s Canyon fire as if the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

 As of Google Maps:

Canyon Fire (Malibu) burned 2400 acres and destroyed 5 homes + 2 other structures. It’s a small fire that affects a rather elite group of people.

The Ranch Fire (Santa Clarita) burned 29,000 acres and the Buckweed Fire (also Santa Clarita) burned 35,000 acres and 25 structures (including homes). There are 15,000 people evacuated in Santa Clarita (population roughly 150,000) alone. (Not to mention a quarter of a million people evacuated from San Diego. I’d be quite willing to hear more about this). These are huge fires that affect middle class people. It is a state of emergency here in Santa Clarita. It’s actually a state of emergency in much of Southern California.

And all the media coverage that I’ve seen today is heavily weighted in favor of the Malibu fire as if what happens to rich people is simply more important than everyone else.

I can’t express how scary last night was: gale force winds that seemed to be lifting the roof off, the power flickering off and on
after being out for 24 hours, and the on-going threat of having to evacuate.

Yesterday, a brush fire (now named the Buckweed Fire) started in the area in which I hike every morning, part of Agua Dulce, California. We saw the smoke behind our home, Jim drove around to investigate, we heard sirens and then planes started dumping water right behind our neighborhood. I put all our evacuation gear (financial records and laptops mostly along with changes of clothes and dog food) out on the bed to organize it, and then later moved it to the front door.

The fire burned through the backcountry and through some neighbors’ homes  behind us, the firefighters protected the rest of our neighborhood, and then the fire moved on (and is now all over Santa Clarita in like eleven different fires), and all the neighborhood men covered the embers with dirt.

Some of us are dirty and tired. Some of us are just tired. All of us would like the wind to stop.

Meanwhile, I’m going to try to do some work while the power is on.

This one’s a little weird: it seems that there were rumors going around that Christian groups in Australia were stacking the votes for the more overtly religious contestants on Australian Idol. So what did the producers do?

They banned all discussion of religion during interviews.

Although no wrongdoing has been proved (most Idol contestants have huge communities supporting them, whether it be a country town or a church community) television chiefs are concerned about the effect of the stories on the “street cred” of the show.

Meanwhile,  here in America, our Christian groups debate whether or not someone is Christian enough for their vote.

I think I need some ice cream.

-GhostGirl

On Monday, I invoked the twin taboos of sex and death by mentioning I had a miscarriage (or two) and asked GhostGirl (who posts with a cat photo) and Anne P (who posts with a circle sculpture photo) to write in my place as I felt bereft and wordless. Thank you to everyone who wrote or prayed. You were generous, and I appreciate that a lot.

Ghostgirl, who also blogs on her own blog here, referred you to job sites for older workers, explored altruism leading to firing in the workplace, outsourcing of outsourcing (potentially leading to more outsourcing), the poor middle class, and the idea of being a recovering Christian. Anne P, who has her own blog (but I’m not sure if I should link to it or not so she can edit this), talked about trying something new every day (or not) and how the workplace treats grief in general and specifically.

My first post after a brief hiatus was simply the world’s worst job advertisement, which GhostGirl suggested may be a spoof, but I fear it’s actually legitimate. I then wrote about labyrinths and grief, working in animal shelters having the potential to turn you into a self-righteous tyrant by constantly seeing the negative side of human nature, telecommuting news, and workplace fashion fiascos. I also posted a really great poem, Misery and Splendor, but no one commented. My analysis? a. perhaps because it’s a poem; b. perhaps because it’s vaguely about sex (there’s that taboo again); c. perhaps because it’s a poem.

My husband and I used to live near the Bay Area. A recent article in the San Francisco Examiner explains one reason why we left. We were working fifty plus hours per week, bringing home twice as much as we made working retail, and we still could never afford to buy a even a small house.

A family of four has to earn over $77k per year, and that is up about 10% from two years ago:

The federal poverty threshold, used by the government to calculate how many of the nation’s people are poor, is an income of $20,650 for a family of four. That means basic necessities in the Bay Area cost roughly 2.5 times the federal poverty level.

But it isn’t just the Bay Area that is feeling the pinch. People who used to be considered middle-income are now having to rely on food pantries to make it through the month.

What this means is that people have less time, energy, and money for the things that make life more fulfilling. They can’t even afford to move out of the area that is killing them financially (we’re still paying off the credit card debt from ours two years ago.)

Check out a Cost of Living calculator here. If we still lived in California, we would have to earn 11-13%/year more in combined income to maintain the same lifestyle.

-GhostGirl

School sexual misconduct reeks of many of the same issues of clergy sexual misconduct: gross power inequities, administrative cover ups, lack of legal prosecution, and long-term emotional (not to mention spiritual) reprecussions. A few examples:

- Joseph E. Hayes, a former principal in East St. Louis, Ill. DNA evidence in a civil case determined that he impregnated a 14-year-old student. Never charged criminally, his license was suspended in 2003. He has ignored an order to surrender it permanently.

- Donald M. Landrum, a high school teacher in Polk County, N.C. His bosses warned him not to meet with female students behind closed doors. They put a glass window in his office door, but Landrum papered over it. Police later found pornography and condoms in his office and alleged that he was about to have sex with a female student. His license was revoked in 2005.

- Rebecca A. Boicelli, a former teacher in Redwood City, Calif. She conceived a child with a 16-year-old former student then went on maternity leave in 2004 while police investigated. She was hired to teach in a nearby school district; board members said police hadn’t told them about the investigation.

School sexual misconduct seems rarely reported, rarely investigated, and the abuser is rarely brought to justice. The statistics from a recent government report are shocking: 4.5 million kids of 50 million in U.S. public schools are subjected to sexual misconduct during their K-12 years. Yikes.

In my first blog post, I mentioned that I consider myself a “Recovering Christian.” That rubbed a few people the wrong way, so I clarified in the comments section. Steph says she’s interested in hearing more on this topic, so here goes.

In my initial comments I wrote:

Remember that to recover can mean “get or find back; recover the use of” and in fact that is the first definition of the word… To me it indicates that I am recovering my faith. I am learning not to blame God for human actions… “Former” would indicate I have no ties to Christianity and that simply is not true. But, I cannot bring myself to identify myself as Christian because that was a world of hurt for me.

There are other labels people use to describe separation from a church or creed—lapsed Catholic is the big one (apparently, recovering Catholic is also used.) There are the prefixes “ex-” or “former-,” or even “apostate.” It’s not like leaving a faith is particularly unusual.

The thing about losing one’s religion is that it’s not a sudden thing. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide, I think I’ll stop believing in God today. And the hard thing for me was that I didn’t stop believing in God. I just didn’t like Him much anymore. I didn’t care for His followers–our church had some seriously crazy things going on, and that eventually led my father to take our business elsewhere. We started attending a Lutheran church–his home faith–and I just couldn’t stand the meaningless ritual responses. Church had already been empty for me, and I could no longer fill it from within myself.

So, I stopped going to church. I stopped praying. It felt like a burden had been lifted. My father despaired, blamed my World Religions college course (which Steph encouraged me to take.) He said, “Don’t blame God for what humans do in His name.” What he didn’t understand was, my pulling away from the church was exactly my attempt at doing that. I couldn’t go to church anymore because it was getting in the way of God.

But, because of my upbringing, I can’t stop referring to the higher powers I believe in as anything but “God” and “Jesus.” God is the cranky old man who is a bit like my own dad (we’ll save that Freudian analysis for another day), and is really, really hard to talk to. Jesus is my buddy, the one I talk to when I’ve had a bad day and my grandma’s spirit isn’t there to consult with.

I’ve had a really hard time with calling myself ex-, or lapsed, or former-, because my Christian background is still there with a vengeance. But, I can’t call myself “Christian”–it has too many connotations to the outside world, as well. “Recovering Christian” seems to combine my need to keep a tie to the religion of my childhood, with the idea that I am taking back a part of it for myself.

There seems to be a basic human need to label oneself. It creates a sense of belonging, of identity. In fact, I lifted my label from someone else who has just as much trouble with established religion as I do. Whether Quaker (as I seem to be turning out to be), or UU, or Lapsed Catholic, we tie our past and our present together with words that define us to ourselves and the outside world. And, when there are misunderstandings, or lack of knowledge, about a label, it gives us the opportunity to share that part of ourselves with others.

-GhostGirl

I can breathe a sigh of relief that my fashion choices for the last week have not been documented to the best of my knowledge (since I’m working at home) and can’t be submitted to the Boston Globe’s Workplace Fashion Fiasco.

If you saw the footage of Ellen crying about her interactions with a dog rescue organization, you probably wondered what was really going on. I certainly did. Why so upset? Ellen, the dog bullies, and me is an essay by Heather Havrilesky about her own relationship with dog rescue organizations in Los Angeles:

But when I happened to catch Ellen weeping into her hands on Tuesday, I knew exactly how she felt. My personal adventures with the dog rescue organizations of greater Los Angeles have led me to believe that such shelters are often run by the kinds of people who don’t know how to play nicely with others. Fueled by truly awful firsthand accounts of animal abuse and abandonment and horrified countless times by owners who move or change their minds and drop their doggies off to die alone at the pound, these charitable souls gradually develop into self-righteous mouth breathers and priggish control freaks.

I fear that one of the challenges of working for a long period of time with an organization that sees the really negative side of human nature is that it can have a detrimental effect on your own interactions. You tend to see evil where there is only hesitation or apprehension or just plain goodness. That’s part of what’s going on. Another part is that many folks would like to see celebrities follow the rules some of the time. (Of course, part of what makes them celebrities is that they can break the rules). Perhaps this is a separate post.

I read the poem below on Cathy’s Heart Happy blog. I met Cathy at Squaw this summer through Jane, my Squaw roommate. Cathy and Jane have written a book together about surviving breast cancer, based on entries in Cathy’s blog and Jane’s poems.

The poem Cathy chose for today is by Bob Hass, who was on the faculty of Squaw, and, of course, former poet laureate. It is only about work in the broadest sense, but it just slays me.

Misery and Splendor
Robert Hass

Summoned by conscious recollection, she
would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,
before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,
the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch
embracing. He holds her as tightly
as he can, she buries herself in his body.
Morning, maybe it is evening, light
is flowing through the room. Outside,
the day is slowly succeeded by night,
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly
and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room
does not change, so it is plain what is happening.
They are trying to become one creature,
and something will not have it. They are tender
with each other, afraid
their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment
when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,
their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.
They feel themselves at the center of a powerful
and baffled will. They feel
they are an almost animal,
washed up on the shore of a world—
or huddled against the gate of a garden—
to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted.
Via Heart Happy

An Ohio woman had a public labyrinth constructed in her backyard in order to deal with the grief brought on by the loss of her parents. Having strangers circling through my backyard doesn’t seem like it would be comforting to me, but it’s clearly worked for her. Such is the individualization of grief, I think.

If you have any gestures that you’ve done to deal with grief, I would be interested in hearing them. Comments are on.

Resource

The Labyrinth Society

Treehugger is discussing the green benefits of telecommuting, and the comments are especially interesting. I wrote a while ago about the pros and cons of telecommuting based on my own experience. I’ve telecommuted for two employers, both of which I worked for in person for more than a year first, which I think is the key to getting your employer to let you telecommute. They have to trust you and your work habits.

Turns out that when you start outsourcing your crappy jobs, pretty soon those countries you’re outsourcing to start to realize how crappy those jobs are, and they start refusing to do them too.

In India’s Call Centers Go Begging, Time Magazine discusses what happens when a workforce, energized by new opportunities given by economic prosperity, stops doing the jobs that provided that prosperity in the first place:

The complaints come at a time when the Indian information technology sector, which includes companies that run call centers and do other outsourced work like medical transcription and claims processing, is facing a dearth of skilled labor. Many are opening back offices in other developing countries. India faces a potential shortage of 500,000 professional employees in the information technology sector by 2010, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), a trade group.

Graduating students are refusing to do these jobs because they can find more fulfilling (and less soul-destroying) work elsewhere for the same pay.  Why do I get a strange feeling that pretty soon, this will all be outsourced back to Americans?

-GhostGirl

 It’s becoming an epidemic. First, a Fort Lauderdale waiter was fired after he left in the middle of his shift to help a woman who was being carjacked.

And now, a bank teller in New Jersey was told he must quit his job if he wanted to accept the $10,000 reward for helping catch a serial bank robber.

I understand the business’s position. When I worked retail, we weren’t supposed to chase down shoplifters. There are liability issues, and a worker’s safety is more important than money.

In the first case, the guy actually spent over an hour talking to the police (and the media.) When you’re in the middle of a shift, that can be a big problem for the employees who are left holding the bag.

In the second case, it was pretty dangerous to follow a suspect in 19 bank robberies. BofA can’t go around encouraging its employees to do things like that.

But there’s got to be a happy median. For one thing, it’s bad publicity, and it’s bad employee relations. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to actively discourage helping others. This seems to happen a lot.

-GhostGirl

And no salary is probably enough….

From Craig’s List  
Entertainment Public Relations Assistant

Date: 2007-10-16, 12:30PM PDT

BEFORE YOU READ: You MUST live in the Los Angeles area NOW! Offices are in West Hollywood/Beverly Hills.

THE POSITION: Need to hire very personable, outgoing, freindly [sic] and very intelligent, public relations assistant/receptionist to work for the owner and account executives of a medium size celebrity/entertainent, hip, young PR company/agency in West Hollywood who is amazing with people and more amazing on phones. Must be able to do 100 things at the same time, if not more, handle a very busy schedule efficiently, master heavy calls and call logs, juggle countless invitations and premiere listings and be amazing on the phones, etc. It’s an overwhelmingly busy, REALLY DEMANDING, hectic atmosphere!!! Did I mention it is a busy place???? Last 5 assistants could not handle the pressure. Hours are long plus weekends and nights to cover red carpets and events. If you are not serious about a life in publicity with actors and celebrities, this is not the job for you!!!!! The up side? Huge room for growth!

PLEASE REREAD THIS AD BEFORE APPLYING!! THE JOB IS ONLY FOR HIGH ENERGY, EXTREMELY HARD WORKING, SMART APPLICANTS! Please submit cover letter as to why you want the job as well as your resume.

A 29-year old woman has decided to see out her third decade of life by doing something new every day for the whole year. Some of the things are more challenging than others, but really, how big a “new thing” can you manage every day and still keep your day job?

This struck a chord with me because I’m feeling less than innovative these days. There are good reasons for this, primarily the all-consuming force that is a crawling infant, not to mention the full time employment. Doing something new every day is probably beyond me at this point, given that just thinking up manageable new things seems impossible. Heck, I’m nearly a month behind in reading the daily comics in the newspaper.

I am trying to reclaim a bit of “me time”, though, if only in my head so far. You’ve heard the phrase “if mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy”? I believe this applies not only to mama, but also to daddy, and to a lesser extent to coworker and boss as well - anyone with whom you spend a lot of time in close quarters. Grouchiness and slide-with-the-minimum are definitely contagious in the workplace just like at home. In both places, injecting some variety and novelty can make a difference.

– Anne P

 There has been a lot of news recently about the aging workforce and the difficulty of finding jobs. US News and World Report has a list of job sites that cater to older workers.

Or, alternatively, you could just start your own web site for older job seekers and kill two birds with one stone.

-GhostGirl

 Hello, Guest Blogger GhostGirl here. I’m the “former-Christian” of the previous post, but I prefer Recovering Christian. It’s much more hopeful, and indicates that something can be salvaged. I’ve known Steph since day one of high school. My father doesn’t realize it’s her fault I stopped going to church.

A while back I read about A.J. Jacobs and his Year of Living Biblically. The same guy wrote, “I Think You’re Fat,” in which he explores the concept of Radical Honesty.

Radical Honesty involves telling the truth. The plain, unvarnished truth, no matter how hurtful. The idea is that if you peel off all those layers, you have a more honest relationship with people. So here’s a truth: I think the guy who came up with this idea is a bit of an insensitive crackpot, but he does have a point.

For Jacobs, it was both liberating and frightening, but like anything else you can take to excess, he found the need to temper it with empathy. I could tell a person I manage that she drives me stark raving mad and if she sends me one more “thank you!!!!” email I will take her multiple exclamation points and… Or I can just delete the emails and tell her in her review that I admire her enthusiasm, which is true, and then coach her in her communication skills.

A better plan (and one in keeping with recent posts) is Radical Authenticity. Because isn’t that what he’s really trying to get at? You can fake your way through a situation, but you shouldn’t fake your way through a relationship. Radical Honesty sounds like regressing back to four years old, before you have learned about hurting other people’s feelings. Radical Authenticity would be moving past the selfish need to spew out every thought and into a way of relating that is thoughtful and based on necessary truths, not  unnecessary unloading.

Besides, telling a woman at work that you have been staring at her boobs and want to sleep with her is not radically honest, it’s radically stupid and can get you fired.

-GhostGirl

First, a brief introduction: I am Anne P, and my qualifications to write on this blog are 1) I work and must survive it and 2) I have been friends with the editor since we were trapped together in a college class on mineralogy. Not much to go on, but I’ll do my best.

Ms. Theologian has previously addressed some facets of grief: funeral attendance by the boss and the stages of grief. As a work-from-home freelancer, she did not have to face any curious coworkers this morning, and will not have a fixed policy to follow/fight for time off to grieve. (Note that this doesn’t mean she won’t have to discuss with her clients her emotional state and its effect on her ability to work.)

My employer (private, non-profit, education field) has very specific official rules for funeral and bereavement leave: from 1 to 5 days (with pay) for different categories of relatives. And you might be asked to prove that you were related to the deceased. However, they also like to be friendly (and generally succeed), so requests for additional leave “will usually be granted within reason” - and can be paid if you have vacation or sick time available to use. There is no mention of miscarriage, which does not surprise me.

Our department also has a specific policy about how the department will officially acknowledge life events - some things for some people qualify for flowers, others just a card. I found it hilarious when I first saw it - in a slightly twisted way, like reading in the Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance how much each part of your body is worth - but sadly I cannot lay hands on it at the moment. But I know it didn’t have miscarriage mentioned either. When a coworker suffered a miscarriage several years back (before this policy existed), I had to take the initiative to make sure “we” sent her flowers; it didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone else.

So I would like to ask you:

1. What are the official and unofficial grief policies where you work?
2. Does anybody have any policies that mention miscarriage?

– Anne P