Surviving the Workday

  Starting here, what do you want to remember?
  How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
  What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
  sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
  than the breathing respect that you carry
  wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
  for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
  new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
  all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
  reading or hearing this, keep it for life ~

What can anyone give you greater than now,
  starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

- William Stafford

Via Heart Happy

Fun: A lot of re-hashers read this blog. Perhaps we should re-hash more. This one time, at band camp….

Letters: Ms. Theologian and others had opinions on consulting, rugelach, giving your boss gifts, and giving Christmas gifts to Jewish people. The consensus? Never bring give rugelach to your boss while consulting. (But, if you do, it’s a business expense.) We also read a Blackberry message, which gave considerable insight into working as an intern at Elle Magazine.

News: The slackism movement in the workplace is (possibly) growing led by one smug white guy, a study suggested that working part-time outside the home improved the happiness of moms, a reporter lost her job for barbecuing in a bikini with a potential subject of a story, and apparently women aren’t that funny. Who knew.

Notes: We pondered retention and generational issues and what to do with a growing business. And don’t forget that cats work too.

Religion: Peter Gomes talked about Jesus, blackness, gayness, and a lot more. If you aren’t familiar with Peter Gomes, he’s the chaplain at Harvard, and we’re always tempted to go lay down at his feet and go Christian by osmosis. Also, we’re read stories of the hajj.

Spirituality: It was extremely dark this week, and some of us spent quality time in bed, head under the covers moaning, when apparently we should have exposed ourselves to early morning light.

Tips: Tips for Surviving the Holidays got a lot of comments, particularly because some of these guides we included are a bit bizarre (and why is my house still dirty when I have friends? Yes? I read that tip), and tips for learning new technology also received a lot of comments from those in the techno-know. Presuming you’re celebrating Christmas, you’ll definitely want to read Tips to Ruin Your Holidays for some things to avoid.

Oh, and look, we’re on American Rights at Work. Because we think that Americans do have rights at work. Really. We swear. Despite what the corporate overlord says.

Dear Ms. Theologian,

Is it okay to give Christmas gift to a Jewish person?

-Wondering

Dear Wondering,

Ms. Theologian is going to take the liberty of reframing your question:

Is it okay to give a Christmas gift to someone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas?

Now, this is an interesting question, because, of course, it raises issues of giving: How is giving at Christmas a Christian act? Who does the gift benefit? the giver? the receiver? Is it the giving that is truly the important part, that is, the Christian part while receiving can be done by all?

Here is a simple rule: You can give a Christmas gift to someone who celebrates Christmas.

If that person is Jewish (or Muslim or Buddhist or Baha’i) and celebrates Christmas in a cultural context, then you can give a gift. But if that person is Jewish (or Muslim or Buddhist or Baha’i) and doesn’t celebrate Christmas in any sense, then Ms. Theologian suggests skipping the gift.

You can, of course, always give a gift at a different time of year. A January gift. A Valentine’s gift. Groundhog Day. Whatever. Gifts can be received year round, but when it is labeled as a Christmas gift and given to someone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, it comes off as theologically presumptuous.

-Ms. Theologian

P.S. If you’d like to write to Ms. Theologian, include a gift.

sent from a Blackberry no less.

On the one hand, the crimes as described are basic things that you’d hope interns would avoid (general truancy). On the other hand,  I always wondered who could afford extended unpaid internships in publishing (people who don’t need to work for money). Thus ends any snide commentary on unpaid publishing internships in Manhattan.

1. Be a writer on strike. You’re to blame for everything. Why can’t you just continue to churn out content without regard to how you’re paid? Honestly. Some people.

2. Have a heart attack, but ignore your symptoms. Apparently there is a death spike on Christmas and New Years because we don’t want to disrupt our holidays for an emergency room visit. Trust me—it disrupts the holiday more if you’re suddenly dead.

I’m not sure how I missed Working Class Cats, the cats of the bodegas of New York. These cats look like the hardest workers around.

As this article reads, a scientist rode around on his unicycle and noted that women made encouraging comments while men jeered.

 Often the men’s comments were mocking and intended as a put-down. Young men in cars were particularly aggressive - they lowered their windows and shouted abusively.

This type of behaviour decreased among older men however, who tended to offer more admiring comments, much like the women.

“The idea that unicycling is intrinsically funny does not explain the findings,” said Professor Shuster.

Huh? Unicycling is intrinsically funny? Men who mock and put down are funny? So humor must be testosterone-based?  I’m sure information is missing here as I’m not reading his actual research paper, but this is stupid on all sorts of levels beginning with using a response to a guy on a unicycle as a gauge of humor. I look forward to hearing more.

Via Feministing

I seem to be a generalist as far as types of worriers go (presuming I had to choose one of those options). Choose your worrying type at Stop Worrying and Start Living. Yes, it’s Martha Stewart. Gag a little. Then move on.

Muslim rite of sacrifice collides with law For Eid al-Adha, some Muslims kill an animal, have a feast, and give some of the meat to the poor (and some donate to charity rather than killing the animal). In North Carolina, the department of agriculture has alleged that the local source of the animals (no, not God), a guy named Eddie Rowe, is operating an illegal slaughterhouse by allowing the actual killing to occur on his land. There are also some issues on the “humaneness” of said slaughter. I stopped reading when twitching was mentioned as I also started to twitch thinking of throat slitting. Ooof.

The Safety Net Pulled Away  Debra Potter sold disability insurance and made a lot of money until  she was diagnosed with MS and actually had to use her own disability policy. Then she found her policy was virtually useless and she had no recourse due to a law called ERISA, which provides no consumer protection and takes away the ability to sue the insurer if they choose not to pay out on your policy. On a side note, she began selling insurance because her husband is a minister and they couldn’t afford to send their kids to college. Again. Ooof.

This story hasn’t been on my radar, so I’m not convinced this is a complete summary:

Amy Jacobson, a top-notch veteran reporter for NBC in Chicago, planned to take her kids swimming. At the last minute, she received a phone call from reclusive Craig Stebic, whose wife disappeared. He invited her to a last-minute barbecue. She attended, and wore a bikini. She was filmed by CBS in the bikini. She then lost her job. She remains unemployed in journalism.

A number of things aren’t clear, so I hope someone in Chicago can clear this up:

• Why did she lose her job?
• Why was she followed by CBS?

In Retention Troubles, David Robinson of Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, responds to a question on how to retain employees in their twenties who seem intent to move on after a few years.

How should businesses deal with recent college graduates who want to leave after just two or three years? In our retail chain, we have a large turnover in our management training program of people who we think are working out pretty well. When we’ve interviewed them to ask why they are leaving, they invariably tell us that our program has been good, but they just want to experience working at another firm.

There is no one who has a more difficult time getting re-hired than a mid-50s executive who has all his or her experience at once company. Workers in their 20s know this, and may have seen the devastation of long unemployment in a parent or close relative. Many career coaches advise recent college graduates to build their resumes by showing that they can adapt to different companies or different industries.

Robinson implies that generational differences are part of what motivates younger employees to change jobs. I’d be inclined to agree. Read the complete answer here.

Sally Quinn interviews Peter Gomes on Jesus, The Church, Communism, labels, and much more.

Hilarious: Possibly I should not be so delighted by the Sierra Club’s Holiday Survival Guide on how to talk to your family if you’re an environmentalist. Possibly it’s the dorky photographs. Possibly it’s the stereotypes. Possibly it’s just the lamest dialogue possible. Possibly I can talk Jim into acting out one of these scripts with me later.

Equally Enjoyable: 101 Appetizers in 20 minutes or Less. Let the 1970’s memories begin.

More Prosaic: 20 Tips for Holiday Survival on Medicine Net.

Training-oriented: Surviving the Holidays with Your Dog for people who forgot to train their dog earlier in the year

Made me snort outloud: Tips and Tricks for Surviving the Holidays (See Hate cleaning the house for company, invite a friend over to help. GhostGirl? Anne? My house is dirty.)

What do you do when your business grows?

You celebrate, yes. But you may also be faced with all sorts of administrative issues with scheduling, personnel, and bookkeeping challenges.

“It’s very common,” said Danika Davis, chief executive of the Northern California Human Resources Association. “You start with a vision, and then the business reaches a size where its organization and administration can mean success or failure. But often the entrepreneur with the vision isn’t the best-qualified person to put those structures in place.”

In Mind Your Business (scroll down to the second question), they discuss several opinions:

1. hiring a part-time or full-time employee (such as an administrator with bookkeeping skills) and 

2. hiring part-time contractors for the same services (administrative services, bookkeeping).

How you handle your growing business depends on what type of business it is and what would be of most help to you. And hiring someone to help you evaluate your needs isn’t a bad idea.

A survey in Great Britain suggests that partnered working moms are happier when they have a paid part-time job.

The Job Satisfaction and Family Happiness survey also found that job satisfaction for women with partners is greater when they work part-time, irrespective of how small or large these jobs are.

It points out that women overall may be working as many hours as men, when the time spent on household tasks like cooking and childcare is taken into account, but a smaller proportion of their time is spent in paid work.

The report says that more effort should be put into improving the quality of part-time jobs, where women often suffer career disadvantage.

And it argues that lowering the cost of child care would enable more women to work part-time, increasing their overall satisfaction.

And, of course, other research presents somewhat conflicting results:

Another report, conducted by the Centre for Policy Studies in 2003, said nearly half of working mothers would prefer to stay at home with their children if not for money worries.

And a 2006 government survey found that more mothers said the desire to spend more time with their children was stopping them from working longer hours.

Since I’ve presented the summaries, there is a lot of room for questioning here, but suffice it to so that one solution does not work for all and what many moms will say that they want are options and flexibility.

I know that I have a lot of peers in Generation X who remember being called Slackers by the (ahem) Baby Boomers or the (ahem) Greatest Generation. Yes, it didn’t matter that we graduated from college during a recession. And it didn’t matter that many of the only jobs available were low-wage service industry jobs that didn’t allow us to pay back our college loans. Get to work, slacker! *  **

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen points out in In Praise of Slacking that we haven’t been called slackers in a while. True that. But when you read enough generational differences in the workplace articles, you’ll see that the stereotype is still there in the “Generation X values their down time and weekends” as if that’s a bad thing. I do value my down time and I haven’t seen any in a while.

And then there is the Slackism movement, Cullen points out, which seems to be the evolution of the slacker stereotype in the corporate sphere. To subscribe to slackism is to understand that the corporate system is not going to reward you for hard work (and may just fire you).

 Resources
In Praise of Slacking

Slackism

*I actually heard that.

 ** And I do know that not all of Generation X is the same.

Dear Ms. Theologian,

So all boss gifting is bad?

-Already Gave a gift

(more…)

It’s not Friday, but there is a seasonal affective disorder quiz here. I can’t get it to work at the moment, possibly because the NYT linked to it.

More importantly, New research on seasonal affective disorder suggests that the timing of light exposure may be key (early morning is best). I’m going out to get my dose of sun (or sun through clouds as it seems today).

Dear Ms. Theologian,

My boss of nearly four years, a wonderful awesome person, is Jewish, and I’d like to make him some Rugelach for the holidays. But is that uncool? Is that overly religious?

-Wondering (more…)

How to Defang Scary Technology in the NY Times has some interesting tips for teaching and learning about technology in the workplace.  

Tip #1  Learn at the conceptual level (rather than the keystroke level).

I often find that some tech people simply won’t tell me what I’m doing at a conceptual level and will pass out keystroke instructions, which are immediately helpful in my short-term goal, but don’t deepen my understanding any way. Apparently they should not be doing this (though I completely understand why they do—because we, the learners, ask for it):

Fearful learners “want to have a piece of paper that tells them what buttons to push in what order,” she said. This leaves them unprepared for errors and impasses, which are inevitable.

So try to understand what you are doing conceptually before focusing on what to press or click.  

Tip #2  Create Analogies  To Anne P’s credit, she always creates analogies to explain technology to me (often they involve food of some sort….), and that’s apparently ideal (the analogies, not the food):

A good teacher creates analogies that make it easier for nontechnical thinkers to understand how a system works — for example, by comparing a hard drive to a filing cabinet, and directories to the drawers of the cabinet, she said.

So try to think of analogies that make sense to you as you learn or ask for analogies, if at all possible.

Resource

How to Defang Scary Technology