The LA Times has a series of stories on Southern California Muslim pilgrims on the hajj: Mecca, by way of Costa Mesa. The hajj or pilgrimage is the fifth pillar of Islam.
Resource
The Hajj Portal
I huddled under the covers this morning waiting for the sun to rise (or for the house to warm) and determined two things while huddled: 1. This is the darkest week of the year. 2. Part of the trouble getting up in the morning is that once I get up, everything gets a little bit worse for a moment: the floor is cold, washing my face, brushing my teeth, and changing clothes makes me cold, and later, hiking the dog when it’s 30 degrees makes me cold. None of this is particularly nurturing or soothing even though it’s necessary, and in the case of the hike, healthy.
Here’s a few self-soothing tips for work adapted from the resources below:
Any other ideas for self-soothing?
Resources
Dear Ms. Theologian,
I am quitting my job of five years to pursue PhD studies and teaching. The company has been great to me, very flexible with my schedule, but it’s time to focus more on my schoolwork. But when I gave them my notice today, the idea of consulting work was brought up. I create Visual Basic macros that interact between Excel and a mainframe, and do a variety of other technical-type stufff. I was told it would be great if I could come up with “some kind of agreement” that lets them know when they could ask for my assistance.
I’ve never done consulting work before, and don’t know what I should stipulate–would they reimburse me for the mileage in my commute (that’s much of the reason I’m leaving!)? Should I be asking for the same amount of money they’ve been paying me? I’ve found a few contracts online, but I’m not sure what I need to have in writing.
Ideas? (I don’t want to get sucked into working more for them than is convenient for me–but I do enjoy the work, in small doses).
Thanks!
-Future Consultant (more…)
Ethical Consuming: Greenness is next to Godliness, which raised some interesting issues about zealotry (of the green and religious varieties), I think.
Letters: Ms. Theologian critiqued the culture of overtime, particularly in nonprofits, fears she was too harsh, and has begun self-flagellation.
News: Workers’ rights in the United States are at a low point, not the low point, but certainly a low point. And seeminly unrelated to that point (perhaps right to the point), certain white collar offices are redefining white space to mean larger shared creative workspaces in order to bring us from our cubes and away from assigned seating. There is an overlap between the fastest growing professions and those that are linked to depression (Please take a deep breath and evaluate all options before becoming a health care aide. Seriously. Ms. Theologian says this as someone who has provided those sorts of personal services. It is very hard to survive those work days).
Notes: And, GhostGirl really doesn’t like the November-December holidays juxtaposed interestingly to dogs can make a workplace a lot happier (but would they make GhostGirl happier about the holidays?). We shared strategies for dealing with coworker-peddlers in the office, the office potluck, WebEx, and considered what happens when the entrance exam for a profession involves a 97% failure rate.
Religion: A lively hour discussion with noted authors about How Can We Discuss Religion at Work? is highly recommended if you are trapped inside during a snow storm. It includes Doug Hicks, who I interviewed for an article in Science & Spirit.
Can we stand another post about how much GhostGirl hates the holidays? Probably not, but I’m gonna do it anyway.
Right around the time I moved to Santa Cruz with my husband, I realized just how much I had begun to hate the holidays. They now involved travel of some sort, often on a plane. They involved compromise, as we spent a lot of time and effort making sure that neither set of parents had cause to be jealous of the other (didn’t work, why are we even bothering?)
They also involved a lot of frantic shopping as my husband’s family added a considerable bulk to my Christmas list (I was an only child. He has four siblings.) As I moved into a professional arena and out of retail, it suddenly became all about parties and potlucks at work. Oddly, I missed the adrenaline rush of the retail madness–the feeling of helping someone find just the right gifts, the utter chaos in which I had to juggle dozens of customers while helping a team of inexperienced clerks, and the wrung out feeling of relief when the day was over.
And it has only gotten worse as we get older. Now that we live on the East Coast, we have to travel the other direction. My parents have become more jealous, more lonely. Meanwhile, Hubby’s family feels like they can command more of our time and we have a whole new round of activities to deal with.
The shopping has gotten worse as three of the four siblings are now married and there are now four small children to buy things for–the Christmas list has more than doubled in size.
I’m now a manager in a professional setting, so there are five more people to buy little gifties for. My adrenaline rush at work is all about making sure data gets out the door before the end of the year, while trying to figure out how to work around the fact that 3/5th of my team is on vacation. I belong to two different departments so there are twice as many Christmas potlucks to contend with.
I have moved from thinking of the holidays as inconvenient and annoying, to becoming a furious, bitter, seething bitch from the night before Thanksgiving until the day after Christmas. This is more than just being sick of the holidays. Some days the littlest thing, like having a bit of a draft coming in through the window, is enough to make me want to explode with rage. I feel out of control at times. I find myself saying snappish things to people who don’t deserve it. I have a hard time letting go.
I know that steps need to be taken to cut out some of the bullshit. Believe me, we have made quite a few of them. For instance, we are NOT going to go make cookies with his mom three times in one week this year. We are flying back early from California in order to have a five day weekend to ourselves. I do all my shopping on Amazon (Don’t even try to tell me to buy handmade. We tried it one year. It failed. I don’t want to talk about it.) We went back to buying books for the kids after a digression into toys. Finding old favorites to share was a pleasure.
Just realizing what we have cut out actually makes me feel better. Next year, we’ll have to cut even more. I bet I can get a good rush out of that.
You can read three success stories of dogs in the workplace in Where Water Cooler Talk Is About the Water Bowl.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released a report of the projected 30 fastest growing professions . Here are the top five:
It’s worth noting that 2 and 3 are among the professions with highest rates of depression in the United States.
Resources
Employment Projections
One of the consequences of mergers, acquisitions, and layoffs is there are a fair number of jobs like this. That is one weird job. It’s really three jobs with separate skill sets combined for one disparate position: production manager, editor, and graphic designer. I haven’t seen any articles on this phenomenon, but I’ve seen it more and more when I read job advertisements.
Dear Ms. Theologian,
I have just finished grad school with an MDiv and am sending resumes out into the world like mad. I was thrilled yesterday to have a wonderful interview with a major activism/advocacy organization, and I’m excited about the possibility of working for them. The job seems to be right in the middle of my skills, my experience, and my passions.
There’s just one catch. When I asked the interviewer (my would-be boss) about the day-to-day work environment at this organization, he informed me that his “team” tends to work a lot of nights and weekends. As a parent of four children (ages three to eight), the prospect of being away from home so much–on the heels of working full time and going to school full time for three years–is definitely not something I would look forward to. I really feel like it’s time for me to give a little back to my family.
Based on how well the interview went, I feel confident I’ll be invited to this organization’s headquarters for a follow-up interview. Do you have any advice on how to deal with my concerns?
Thanks so much,
-Hesitant to work weekends
I’m listening to a discussion on Your Call: How Can You Talk about Religion at Work? Lots of great discussion here on issues like:
You won’t find me in my office, I’m working reports on a supposed trend in workspace use toward the elimination of cubicles and assigned seating and creation of more communal spaces, in which people can be more creative and sort of lounge around. I recall the same trend during the Internet Boom of the late 1990s, but I’m not surprised it’s back. The cubicle can be a terrible place to work. It’s one of those systems that may be seemingly efficient, but quite possibly kills the urge to work.
I’m going to hypothesize that one of the reasons this is a stressful time of year (for some of us, anyway) is that the expectations for us in the workplace and at home increase many times over normal levels. And these expectations don’t necessarily increase all at once, but bit by bit until we break: a recipe that has to be typed out and emailed immediately, a bill that has to be submitted with special secret codes, a year end budget due by the 21st before a vacation, an extra trip to the grocery store for ingredients for a potluck dish, etc.
So, today, I’m going to document on a 3 x 5 card the increasing expectations in whatever form they occur. If you’re so inclined, you can do the same, and list in comments if you wish. Perhaps there aren’t as many increasing expectations as I think there may be. Perhaps there are more.
This is apparently the legal edition of the Spirituality at Work Roundup.
Fourth Amendment I’ve read a fair amount about violations of the fourth amendment related to immigration raids of late. The articles I’ve read report experiences similar to this one:
“I was interrogated and detained for hours just because federal agents thought I was breaking immigration laws,” said Pasqual Talamantes, a UFCW meatpacking worker from Grand Island,
Neb. “They were handcuffing us and holding guns. I told them I was a citizen, born here in the United States, and they did not believe me.”
Bosses Can Sue Workers The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in favor of an employer who had sued a former employee. It gets fairly confusing in a “who sued whom?” way, so I’ll quote the summary:
In 1998, Cleveland resident Tammy Greer-Burger filed a sexual harassment suit against Laszlo Temesi, her former employer. The jury ruled in favor of Temesi, who turned around and filed suit against Greer-Burger to recover his costs defending the sexual harassment suit and for punitive damages for “malicious prosecution.”
Think of how the threat of being sued by your employer might stop you from reporting discrimination.
Counter-Regulatory Regulators It’s not a good time for workers’ rights (see above and the difficulty of making the Employee Free Choice Act, which would guarantee that workers have the right to form a union, into a law) and much of that has to do with counter-regulatory regulators in charge.
We’ve had a series of behind-the-scenes conversations here about the Workplace Potluck, some of which should be shared.
1. GhostGirl brings up the larger issue of Potlucks in Culture (see right column) as discussed by Miss Manners, who, generally speaking, does not like them because they place the burden of food (and service for that matter) on the guests. This doesn’t mean we can’t eat together or bring food necessarily; it’s more a statement on trends in dining as far as I can see.
(more…)
Ideally, we seek out mentors for the fields that we want to work in, and cultivate a relationship with them. But, of course, it doesn’t always work that way. Often mentors are hard to find. Sometimes mentors clash with potential mentees. Sometimes mentors just aren’t interested in mentoring.
Dipping a Toe into a New Career describes the adventures of a customer of Vocation Vacations, a service that allows customers to spend a few days in a potential career with a mentor of sorts:
Prospective clients contact Brian Kurth, the founder and president of Vocation Vacations, with their fantasies.
They tell him they want to be a sports announcer, a brew master or an innkeeper, for example; then he sets them up to shadow a professional in that field for an average of two to three days, from a list including more than 130 professionals in 70-plus lines of endeavor.
Most test drives cost between $349 — that’s for one day with an animal therapist in West Palm Beach, Fla., or with a cheese maker in Seattle — and $2,000.
It’s not the same experience as cultivating a mentor in your current field, but it does seem like a way to explore new careers and make contacts that wouldn’t ordinarily be available to you. And guess what career the customer in Dipping a Toe into a New Career explores? Wine making. Clearly I have wine on the brain.
So you want to be a sommelier? looks at the great numbers of people studying to be sommeliers, and not just ordinary sommeliers, but master sommeliers, who have to pass a test with a 97% failure rate.
The evolution of a serious regional wine culture relies on senior sommeliers willing to teach those less experienced. An entry-level course with 40 students at Disneyland’s Napa Rose restaurant looks ultra-democratic. But the highly politicized Court of Master Sommeliers invites just some students, not all, to advance through the process. Even then, the London-based organization’s final exam has a 97% failure rate.
I blame Sideways for the number of us who think we know something about wine. Part of me thinks that trying to pass a test with a 97% failure rate would be just up my alley. (Another part foresees a lot of hangovers if I pursue this career path.) In any case, it sounds like the primary reason for failure on the test is that you have to guess the region, varietal, and vintage of a wine in a blind tasting, as well as come up with rationale for each choice. That’s sort of insane.
Setting my own private wine fantasy aside (and how I would have to create an Excel spreadsheet to record all wine tasted), consider what happens in a profession when you make the membership requirements so strict that only 3% of those invited to test will pass. You boost the perceived exclusiveness of the profession (as well as the salaries of those who pass the test for membership).
When a colleague sells cookies details the dilemmas we face when colleagues sell cookies, candy, wreaths and more at work:
Since when did the office become a peddlers bazaar?
The guy in the next cubicle is pushing wrapping paper to fund his kid’s school. A friend in accounting asked you to sponsor her 5K run for leukemia research. Holiday wreaths are for sale in the cafeteria, with proceeds going to a local homeless shelter.
‘Tis the season for giving. And for asking: How do you fend off the annual onslaught of office hawkers without being labeled a Scrooge?
Say yes. Say no. But either way there are consequences.
We talked a little about the trouble with videoconferencing in the workplace. So what about Web Ex? I use this service all the time. It allows me to share my desktop (or to view the desktop of others) with people with whom I’m on a conference call. It’s decent for long-distance training of others though unlike video conferencing it does not allow for live video.
Do you use this? Or something similar? Is this a substitute for video conferencing because it’s easier to use?
Harvard has revamped its financial aid policies substantially in the past five years. In the latest change, families that earn $120,000 to $180,000 will only pay 10% of their yearly incomes for Harvard. This particular income bracket is labeled “upper middle class” by the New York Times.
Hmm.
Previously changes to financial aid include waiving tuition for families with incomes under $40,000, and later, under $60,000.
Hmm.
I have to say that given the size of Harvard’s endowment, I think Harvard could revolutionize education by just offering it free to anyone that got in based on merit.
In a mine near Cloncurry, Australia, workers were reportedly offered $10,000 to sign a binding five-year agreement that gave up their rights to collectively bargain against their employer. Their employer, the mine, denies offering money for giving up rights.
A recent Canadian survey found that one-quarter of Canadians feel they have been discriminated against.
One opinion on the survey results:
“This is, in our opinion, a high percentage,” said Ayman Al-Yassini, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. “It demonstrates the urgent need to ensure that the rights of all individuals in society are protected.”
The federal government needs to do more, he said, to strengthen the “sense of belonging” and citizenship across Canada.
Another opinion on the survey results:
Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association of Canadian Studies, said the findings have implications for the Canadian workplace, which faces a shortage of skilled labour and must rely on a steady flow of immigration.
Mr. Jedwab said the findings should provoke discussion given that earlier this month, Statistics Canada released its 2006 Census on immigration and citizenship that showed that nearly one in five Canadians was born on foreign soil, the highest proportion in 75 years.
Mr. Jedwab said that because Canada’s population is evolving, one of the biggest challenges facing policy makers is dealing with employment and economic integration issues. This includes ensuring skills and education from abroad are recognized, and as more newcomers arrive, ensuring that workplaces are more harmonious.