Surviving the Workday

Yes, I’m sorry, but it appears to be time for Tips for Surviving a Recession. I know we don’t want to hear this or think about this, but I sincerely believe it is still happening.

Tips include:

• Build your emergency fund.
• Pay off your credit cards.
• Increase your income, if at all possible.
• Don’t buy a new home without selling the old home.
• Don’t quit your job without finding a new one.

That’s my summary, but there is more at Tips for Surviving a Recession, including things to tighten in the family budget.

My favorite quote from the article deserves to be called out with a snarky reply:

“I have a friend who just lost her job. She is having a ball selling a whole bunch of stuff on eBay, everything from a gold Cartier watch to smaller things,” says Kit Yarrow a marketing and psychology professor at Golden Gate University.

Oh, Kit, I’m sure your friend is “having a ball” selling her possessions on ebay. Perhaps the words just came out wrong? Say it’s so. Please.

Resources
Recession? Maybe.
Recession Proof Financing
Recession Ready Advice: Careers
The Brazen Careerist

I love the idea of a bicycling paradise where cars aren’t allowed and bicyclists are safe. I don’t live in that world. And knowing someone who was killed on a bicycle by a drunk motorist makes me hesitant to suggest this vision to anyone as ideal. But this is a stunning example of ignorance and hatred. Melissa Arrington killed a bicyclist while she was drunk in her car. And then she laughed about it with a friend expressing homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-bicyclist, anti-environment sentiments.

During the conversation, the man told Arrington that an acquaintance believed she should get a medal and a parade because she had “taken out” a “tree hugger, a bicyclist, a Frenchman and a gay guy all in one shot.”

Arrington laughed. When the man said he knew it was a terrible thing to say, she responded, “No, it’s not.”

Pretty sure there’s a circle in hell with her name on it. At least the judge seemed to agree.

Via Treehugger

I’ve read enough crazy boss articles to understand the basic article structure: we tell a story about the crazy boss, we quote an expert who has divided crazy bosses into categories, we investigate the categories, we tell a success story with a crazy boss, and we mention that leaving the job is always an option.

Understanding the Crazy Boss uses this model with an expert called Hornstein and the categories of  Conquerers, Performers, and Manipulators:

Conquerors prey on employees who show signs of weakness. Once these bosses uncover a person’s Achilles’ heel, they attack with a vengeance and zoom in on the weakness to create embarrassment and humiliation.

Performers have a penchant for belittling workers, but unlike Conquerors, they undermine employees to mask their own incompetence. Hornstein says attempts to reason with Conquerors will backfire and draw more wrath, as these bosses are known to have uncontrollable temper tantrums. The best defense is to stay out of their way, he adds.

The Manipulators are the smoothest of the tyrannical bosses. These types of bosses are afraid they’ll become less valued if subordinates step into the limelight or receive recognition. They’ll go to any end to retain power—such as stealing someone’s ideas and taking credit. Yet they’ll always appear to be the subordinate’s ally.

The article makes a couple of other good points: crazy bosses have often been rewarded for their craziness, and, consequently, are not going to change. With narcissistic bosses, that narcissism is often what propels them to the top of the corporate structure. You can develop short-term coping strategies for people in any of these categories (or other categories), but often the best idea is simply to prepare your resume and depart from the company.

Now the Voice in my Head chimes, “But if we can help them? minister to them? What if we recognize the divine spark in that crazy boss (and isn’t it really crazy behavior, not a crazy boss?) and want to treat the boss with love and dignity? Yes, even though the boss makes our lives miserable that’s our own choosing, isn’t it? Well, Voice in my Head, take a deep breathe, and back away. It is quite possible to recognize the divine spark within, and still walk away. Not everyone is asking for help.

In any case, it’s snowing, so I’m going to go outside.

You might read Work, Computer: Neck Stretches which includes a bunch of small stretches. I liked the last wrist stretch the best (please insert the word “gently” at each step):

Wrist Stretch

1. hold arm (gently!) straight out in front of you
2. pull the hand backwards (gently!) with the other hand, then pull downward
3. hold for 20 seconds (gently!) 
4. relax
5. repeat 3 times each (gently!)

Now, this looks like an ordinary dog-video at first, but it is not. It is one of those stories about succeeding at the impossible. And I’d add that you can teach a dog to do just about anything with a spoonful of peanut butter.

Just in case you want to nominate me for any particular posts for cultural commentary anecdotes at the UU Blog awards, I’ve skimmed through the last year’s writing and picked out some favorites:

In Cultivating Religious Skin, I recount an experience with zealotry at a spa while naked for a facial (Why? Explain the nakedness.) Enter the Extractor. Aee!

In This is Not About Starr King, I tell the story of how I said, “That sucks!” in reference to a financial aid package at a seminary while considering UU ministry and was told I was being homophobic. I did not point out that anyone can suck, but probably should have. Instead, a decade or so later, I consulted the OED and made my point (Yes, much like George Costanza with the shrimp joke, I cannot let it go.)

Free Samples in which I stop doing work for free. Except, of course, on this blog. And volunteer work. And other stuff. But I stop doing paid work for free! It was an important step.

Southwest Doesn’t Like Breasts and Policing Women’s Attire were written during that weird period of time in the summer of 2007 when Southwest flight attendants kicked women off of planes for being scantily clad. Clearly they had never been to Abercrombie & Fitch.

The Sexualized Workplace describes the nature of a specific type of harassment that seems popular at the liberal darling, American Apparel. I hate them. I’m a hater.

And then there were the Job Titles series of posts on titles, tasks, and authority: Editor, Artist, Teacher, Doctors, Lawyers, and Minsters, oh my! I thought those were pretty good. Thorough, at least.

And the No China Diet: General Thoughts, Motivation, Overcoming Objections, Where Does Your Food Come From?, What Trader Joe’s Says, Food, Reading Labels on Food. That’s probably enough for anyone of my China tirade.

You can nominate them on the UU Awards. You don’t need to be a UU as far as I know. Ms. Kitty said so. And you don’t have to nominate me. I said so.

Sunday I flew back from our poetry workshop and was reading O Magazine (at this point in the narrative, a small devilish voice is heard in my head that says, “Oh really? And what other bourgeosie things were you doing? Pilates? Eating organic dark chocolate? Planning a trip to William Sonoma? It’s not a very nice voice). And I came across Oprah’s interview with Pema Chodron. Chodron is famous for speaking about tonglen breathing, which is just about the only technique I’ve ever used that seems to manage pain of all sorts. The problem is that it’s so painful to use that I often simply forget about it. Like in the dentist’s chair. Or after a miscarriage (or during, for that matter). Or when dealing with capricious clients. 

Here’s an excerpt that struck me as particularly helpful:  

 Pema: Of what it feels like, which is always—feels really bad, and it’s usually in the throat or the heart or the solar plexus. And it feels like a tightening. If you can stay with that feeling and breathe very deeply in and very deeply out, and say to yourself, millions of people all over the world share this kind of fear, discomfort what—I don’t even have to call it anything—they share this not wanting things to be this way. And it’s my link with humanity. And why—and it gives birth to a chain reaction which causes people to strike out and hurt other people or self-destruct. In other words, not staying with the feeling cuts you off from your compassion for others, your empathy for others, and also from the largeness of your own heart and mind.

I’ve had that tightness in my chest on and off for a few months. It’s worse with some of the stress of recent work, but it’s more or less always there. I had understood it as anxiety and pain in the unpredictable and unwanted circumstances. But I drew a great deal of affirmation from Chodron’s words in that I can be with the pain, in the sense of be here now, and don’t need to chase it away and move on to a happy place with bunnies, babies, and tulips.

Read the whole interview.

Now yoga postures at work is from Ladies Home Journal, and you may have to click past the ad, but the slideshow of the entirely normal looking folks doing desk-side yoga is worth it because not everyone who does yoga looks like Rodney Yee. And don’t stay in the last pose for too long or a coworker may call an ambulance.

I won’t say this is the freakiest thing I’ve ever read because I worked at a junior and senior high schools and noticed that many girls showed up far further into womanhood than I was as an adult. However, breasts at age 8 is now considered within normal range.

Until 10 years ago, breast development at age 8 was considered an abnormal event that should be investigated by an endocrinologist. Then a landmark study in the April 1997 journal Pediatrics written by Marcia Herman-Giddens, adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that among 17,000 girls in North Carolina, almost half of African Americans and 15% of whites had begun breast development by age 8. Two years later, the society suggested changing what it considered medically normal.

The new “8″ — the medically suggested definition for abnormally early breast development — is, the society says, 7 for white girls and 6 for African American girls. [Ed note: And the rest of you? You don’t count. Kidding. Article ignores Latinas and everyone else.]

Potential causes? Obesity and environmental pollutants that mess with the endocrine system. Potential problems? All that emotional stuff that goes along with puberty that you may not be ready for at 8.

I watched The Devil Wears Prada last night, and have been thinking since about the notion of a “tipping point,” the moment at which a series of small changes adds up to big change. For example, in the movie, Andy undergoes a series of transformations from a normal post-graduate to a fashionista, but the tipping point is when she recognizes that she sold out a coworker to get ahead. Note that the tipping point isn’t actually selling out the coworker, but the moment much later when it is brought to her attention, and that prompts her to walk away from her job and toss her Blackberry into a fountain. This was the moment when all of those compromises added up to too much for her to handle. She found her tipping point.

Malcolm Gladwell writes about tipping points in epidemiology and elsewhere:

Things can happen all at once, and little changes can make a huge difference. That’s a little bit counterintuitive. As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.

But there is not necessarily a relationship other than a cumulative one.

More on tipping points to come.

I think most of us experience some combination of fear and dread when asking for letters of recommendation. David Robinson of Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, has some excellent advice on how to prepare to ask for a letter of recommendation as well as how to read the signs from your potential recommender. If you’re considering returning to school (or applying for a fellowship of some sort), you’ll find the advice helpful.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes in Hillary’s Real MLK problem that Clinton fundamentally misunderstands the nature of social change:

But Clinton’s LBJ remark reveals something more worrisome than racial tone-deafness – a theory of social change that’s as elitist as it is inaccurate. Black civil rights weren’t won by suited men (or women) sitting at desks. They were won by a mass movement of millions who marched, sat in at lunch counters, endured jailings, and took bullets and beatings for the right to vote and move freely about. Some were students and pastors; many were dirt-poor farmers and urban workers. No one has ever attempted to list all their names.

I found it a compelling piece. And I’ve read a lot of election coverage and why I should vote for Candidate A, but I found this some of the most thought-provoking writing about process.

Here is the best photo ever of a Santa networking group, the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas. Heard of them? The membership requirements are simply working as Santa and having a real beard.

The group meets yearly for lunch to reminisce about the Christmas season as well as plan their moves for the next year. Members approach being Santa from a variety of angles, including, my favorite angle for work, ministry:

Patrick Cunningham, 53, a United Methodist minister from Tucson, said he played Santa at churches to help spread the spirit of God.

“I actually see being Santa as a ministry,” he said. “It’s a way of touching people with love.”

When Retirement Collides with Reality explores the terrain of retirement in terms of expectations and reality. According to John Trauth, a financial consultant for retirees, work offers a structure, community, and shared purpose. When these elements are gone from the day, retirees need to seek parts of them elsewhere.

Ethical Consuming: Trader Joe’s pulls Chinese products and lures us back into their bastion of alcohol and chocolate. Now if there were actually room to park (or monorail service!)

News: Doctors in Rhode Island are prepared to let you pay them to treat you, which is more surprising than it sounds. A Muslim Track Star is disqualified based on her outfit (well, let’s be honest—she was disqualified based on insane adults, not her outfit). Generation Y may not be narcissistic (you may just be getting on in years yourself). Racial harassment in the U.S. is at an all-time high (since the Civil Rights Act of 1964), which we find depressing as all hell, but perhaps symptomatic of the economy and our reptilian desire to simply attack others when we fear for ourselves.

Notes: Do you really want to give a gift to your doctor? Because apparently it causes them great amounts of pain to take it. Apparently there are places where politics and work mix well, and possibly places where the “secret” of employee retention is known. Lastly, GhostGirl gives us tips on how not to reorganize an entire workplace.

You could give me a hand by reading my novel excerpt in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest and writing a review. It is cut-off in a weird place, and also racier than you might expect, but it is the story of a friendship from two points of view. If you don’t want to write a review, you can rate the reviews as helpful. Or just read. Or not. Some people like it. Some do not. We move on.

I’m going away for the weekend to the woods to write poetry, but I have a few posts scheduled. In preparation, I was reading A Retreat to Find Peace, which describes another writer-editor’s practice of taking time off in between jobs to ground himself in nature:

I have changed jobs enough times in my life to know that those days in between an old job and the start of a new one are among the most poignant you can experience. Those days off are more than a vacation. They are states of limbo where you really don’t have a job, where your professional identity is on hold.

I don’t actually think I’ve had time between jobs to do much of anything (other than plot a commuting route), but it seemed to me that I could use some time in the woods and rejuvenation.

New Hampshire may require insurance companies to pay for home births.

When I was pregnant, I was interested in a home birth. For low-risk pregnancies, there is substantial research that suggests home births with a nurse-midwife are absolutely safe, and, in fact, decrease risk of infection.

Via Feministing 

A study about burnout among newspaper journalists demonstrates that young copyeditors and designers at small newspapers are most at risk for burnout. I got tired just reading about it. Seriously.

Read When Your Doctor is On the Gift List for some interesting thoughts on holiday gifting (and other gifting) to medical doctors. Be sure to read the comments, many of which are from doctors about their personal experience with gifts. It seems that generally speaking, they appreciate gifts, except for cash, which makes them uncomfortable, but do not feel gifts are necessary. A thank you note always seems to work as do whole office gifts.

A few doctors in Rhode Island got together and came up with an innovative solution for those without health insurance. They are about to take it statewide.

In this program, she pays $30 a month for a “membership” in her primary care doctor’s practice, essentially keeping him on retainer. That means that even without insurance, she can get frontline medical help whenever she needs it, paying just $10 for each office visit.

Sure, there are more out of pocket costs with this program (you have to pay in full for things like X-rays and prescriptions) but it means that just a basic office visit, or taking care of your child’s health, won’t break the bank. And of course, the insurance commissioner is hating it.

Muslim high school track star disqualified for outfit. What can I say? She has to wear an outfit that covers herself for religious reasons. She’s worn it before without any disqualification. And now it’s an issue that she’s the fastest young female runner in D.C. Hmm.