Surviving the Workday

My husband is a Quaker at heart. His family roots in Quakerism extend back many centuries. While we do not attend Quaker services, we both know that when (or if) we have children, they will be raised in the Quaker faith. That is why this article caught my eye.

One of the tenets of Quakerism is that they do not swear oaths. They believe that the truth should be told at all times, thus swearing an oath implies a different standard under that oath. They are also non-violent; many conscientious objectors are from The Society of Friends, and they won the Nobel Prize in 1947.

Given that, I am actually kind of amused that a teacher at CSU East Bay was fired for altering a state-mandated oath to state her non-violent beliefs, and for circling that she “affirmed” rather than “swore” this oath (affirming is allowed in Quaker beliefs.)

Modifying oaths is open to different legal interpretations. Without commenting on the specific situation, a spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Brown said that “as a general matter, oaths may be modified to conform with individual values.” For example, court oaths may be modified so that atheists don’t have to refer to a deity, said spokesman Gareth Lacy.

This woman had made similar alterations to two previous oaths she had signed. Yet, the CSU declared her changes “unacceptable.” Well, I personally find religious discrimination “unacceptable.”

So I’m still feeling sort of creepy about saying why I don’t currently go to church, because I fear it came off as if I was denigrating church-goers or was a lazy-ass yuppie, and I’m neither. So I’ll write briefly about times when church worked for me (and I worked for church).

When I was seventeen-years-old, I went to Smith, and attended the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence in Northampton regularly on Sunday mornings for two years while in school. The minister was Victoria Safford. Now of the four reasons I mentioned yesterday for not going to church, some of those were still issues, but played out differently:

1. Church was important to me. I’m not sure why it was important to me, but I felt absolutely compelled to go to church. I loved Victoria’s sermons, felt something always shift within me, and felt lighter afterward as if the world had broadened before me. I can remember specific phrases she used that moved me (and it’s almost two decades later). This was a time in my life when it was important to see women in their late twenties and early thirties as role models for work in ministry (and academia) and life in general beyond Smith and Victoria certainly served that role as did Carol Zaleski, a religion professor at Smith.

2. The time of day still sucked. When I attended church, I used to miss brunch at Smith, which was the biggest and most elaborate meal of the week, and more importantly, included in my meal plan and already paid for. So it was essentially giving up a $15 meal with my friends, and having to eat elsewhere at a time in my life when I earned money scrubbing toilets. But I did it.

3. I seemed to matter more.  I don’t think Victoria had any idea who I was, but she still greeted everyone as they entered and left the church. Other parishioners were really friendly to me and there were other people within my demographic in the church. I suppose that’s because Northampton is partially a college-town, and it wasn’t unusual for students to attend services. But I had the distinct sensation of mattering, and my intellectual and emotional needs for stimulation and connection were met.

4. I didn’t see petty dysfunctional shit. Now I was 17 when I started attending, and 19 when I transferred from Smith, so it’s possible there was tons of petty dysfunctional shit that I didn’t know about. But I also worked in the RE program, and was always treated well and respectfully as I was when I attended church.

I think it’s important to note here that even though I attended regularly, I was not a member. Now why wasn’t I a member during one of the best church experiences of my life? Two reasons: 1. No one ever asked me to join. 2. When I saw membership materials, the idea of having to scrub more toilets to give more money (other than the money I had to pay for my missing meal, and what I was giving in the offering) was probably too much for me.

I’m going to write more about other times church worked for me next week.

so, it’s time for a quiz. Apparently I’m the most abused form of punctuation around.

You Are a Semi-Colon

You are elegant, understated, and subtle in your communication.You’re very smart (and you know it), but you don’t often showcase your brilliance.Instead, you carefully construct your arguments, ideas, and theories – until they are bulletproof.You see your words as an expression of yourself, and you are careful not to waste them. You friends see you as enlightened, logical, and shrewd. (But what you’re saying often goes right over their heads.) You excel in: The Arts You get along best with: The Colon

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

 Via Linera

 I would like to file this under What the F***? but alas, we have no such tag.

Seems a supervisor at a “motivational coaching business” had some crazy ideas as to what exactly motivates people. He woke up one day and said “I know! Waterboarding!”

A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.
    In a lawsuit filed last month, former Prosper, Inc. salesman Chad Hudgens alleges his managers also allowed the supervisor to draw mustaches on employees’ faces, take away their chairs and beat on their desks with a wooden paddle “because it resulted in increased revenues for the company.”

Regardless of whether or not Hudgens participated voluntarily in this exercise, as the company alleges, at some point in time, someone has to be the grownup here and say “Hey, wait a minute! This is stupid and harmful and I’m not going to participate in your shenanigans!”

In the latest installment of the New York Times hurl-worthy series, Sensible Portrayals of the Emotionally Bankrupt Parents (Part 1 Children Are Not Decor), here is Part 2: Never Too Young for That First Manicure. I’d say that’s just not true. And that photo would be a lovely place to start a discussion with your child about class.

Last night, I dreamt that I was in a hell of my own making working at Noah’s Bagel Bakery in a strip mall in Stevenson Ranch with six women demons.

Sound strange? Not if you know that I watched a DVD on The Tibetan Book of the Bed before bedtime. This is the strangest religious DVD I have ever seen. Some notes:

a. The DVD is narrated by Leonard Cohen, which sounds much cooler in theory than it is in reality. He has a great voice, of course, but it sort of lulled us into apathy and lethargy despite seeing dead people on screen.

b. There are a few clips of the Dalai Lama, in which, I swear on all that is holy, he sounds exactly like Julia Child. Blame the low production values. This realization was enough to awaken us from the Cohen-induced-apathy into fits of glee.

c. Have you ever taken ’shrooms? Because you’ll enjoy Part 2 of the DVD and the demons.

Tibetan Book of the Dead. Read it. Don’t see the video unless you liked the ’shrooms.

So I’m one of those people who affiliates herself with a denomination (Unitarian Universalist or UU), but doesn’t attend church and isn’t a member of a church. I realize that in the larger picture, this is undesirable and “bad,” but, after a few years of guilt, I’ve ceased caring.

Before reading my reasons for not attending church, you may wish to read what others have written regarding recent Pew research that only 24% of those who identify as Unitarian Universalist (UU) in a survey are actual members of congregations at Philocrites, Transient and Permanent, The Journey, Yet Another Unitarian Universalist, Boy in the Bands, and The Chalice Blog. This will help you read what I’ve written within a larger discussion of affiliated but unchurched people.

And please note that I attended UU Sunday school and five different UU churches regularly from age 5 to 27, went to seminary, have been an employee of both a UU church and a Catholic school with required Mass, so it’s not like I haven’t thought about church, theology, religion, and spirituality. For the record, I’ve also written about when church worked for me here and here and here.

 Here’s my list of why I don’t go to church any more:

1. I don’t actually think church is important for me right now  It certainly has been very important in the past.  It might become important in the future. And it’s certainly important to others. I’m not denying any of that. But considering I’ve regularly attended UU churches all around the country, I think I have a sense of what church is about for UUs, and church isn’t for me right now. However, I don’t think that means I’m less of a UU or less spiritual or religious.

2. The time of day sucks   I go to the Sunday Farmer’s Market, and it closes by 11:30. I like the place a lot; I like vegetables and fruit; I like wandering around. I always run into someone I know and have a chat. It makes me feel really good, and I’m not willing to trade that for church right now. And my Sunday mornings aren’t limited to the market. This Sunday, my friend Beth is coming over for brunch. Next Sunday, I’m having brunch out with other friends. For people with standard working hours (many of my friends), Sunday morning is one of the rare times to socialize.

3. My needs don’t seem to matter much in church  This is a biggie. When I was single, I felt woefully out of place in the UU churches I attended so much so that I volunteered to work in the RE programs where people (and by “people” I mean the kids) were closer to me in age. I rather liked those experiences, but it certainly didn’t make me want to hang out with the adults in the rest of the church. More recently, I’ve found that the UU churches I’ve attended have seemed populated entirely with parents of young children and retirees, and served their needs pretty well with programming (at least to an outside observer), but left me with the sense that I would be more highly valued in the church if I reproduced (or retired). Along those lines, I’m never particularly interested in the additional programming at church. Social action often seems low to absent, and family game night and folk dancing seem everywhere. That’s just not what motivates me to join the club.

 4. Petty Dysfunctional Shit  As someone who has experience with petty dysfunctional shit (often on a daily basis!), I seem to be able to identify it fairly quickly, and, unfortunately, one place it thrives is in churches. I have no need to deal with an additional time-suck on my energy during my down time. Plenty of churches have let The Crazies take over.

All of these seem like selfish reasons, but I since not attending church my soul and life seem to be thriving. And it took a long time in order for me to learn how to take care of me, so I’m going to keep doing it regardless of perceived selfishness.

Let’s say you read what I wrote above, and still had some interest in me attending your church despite what seems like abject grumpiness (perhaps it’s just honesty?) on my part. In that case, I’d suggest the following:

1. Don’t make church the end-all-be-all-of-ministry and of religious and spiritual experience, because it’s not.  It’s a part, and not the whole. And there is a growing number of unchurched folks out there getting their needs met elsewhere. As people with liberal religion, and a growing number of unchurched folks, I think listening to why and how they ended up unchurched is a good first step.

2. Offer an alternative service time and alternative ministry to Sunday mornings.

3. Spend considerable time understanding how to minister to single people, people who don’t have kids, and people who don’t fit into the mainstream of the congregation. Ask them what they want. I’m guessing it’s not folk dancing and family game night.

4. Stand up to The Crazies. And every church has them.

I don’t feel particularly good about this post or proud about it, but I thought it was important to state the legitimate reasons that I don’t attend church regularly in light of the larger discussion on the people who affiliate as Unitarian Universalist, but don’t attend church.

Despite obstacles, muni driver rolls ahead describes a day in the life of buss driver Rochelle Fuller:

When Fuller, a 44-year-old San Francisco native, arrived to work, she didn’t know to which line she’d be assigned. She works the “extra board,” similar to a pool of substitute teachers who fill in at schools where and when needed.

She was given bus No. 8176 because it was next in line to leave the yard. Added to the fleet in 2002, the bus already is halfway through its expected life span, having logged more than 236,000 miles on its odometer.

“It’s really just the luck of the draw when it comes to which one you get,” said Fuller, a Muni driver for almost a decade who knew many of the passengers she picked up in Bayview-Hunters Point, the neighborhood where she was raised. More than once, their conversations turned to news of mutual friends and old classmates who had been killed.

Keeping your options open? Maybe you shouldn’t.

A new study in behavioral economics by Dan Ariely of MIT suggests that human beings will do quite a bit in order to avoid a loss (the end of an option). Three examples are given:

1. You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case.

2. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

3. Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

Those all sound familiar to me. It seems like one of those aphorisms of daily life (Keep Your Options Open!) may just be a time-and-energy-suck.

If you’d like to play a model of the game used in the study, click here.

A twenty-three-year old unmarried pregnant teacher in Minnesota lost her job at a Catholic school. I guess she should have had an abortion (that was sarcasm):

Emily Prigge, 23, of Lake City, told her principal about her pregnancy last month. Prigge says the principal and a priest asked her to resign last week, and she did. Her pregnancy is about 15 weeks along.

Prigge was in her first year on the job at St. Felix school. When she took the job, she signed a Catholic Christian Witness Statement, where she agreed to set a good example as a Christian in her personal and academic life. Prigge, who is Catholic, says she was told that she didn’t live up to the statement because she had premarital sex.

I’m pretty sure the principal and priest aren’t setting good examples either.

Ford is offering some substantial buy-out plans to 54,000 hourly workers. The buyout plans include these sorts of options:

Employees with as little as one year of seniority can receive $100,000 cash, although they give up all health benefits after a six-month period.

For employees at least 55 years old and with at least 10 years on the job, the payout jumps to $140,000.

And opinions by workers vary:

“I am taking it seriously, but it’s really hard to think about leaving,” said Jerry Thomas, a 37-year-old millwright with 12 years at Ford. “The only thing that would make me do it is the uncertainty. We just don’t know what’s going to happen with Ford.”

“We never had this type of opportunity when I was in the steel industry,” Mr. Linko said. “We knew for years that the industry was in trouble, and one day the doors just shut.”

“I’m taking the $100,000,” said Stacy Haynes, a 34-year-old mother of four children. “I’ve been here 12 years, and I can’t believe I lasted this long.”

“I’d like to retire, but it’s just not enough money for me now,” Mr. Fender said. “I’m making almost $80,000 a year, and I can’t see leaving that behind.”

Do you remember last summer Southwest asking women who were “dressed inappropriately” to leave the planes?

 Now there’s more of that sort of behavior. Again with young women. Again on Southwest. I really don’t get this. I just don’t.

Think of a time when you were slighted at work. And, if the moment is right, compare it to this: Being slighted on national TV, and then having it broken down in detail for you the next day (again on national TV) just in case you didn’t know how slighted you had been. Slighted! I tell you. Slighted!

I feel weepy for Whoopi.

I found an interview in Finding My Religion with parapsychology researcher Dean Radin. Radin has studied psychic phenomenon at Princeton and the University of Nevada, and has explored whether intentionally-blessed chocolate tastes better (and it does, apparently, keep that in mind when you’re cooking).

At the end of the interview, the interviewer brings up The Secret.

There has been this craze of late about “The Secret.” And I wonder if you have any thoughts on that, since a lot of the work you do relates to how our minds affect reality.

Well, craze is a good word. I mean, it’s a little overblown and embellished, but I think the general idea that intention can help either push us or pull us towards goals that we have is not a bad idea. It’s not significantly different from the power of positive thinking, nor is it too different from the effects that we see in our intentional chocolate experiment and many other experiments like that. There is something about intention that seems to be the underlying focus for a mind-matter interaction.

One reason people cringe when they hear about “The Secret” is that it suggests we have far more control over our lives than we probably do. So if you get cancer, let’s say, you should be able to cure yourself with your thinking.

It does create this sort of New Age guilt, and actually I think that the intentional effects that we see in the lab (from positive thinking) are pretty small. It’s not as if you’re in a boat without a paddle and you’re about to go over Niagara Falls — you can’t simply zoom off to the shore by wishing that it will happen. But you can, if you pay a little bit of attention beforehand, move it very slightly, and if you do it systematically you might be lucky enough to move it to a place of safety. Obviously, if you are near the falls, it’s too late.

It’s definitely too late for me! But at least I don’t suffer from New Age Guilt. I prefer the centuries old Catholic kind.

You might enjoy reading the entire interview though including an in-depth description of the intentional chocolate experiment.

Wanted: Someone Who Knows Nothing About The Job explores the trend toward hiring presidents of universities who lack academic credentials. Of course, if you want to run your university like a corporation, there is no need for silly academic degrees.

Ethical Consuming  The “Made in Italy” label on a purse or item of clothing may actually mean it was made in a sweatshop in Tuscany by an indentured Chinese person. Technically, yes, it was made in Italy, but not under any sort of fair-labor laws that you might expect.

Fun  You’ll need a pen and paper to take the Business Etiquette quiz, but is well worth it to figure out who to introduce first and whether or not you can order for the group at a workplace luncheon that you organize. 

News  GhostGirl hosts fun with statistics. Readers interpret numbers.

Notes  Anne P. describes small town crime across the street from her workplace, and launches her own career in investigative journalism by venturing beyond her own locked door to see what’s up. There’s a connection between feeling sad and spending a lot of money, so if you’re sad at work, hide your wallet. And readers shared opinions on disclosing illnesses in the workplace.

Also, we became somewhat famous on the Boston Globe’s Miss Conduct’s Blog (advice on manners), and Buzzfeed’s Green Sex.

Here is a web site with some interesting, and often surprising, statistics:

On the health front:

Average life expectancy–the US is way down there at #45, while in most African nations, I would be dead by now.
Fattest countries in the world (Woo hoo! #9!)
Public health expenditures–The United States is surprisingly high on that list. However, I think this also implies that we have a higher number of people at risk and requiring public health care, more than it implies we take good care of people.
Divorce rates–Don’t move to Belarus if you want your marriage to survive, apparently.
Birth control use–Who knew that Brazil had the highest female sterilization rate?

Economically speaking:

Worldwide unemployment rates–Check out Uzbekistan!
Technology adoption–Not sure where Squitzerland is but they sure do love their computers.
Economic statistics by country–The rate of inflation in Zimbabwe is insane. What are we all complaining about?
Military expenditures–Finally, we are #1 in something.

Anne P here.  Ms. T is having a slow news day, so I’m here to spice things up with the excitement that happened at my workplace yesterday.

Well, technically not at my workplace, thankfully, but at the bank across the street, visible from my window.  They were held up.  We knew something was going on in this small town when most of the police department’s vehicles came roaring up, lights and sirens.  The bank’s blinds were drawn by that point, too.  But the officers were not running and no guns were drawn, so it seemed clear that whatever it was, it was already over with.  People from other businesses on the street were on the sidewalk, wondering what was going on.

So I went on and walked to the post office as I had planned, and then on to my own (different) bank down the street.  While I was out, the police helicopter arrived and started doing search patterns overhead.

My coworkers locked the outside doors and called colleagues who were elsewhere on campus, so they could avoid being taken hostage as they returned to the office.

Am I crazy?  The police didn’t seem worked up or worried about people on the street.  It seemed pretty unlikely the crook was hanging around within sight of the bank he’d just robbed.  If he was going to grab a hostage, wouldn’t he do it immediately, rather than 10 or 15 minutes after the robbery? 

Then again, criminals are not known for their logical thinking, so maybe my coworkers were right and I was being cavalier or naive.  My head says that, but my gut still doesn’t believe it.  I didn’t lose any sleep last night over this stupid thing I’d done, risking leaving my daughter to never know her mother.

I’m not sure where the spirituality comes into this, but it happened in the workplace, and hey, how often does a blog about the office get to feature a car chase?  (Er, not that there was a car chase.  He fled on foot.  Sorry.)

Here are some interesting  links I have come across in the past week. Might as well dump them on you.

The Modern Religious Climate: Brisbane exorcisms are in such high demand the Catholic Church has created classes to teach priests how to perform them.

Meanwhile, a manga-style version of the Bible is drawing attention. For those who think it’s a bad thing to treat such a serious subject as a comic, may I direct you to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus.

Wikipedia defies 180,000 demands to remove images of the Prophet Muhammad.

Speaking of Muhammad, the woman who stirred up much wrath after she named a teddy bear after the prophet Mohammed is heading for China.

On the work front: Scott Adams finally lampoons the infamous Drunken Lemur decision, in which a man was fired for posting a Dilbert cartoon insulting upper management.

An interesting article about the younger generation in the workplace. We’ve talked about this a lot in this forum already. This is yet another highlight of perceptions and the generation gap.

Science and Ethics: For the record, bottled water is immoral. But we knew that already.

And finally, I have a “theory” of my own about this one.

So it’s time for a quiz.

This one is about business etiquette, which is really just common etiquette. Too often, manners are dismissed as snobbishness, but what they are really about is making people comfortable. About a year ago, I took a seminar at work on this very subject and learned that it’s not just a matter of being polite–it’s a matter of making the client comfortable so that you can form a bond with them. The best advice was to repeat a person’s name as often as possible during the conversation, both to make it easier to remember and to make sure you got it right in the first place.

Watch out, there are some trick questions. And at least one that had me really puzzled (number 5.) Why on EARTH would it be okay to preorder for everyone? I can understand having a limited menu, but it seems to me that dietary restrictions and the like would dictate that it’s impolite to make that decision for people. Can anyone shed light on this?

I’m Ill, but Who Really Needs to Know? explores how a number of individuals have navigated serious illness in the workplace. Some people choose to hide their illnesses, and others fully disclose. The results are mixed with both strategies. In the situations where full disclosure of an illness seemed to work, it was because management was fully supportive.

I found the comments by readers particularly illuminating in the stories they told about particular workplaces and particular illnesses.