This sounds like a good idea: Employers offer aid to avoid foreclosures. It really does. I like the idea of employers being helpful, and one of the arguments in the article is that what’s good for the employee is good for the employer (in terms of “productivity” of course).
But there are some significant questions:
- Who determines who qualifies for aid at work?
- How is the aid repaid?
- What happens if you quit your job? (or are laid-off)?
- Do you really want to owe your employer money?
I read an article a long time ago in Mother Jones about the mentality of a whistle blower. It wasn’t terribly positive, and I’m not sure exactly why. Take this case, for example, which wouldn’t be anywhere without a whistle blower: a pharmacist for Walgreens just blew open a huge scheme to bilk taxpayers of millions of dollars by switching Medicaid patients to the most expensive version of a pill:
To save taxpayer dollars, Medicaid limits how much it pays for popular forms of drugs.
But it doesn’t bother to set price-ceilings on rarely-used versions.
Take generic Zantac, or ranitidine, for example. The antacid is a huge seller in tablet form. Medicaid limits payment to 34 cents apiece.
The same drug as capsules has no price-ceiling because it was so rarely-prescribed. Medicaid pays $1.25 each.
Walgreens figured it could pocket millions by switching patients from tablets to capsules.
Cheers, whistleblower! I raise my cup of tea to you this morning. Walgreens agreed to repay the government 35 million dollars. I wish I had a job to offer the whistle blower.
Are You Your Own Bully? explores the idea that we may bully ourselves throughout the workday with negative self-talk and imagery:
The things that we tell to ourselves can be much meaner and far more hurtful than anything anyone else would ever tell us.
I’m talking about self-talk – specifically, negative self-talk.
Self-talk refers to the thoughts and attitudes that you have about yourself. It is expressed primarily in thought form. Negative self-talk can be a form of bullying yourself. Like external bullying, it’s unfair and it’s usually not true.
Paying attention to self-talk is important because what you tell yourself makes a difference in your professional success. Too much negative self-talk can sabotage your career before it even gets a real start. The damage we do to ourselves is as real as the damage that any external bully could do.
This week on the east coast started out hot, damn hot, but it has finally settled down a bit. Meanwhile, we all have dry throats from the air conditioners, I have run out of sleeveless shirts appropriate for work, and the biggest office scandal of the week is all the women who saw fit to show up braless in tank tops, short skirts, and hooker heels. So the first category of the day is sort of appropriate:
Here’s a slideshow on productivity, which compares two work styles and two workplaces. It’s not terribly sophisticated, but I think it gets at some of the isssues we were discussing yesterday with time spent on the Internet at work.
Do you identify with either of these folks?
In You’re Too Hot for This Job, we have a question and answer regarding whether or not looks could get you passed over for a job. The answer pisses me off. Still trying to figure out why…. Feel free to venture a guess, as I appear not to be in touch with my intellect today.
Here’s an amusing item from Work-Related Blogs about time wasted at work in the United Kingdom:
According to the CBI: “the average UK office worker spends an hour and a half a week of work time surfing the web for personal use, at a cost to the economy of £10.6bn a year.”
It is estimated that employers across the public and private sectors lose 4.4 per cent of working time in this way, which accounts for 95 minutes a week, or ten days a year, at an average annual cost of £939 per employee.
See Over 90 minutes a week spent on personal websurfing at work.
What the CBI fail to mention is that employees are also said to contribute £26bn a year in unpaid overtime, or 7 hours and 24 minutes of unpaid work each week.
Love the detail! 7.5 hours of unpaid work v. 1.5 hours of web surfing during a normal work week. I’d say employers win even if you surf a bit more. Besides, who’s to say that isn’t work?
The “All Faiths Beautiful” Exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore MD looks to be very interesting. Part of the exhibition revolves around PostSecret, one of my favorite sites. The exhibit ends on August 31st.
How noisy is your workplace? What sorts of noises do you hear? It seems that even a low-volume of noise (typing, people talking, phones ringing) can affect workers, and result in additional stress (and use of sick days):
Workers toiling in noisy environments showed increased levels of the stress hormone epinephrine, but few of the participants reported feeling particularly stressed. Surprised at his findings, which appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Evans suspects that workers tend to get used to the sounds and so become unaware of the possible detrimental effects.
This isn’t an easy problem to fix. Researchers warn of self-reporting satisfaction on noise levels in the workplace. Apparently we’re often not aware of how noisy our workplace really is.
Well, as a lover of disaster and end-of-world scenarios, this use of technology to persuade the souls of the spiritually wishy-washy really tickled me! Why didn’t I think of this - darnit! For about $40 per year, a believer can arrange to have two sets of emails sent to their unsaved friends and relatives after the Rapture. Of course, when the Rapture happens, everyone will know the truth - so why not snag that opportunity to extend a hand from Heaven? Before it’s too late! You may have heard about this on NPR; I heard about it through the grapevine. The website: You’ve Been Left Behind.com. What I find most curious is their explanation of how the system works:
We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the “Rapture” of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system.
Why not 5 out of 5? I love how they leave some room for two team members who might not get called up with the rest! Or maybe they are open to the possibility of Satan hacking into two of the accounts? In any case, when the Rapture does happen, be sure to check your email. You only get 1 more day after these emails are sent to save yourself. After that, God destroys the world.
In fourth grade, I arrived from living for a year in New Zealand to the middle of the year in Mrs. Berry’s classroom. Mrs. Berry was a lunatic. I was well aware of this in fourth grade, but it took the rest of the year to convince my parents of this fact. Mrs. Berry insisted that all the fourth graders in her class wear deoderant because she claimed we smelled. She also insisted that we pair up and play house in a cardboard box. And, finally, she insisted that we worship Penny and Arnold, two pigs she made out of bleach bottles and proudly displayed on the top of her desk. Our daily required rituals with Penny and Arnold included dressing and bathing, as well as letting them date (only on Fridays though). Eventually Penny and Arnold were married in a schoolwide ceremony that involved a full wedding, live musical accompiment, and, of course, cake.
Puppy weddings on the We channel reminds me of Mrs. Berry. And that’s not a good thing. You’ll recall We from earlier this week. They like the weddings. On the other hand, I see same-sex weddings. And then I think of what The Right will make of same-sex dog marriages, and I feel like screaming ahead of time.
- I work in market research in real life. Or, let’s be clear, I work in the Operations department for a market research firm. I work with data. I can spot a data trend a mile away. I don’t need to be clubbed over the head to notice that there were two big trends in my collection of links this week:
If you need an individual plan for health insurance, you might just find yourself denied if you’ve had a c-section.
It’s really hard to express the frustration over individualized health insurance plans to people who don’t have them. The basic difference is that if you have an employer, the employer can negotiate for group rates, and coverage for everyone. As an individual seeking insurance without an employer, you negotiate on your own and the insurer can raise the rates whenever it wishes, deny all sorts of coverage, cancel you without a reason (illegal), and your only recourse is to go elsewhere. Oh, but where is elsewhere? It’s just another insurance company. And if you’re denied coverage by one insurer, you’re red flagged for the rest of your life as a risk only to be denied, and denied, and denied. It is a terrible situation to be in. I know.
This is the story of a woman who had a C-section, and was then denied health insurance because of it. Why? It raised the chance of having another C-section. Note that her C-section was not elective, and had she had the good sense (ha, ha, I kid) to get herself sterilized, she could have coverage:
“Obstetricians are rendering large numbers of women uninsurable by overusing this surgery,” said Pamela Udy, president of the International Caesarean Awareness Network, a group whose mission is to prevent unnecessary Caesareans.
Although many women who have had a Caesarean can safely have a normal birth later, something that Ms. Udy’s group advocates, in recent years many doctors and hospitals have refused to allow such births, because they carry a small risk of a potentially fatal complication, uterine rupture. Now, Ms. Udy says, insurers are adding insult to injury. Not only are women feeling pressure to have Caesareans that they do not want and may not need, but they may also be denied coverage for the surgery.
I don’t wear panty hose. I, in fact, hate panty hose. They fall into a category of things my East Coast mom thought were totally necessary post-puberty with skirts and dresses for her California child, but were totally not necessary in any way, shape, or form. This formed the basis for any number of clothing battles during adolescence regarding appropriateness, nakedness, and my inability to follow clothing guidelines, and paved the way for me majoring in earth science, because frankly geologists don’t wear hose.
Mom was wrong, and now she no longer wears pantyhose either, and I refrain from excessive gloating that the last time I wore hose was the senior prom. We move on.
My top complaints about The Hose:
they make my feet smell;
they never fit properly because I’m tall (even in tall sizes they don’t fit); and
they look totally weird, especially when they run.
Oh, I’m not alone with hose loathing. The Wall Street Journal takes on the all-important discussion of hosiery in the office, which reveals a demographic divide (the Boomers often do the hose, Gen X and Gen Y do not):
The fashion shift has left some baby boomer managers feeling that their hose make them look frumpy. Kathy Garland, the 54-year-old chairwoman of the Northern Dallas area for the National Association of Women Business Owners, says she finally threw out a bag full of hose last week. An executive coach herself, she noticed a few years ago that she was the only woman wearing hose at a formal business fund-raiser. “Younger women don’t even think about panty hose,” she says.
I do actually think about panty hose, but much of what I think of them cannot be printed here.
I’m not sure what it means when multiple people send me a clip of someone clearly having a break with reality:
Office Worker Goes Absolutely Insane (no audio, but from a supposed security tape)
Second Angle on Office Worker (with audio (Russian?) and from a cell phone)
Assuming this is real, I really hope no one was hurt. And assuming no one was hurt, it’s odd that people stayed in the room….stunned, perhaps? My first instinct would be to bolt.
Oh, I laughed and laughed at this.
Possibly because I didn’t have a wedding.
Favorite line: “Bitch, get off my veil!”
The four-day work week gains some popularity in the United States, mainly to help with car commuting costs:
When Ohio’s Kent State University offered custodial staff the option of working four days a week instead of five to cut commuting costs, most jumped at the chance, part of a U.S. trend aimed at combating soaring gasoline prices.
“We offered it to 94 employees and 78 have taken us up on it,” said university spokesman Scott Rainone.
The reason is simple: rising gas prices.
But it is not without some problems at some workplaces:
But a four-day workweek brings problems too. The state government in Ohio is bucking the national trend and canceling an 8-year-old policy that allowed a compressed workweek—after complaints that no one was around to answer the phones and serve the public some days.
I have to admit I’ve had this problem with county offices in LA, which are closed on Fridays. I hardly ever remember to call during the lengthy days M-Th. But when I’ve had M-Th jobs, I’ve sure enjoyed the long weekend. Other thoughts on this particular flextime option?