I love holidays. It’s like a built-in theme for the column. I barely have to think. Which is a good thing today, given the horrendous amount of candy I consumed at work. They had bowls of it in every conference room. Was that really necessary?
I’m betting all the Grade-A Halloween news will come out tomorrow, so I might just have to write a followup post, but I have a small collection going already.
Yes, giant balls of grass hang over cafeteria tables. What more can I say? It would enliven any cafeteria. It’s workplace decorating at its weirdest.
When Jim and I both became self-employed a few years ago, we tried to be good little boys and girls and buy health insurance with an individualized health plan, which seemed the responsible thing to do (responsible for ourselves, our families, society in general). Actually, we bought insurance through two professional organizations, which claimed to give us group rates. This was actually not true. The rates and coverage were approximately the same as buying the plans with a broker or directly from the insurer, which we tried later. In any case, we discovered something very curious—my health plan cost a lot more than Jim’s (even without maternity coverage on mine). And I’m younger than Jim. And we have approximately the same good health and no pre-existing conditions. Mine just cost a lot more. Apparently this is not just our problem: Women Buying Health Policies Pay a Penalty. Could we find a more corrupt little slice of life in the United States than these plans? Honestly. Perhaps in the Mafia.
More from me on the topic here: Individualized Health Care Plans, The Costly and Meager Plan, and Had a C-Section? (because that rules you ineligible for an individualized health care plan)
Freelancing sounds like it’s a walk in the park. However, many freelancers work really long hours for not so much money in situations that mimic the worst job of their lives.
7 Freelancer Stress-Busting Tips has some suggestions for dealing with freelancer stress. Here’s my favorite:
Define a quitting time. If you don’t have a time you’ve set to close up shop, you’re going to be plugged in so much that you’ll never feel like you can relax. Set the most important part of business hours — quitting time — and stick to it. You’ll find your focus improve instantly, and if you fall behind you’ll discover that it’s less stressful to show up earlier tomorrow to catch up than it is burning the midnight oil.
Your favorite tips?
To Those That Have, Shall Be Given is a summary of the research about work success, beauty, and ugliness. The conclusion? Beautiful people are hired more easily, paid more, and bring in more money to their employers. Interesting. Depressing. Enough to make me get a hair cut? Probably.
Co-working is for those of us who work at home, but get a bit bored and like company. You know, the semi-anonymous sort of company that exists in a cubicle world. So we find a place to rent a desk. Perhaps if I didn’t work at home with Jim, and didn’t live in a neighborhood with neighbors who were home often enough to be coworkers, I’d be into this. Might it be a city thing? Do any readers rent a space to co-work with others? How does it work for you?
Is a mentor an advisor? A friend? Both? Inside Higher Ed explores this topic as it relates to mentoring students. And do students benefit if a mentor is simply an advisor? Do they benefit more if the mentor actually “cares” about them? You be the judge. And keep in mind that mentoring is correlated to advancement and retention at work. I swear.
And do your coworkers know your religion (or lack of religion)? That’s the discussion at Transient and Permanent as related to Unitarian Universalism. I’ve found that no one cares about my religion at work. At least not in a Catholic workplace, Indian workplace, or Jewish workplace.
In my copious amounts of spare time, I’ve been trying to get our emergency supply kit together for The Big One. We do live on the San Andreas fault, after all. It’s not that we don’t have emergency supplies. We do. They are just everywhere in the house. And porch. And back deck. And closets. And we’ve had kits before, but inevitably we end up borrowing the pliers or paper towels when we run out.
In my rummaging around on-line, I found some of the longest emergency supply lists known to human kind. I mean, yes, it would be nice to have sleeping bags and a camp stove in the “kit”, but we have those anyway around the house. And an emergency kit that is the size of our bedroom is hardly ideal.
Here’s the best list* that I’ve found (it’s short, but I would add cash and pet supplies to the list). I think I could fit all the supplies in one of those enormous Tupperware tubs:
Wired Magazine has a more comprehensive list, but I fear it involves just about everything in the house.
*Hot pot is not an item on the emergency list. It takes electricity.
As I was saying last week to GhostGirl, I tried to get into Mad Men on DVD, but if I wanted to watch people smoke for an hour and act like assholes, I’d go to a bar. However, here’s an article in the LA Times about the relationship between Dan Draper on Mad Men and his secretary (later copywriter), Peggy Olson, Mad Men Makes Soul Match, that makes me think my judgment was hasty. Basically, the article makes the point that sometimes the most fulfilling, most helpful, most soulful relationships at work are matches between coworkers that are mostly philosophical in nature, such as the relationshpi between Dan and Peggy:
Some pairings aren’t romantic at all; instead they share something deeper, a life philosophy. The AMC show’s most powerful example, suggested in only a few strokes, is advertising master Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and underling copywriter Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss). These two are kindred spirits, professional allies, soldiers marching for a keep-it-to-yourself society in starched collars — hers Peter Pan, his from Brooks Brothers. Both thrive in the impersonal atmosphere of the ad agency, where imagination helps.
Perhaps I’ll have to watch a bit more as I’m intrigued by this sort of workplace relationship. And you’ll recall, this was also discussed under Work Spouse, Work Spouse Redux, and, to a lesser extent, Do You Have a Best Friend at Work?
Look what was on PostSecret this morning:
All right, ‘fess up commenters!
(In case you can’t read it, it says “I secretly love my work spouse.”)
I just took the “What Were You Born to Do?” quiz on Facebook, with the result of “Sportsman/Woman.”
Clearly, I should be writing this column and not taking dubiously constructed quizzes on Facebook, particularly since my husband just expired from hysterical laughter. Perhaps the result came from my desire for everybody to get along?
I thought the Five Signs You’re About to Be Fired were the sorts of things that we should all be aware of.
Here’s a brief summary of five warning signs:
1. Your boss flat out tells you that you’re going to be fired.
2. You’re getting “feedback” in writing. You know how it goes: document, document, document.
3. You feel increasingly hassled by your boss.
4. You feel increasingly micromanaged.
5. You feel ignored by your boss.
There are other signs, of course. Would you like to suggest any?
I have to say that I don’t live in fear of getting a spaghetti pie at work as the author of this article does. I actually did not know what spaghetti pie was, and, now that I do, I will say that my Italian-American side finds it to be an abomination. And completely unnecessary.
That said, the rest of the article about The Obese Office is great and includes a manifesto for healthful office eating and tips for making healthful eating choices at work, including:
Take a Brain Break- Working without a break is unhealthy, as well. Your brain goes on autopilot. Once again, productivity drops. Meditate. If you have to (I did), go to the ladies’ room and close your eyes for five minutes. Do some deep breathing exercises.
Drink More Water - Drinking really helps. We often think we are hungry, when we are in fact thirsty. Try flavoring a 1.5 liter bottle of water with a little Crystal Light. (All that water provides an opportunity to go to the bathroom and meditate!)
Find a Buddy - Support and company is always a good thing. Find someone to join you and you can buck the system together.
A Food Gift - When someone gives you a box of chocolate or a spaghetti pie, and they know you are losing weight, refrain from hurting them. Simply smile and say as you push the spaghetti pie back in their direction, “Oh thanks so much, but you know, spaghetti pies aren’t a part of my food plan. I appreciate the thought and would really love some fresh fruit. Why not bring it tomorrow?”
There’s that spaghetti pie again.
I’ve been rearranging my office space, and I no longer have an in-box, just a calendar and pens. That’s all right with me as I didn’t use an in-box. I try to immediately process paperwork so that nothing piles up.
However, here’s an interesting post on the usefulness of the in-box.
Do you have an in-box? Do you use it? How?
Well, this just makes my heart ache. This is the local high school, where (presumably) our offspring will go, and where student Jeremiah Lasater killed himself in the restroom.
The descriptions of what was going on in his life seem utterly agonizing:
But the grief was mixed with dismay because some parents and students said they knew Lasater was being bullied at school, taunts that some insisted school administrators were aware of and ignored.
Lasater didn’t fight back, he just took the abuse, said Caleb Neale, 14.
“Everyone picked on him a lot because he was kind of nerdy,” said Caleb, sporting a 51, Lasater’s number on the school’s junior varsity football team.
Michael Daly, one of Lasater’s former special education teachers, said the teen had endured teasing and bullying for years.
Daly said he fears the teen finally just had enough.
“He didn’t go with a bunch of bullets and try to kill others. He went with one bullet and killed himself,” said Daly, who taught Lasater in the eighth grade at the district’s High Desert School. “He didn’t try to hurt others. He was tired of hurting, himself.”
The LA Times has a short series of profiles of people who have used cancer as a catalyst for change in their work lives. And guess what? They’re not working more. They’re doing what they feel called to do with meaningful work.
I might be able to accuse the LA Times of beating a dead horse because they do write about individualized health care plans quite a bit. But as a small business owner who has had one of these terrible plans, and participated in this particular health care racket, I think the more attention brought to them the better.
Why are these plans so bad?
Here’s my personal list:
a. the deductibles are much higher (e.g., $5000+) than for plans through employers
b. the benefits are lower (and often non-existent) than for plans through employers
c. insurance companies cherry pick who they cover and reject the rest (God help you find insurance once you are rejected by one company—it’s the equivalent to being blackballed for life. And remember if you’ve had a C-section, you will be automatically rejected.)
d. the rates increase drastically as you age (e.g., I had the nerve to turn 35. God help me.)
e. insurance companies charge more if you disclose conditions (e.g., I saw a therapist three times four years ago as I left a terrible job. I got charged 25% more for the premium because of this. Three times, mind you. Three times.)
f. insurance companies will cancel your policy if you actually dare to use the insurance (e.g., pregnancy, cancer, migraines, indigestion)—it’s illegal to do this, and yet they do it all the time.
g. these plans are scarcely regulated at all (smart, huh?)
And on an electoral vote, when I evaluate how a candidate supports small businesses, the primary way I do that is not by how much they want to tax me, but how much they want to help with my health care problem.
Read more stories about individualized health care plans here.
The LA Times has a list of the top ten celebrity fan disses, an interesting reflection on how ingratitude is perceived by fans (or how self-respect and honesty are perceived). I see Tori Amos….
A while back, someone asked me about labor conditions in Turkey, so I’ve been on the look out for related stories. Here’s one: Workers in Turkey who sandblast jeans are at risk of contracting silicosis.
Hundreds of workers in Turkey are exposed to the deadly disease silicosis simply because they were hired to manually sandblast denim in makeshift illegal workshops where the health and well-being of laborers were disregarded and safety gear ignored, activists say.
Industry analysts put the number of people who work or had worked in the past in sandblasting jobs at around 10,000 to 15,000. Most workers who landed in denim workshops came to big cities in search of jobs and were forced to work in hazardous conditions. Aged between 15 and 25, they primarily came from Turkey’s central, eastern and southeastern cities of Bingöl, Ad?yaman, Diyarbak?r and Sivas.
This seems like a very familiar story. Change the product, change the country, but the working conditions for those who are poor and desperate seem not to change.
Lego, the toy company, heads for a record year in profits as parents seek to buy non-Chinese made goods:
Lego says that its sales are up 30 per cent in the UK so far this year and is on track to hit an annual turnover of £95 million, which would be a record.
Marko Ilincic, the British managing director, said: “In the credit crunch it is all about trusted brands. Last year the toy industry was dogged by the Chinese product recalls. We are helped by the fact that our toys are made in eastern Europe mostly.”
Hmmm…mostly?
I think I have finally consumed a sufficient amount of caffeine to write this, so here goes.
Today, it’s all about food. (Possibly, it’s all about how you shouldn’t be eating when you read this?)