Surviving the Workday

CNN has a list of the top 10 interview mistakes, which includes all sorts of odd behaviors in terms of grooming and hygiene gaffs, some oversharing, some underpreparation, and then plain rudeness:

• Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a “private” conversation.

• Applicant told the interviewer he wouldn’t be able to stay with the job long because he thought he might get an inheritance if his uncle died - and his uncle wasn’t “looking too good.”

• The job seeker asked the interviewer for a ride home after the interview.

• The applicant smelled his armpits on the way to the interview room.

• Candidate said she could not provide a writing sample because all of her writing had been for the CIA and it was “classified.”

• Candidate told the interviewer he was fired for beating up his last boss.

• When the applicant was offered food before the interview, he declined saying he didn’t want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking.

• An applicant said she was a “people person” not a “numbers person” — in her interview for an accounting position.

• During a phone interview the candidate flushed the toilet while talking to hiring manager.

• The applicant took out a hair brush and brushed her hair.

Advice in the article seems pretty obvious.

Honestly, if you are going to make certain arguments, it might be good to spell-check your sign first.

I’ll abstain from Gawker posts for the rest of the week as penance for two today.

 The German edition….

A flash mob of striking department store employees hits Stuttgart and leaves the store in chaos. What’s a flash mob? You’ll have to read the article. And how many times did it take for me to spell Stuttgart correctly? Four.

Workers at a small German computer company were fired for not smoking. Actually, they were fired for complaining about the smoke of coworkers:

“I can’t be bothered with trouble-makers,” [the owner] was quoted saying. “We’re on the phone all the time and it’s just easier to work while smoking. Everyone picks on smokers these days. It’s time for revenge. I’m only going to hire smokers from now on.”

It is a great day when I can write a post involving both employment law and painting with your butt. Basically, an art teacher in Virginia paints with his butt cheeks, and made a video of himself doing that in a thong, and with a Groucho Marx mask, and school officials saw it and fired him (wrongfully so, and they’ve now settled for $65,000) The larger concern here is that your workplace can often try to control your free time to some degree, or at least hold you responsible for advertising your butt painting.

But I so want to try.

I have just now learned that I possess a Secret Power. Read on from Dear Cary to see my Secret Power: 

My mother-in-law put a curse on my husband and me — I believe she couldn’t get through to me and so she attacked him. She cursed that he would never make any money in his life, that he would lose his business, lose his wife, me, and the kids, and be completely destroyed. And to seal the curse, she spat in his face twice.

I’m a very superstitious person and I truly believe that she sealed this curse on him. The reason is that they are Greek and I am not.

And to think no one told me of the power of My Greekness. God, who to spit on first? I’m really a bad spitter; I should probably practice first. Cary’s response is far more compassionate than my own.

Copy editors generally stop writers from looking dumb in print, so it should now be much more interesting to read the LA Daily Journal, which laid-off its entire copy editing staff. The whole thing. No copy editors at the paper. Good luck with that.

There more than half a million realtors in California, but their numbers are declining in the recession as they shift careers. Former realtor Jaime Gutierrez now drives a cab.:

Gutierrez, the cab driver, said he’s glad he had his first career to fall back on. Now, in addition to driving his cab, he has a new second job: a substitute teacher.

He said he figures there will always be a need for subs, even if it doesn’t pay as well as real estate.

“My income level did double,” Gutierrez said of his time in real estate. “But there was a lot of hang time in between paychecks. I was fortunate to have another job to do at nights and weekends to keep the bills paid.”

As with other kinds of independent contracting, the time between starting the work and getting paid can be the biggest challenge to surviving the profession.

In Blue Collar, Bare Cupboard, author Sasha Abramsky describes life for the working poor in communities outside of Eugene, Oregon. What was always called “hungry” by the government has now been categorized as having “very low food security”:

In 2006, the USDA instructed government agencies to no longer refer to this group as being hungry. The change came about after a Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies reported it could not conclusively determine whether people who couldn’t afford to buy food actually experienced “discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation.”

As a result, the 11 million Americans who cannot afford to stock their houses with food are now classfied as experiencing “very low food security.”

In the decades since the Great Depression of the 1930s, this category would have been made up largely of the long-term unemployed, the homeless, perhaps the mentally ill and other marginalized groups.

These days, however, increasingly it is the working poor—whose wages have stagnated, whose cost of living has gone up with higher gas, food and healthcare expenses, and whose time is now spent standing in line at food banks.

 Scott mentioned giving to Friends of the World Food Program. I would add (an addition, mind you, not substitution) your local food pantry to the list.

Via Heart Happy

There’s a fun article in the LA Times about LA’s Brewery district, which is an industrial area inhabited by artists and gardeners who have literally survived (and thrived) by rescuing plants to create an oasis in which to create art. There’s also a slideshow of art and plants and homes.

When you think of a service dog, you may think of a dog helping a visually impaired person to navigate. Or perhaps a seizure alert dog. However, there are a number of other ways in which dogs can perform as service dogs including Psychiatric Service Dogs for people with Major Depressive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Autism, Anxiety Disorder, and Schizophrenia. I mention this after coming across the story of Wal-Mart kicking out a service dog-in-training (Why is Wal-Mart always the non-example of decent behavior? Why?) and remembering a story of a fellow writer in workshop regarding how her service dog often gets her kicked out of businesses because she doesn’t look obviously blind.

 You can read a story about the need for and about the work of psychiatric service dogs here.

A new study analyzed data on alcohol use by workers in various industries and found that workers in the hospitality industry were more likely to have issues with alcohol:

According to a new report by Ensuring Solutions to Alcohol Problems at The George Washington University Medical Center, “Workplace Screening & Brief Intervention: What Employers Can and Should Do About Excessive Alcohol Use”, alcohol-related problems are disproportionately represented in American business, with employees in the hospitality, construction and wholesale industries significantly more likely to be dependent on or abuse alcohol.

You can find other industries here (scroll down). It looks like workers in public administration have the least risk of issues with alcohol, which leads me to wonder if there’s a correlation between lack of job stability and alcohol use. Just wondering.

so here’s a quiz: The Work/Life Balance Quiz from the Canadian Mental Health Association.

I’m an 11.

I win! I win!

The Client Analyzer Tool allows you to enter basic information on your clients and discover the hidden vampires. I think of vampires as the clients that appear to be attractive on the surface, but stress you out and don’t pay on time. I went through a period of time about six months ago where I was forced to drop clients, and sort of intuitively did what this calculator does by figuring out which folks were using a lot of my time and energy and not providing much income.

Via the Anti 9 to 5 Guide

From The Tension Builds (It’s Almost Monday): 

THE feeling is familiar: you are savoring the last of a leisurely Sunday lunch or a long walk in the park when you abruptly realize that your weekend will be over in a matter of hours. In an instant, you are deep in what John Updike called the “chronic sadness of late Sunday afternoon.” As you envision the to-do pile on your desk, the meetings on your calendar, and that trip to Topeka on Tuesday, your mood shifts again, your muscles tense and your head begins to ache.

I’m a bit too late for this feeling as it’s well into Monday morning, but thought it was worth sharing.

with daily jet travel.

Question to the Governor: Governor, also global warming came up in discussions today and there have been recent reports coming out that you’re flying up and down the state as much as on a daily basis in a jet that puts out a lot of global warming emissions. So how do you reconcile your public rhetoric on global warming versus your personal lifestyle choices?

Answer from the Governer: Are you always that positive? (Laughter) What a positive guy. I explained that one already. To me it’s very important that I serve the people of California, but also at the same time that I serve my family. And so in order to do both I fly two or three times a week up here to Sacramento and fly back again so I can be at night with my family, can do the homework with the kids, can spend time with my wife and everything, which is extremely important. I promised that to them and I promised to the people of California I would take care of the job. And that’s what I do. That’s why I fly up to Sacramento and all over the state. (Applause)

It’s so helpful for the governor to mock reporters in the name of service.

Putting Some Fun Back Into 9 to 5 explores how different workplaces attempt to be more fun. Now part of this reminds me of the forced fun in The Office, which is, of course, no fun at all. And the article does a fair job of pointing out that what is fun to some of us is no fun to others. I also recall writing about an Attack Monkey, who was regarded as hilarious by some (read the comments), and not so funny by others.

Interestingly enough (to me), the notion of pranking keeps coming up:

And then there is Dr. Robert Woo, an oral surgeon of Auburn, Wash., who replaced two of his dental assistant’s teeth with implants. The woman’s family, as it happened, raised potbellied pigs, and she often talked about them with co-workers in the office.

While the patient was under anesthesia for the implants, Dr. Woo played a practical joke of sorts. He installed two bridges, which he had designed to look like boar tusks (which Dr. Woo must have thought were similar to potbellied pig tusks), and then took pictures of his sedated employee. By the time she awoke, proper new teeth were in place.

But the assistant learned what had happened when the photos surfaced at an office party.

She quit and sued, then settled out of court for $250,000.

And you’ll recall yesterday’s post on the Los Angeles Fire Department and the history of litigation related to discrimination, some of which involved pranking.

It seems important to consider empathy when pranking. How would you feel if you were medicated, fitted with pig tusks, and then photographed? Likewise, how would you feel if you were tricked into eating dog food? Not so fun.

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.

I was thinking about why exactly Children are not decor sickened me so much, and think I’ve identified part of the reason. The families, as described in the article, seemed to fit into the narcissistic family model, which coincidentally relates to the book I’m reading right now, The Narcissistic Family. (more…)

It’s the last day to vote in the UU Blog Awards. You can vote for Surviving the Workday. Or not. You don’t need to be a UU to vote in the awards, just a reader.

News  Some stereotypes about women at work sound a wee bit familiar for those of us in the workplace (and watching the primary races). There’s been a huge increase in the number of discriminatory remarks in UK workplaces.  And people had some strong opinions about guns in the workplace parking lot.

Notes  Time off to vote in the United States isn’t a federal matter as much as an issue of state law. You can check your state here. And managers should pay attention to conflict in the workplace because it may be the key to preventing workplace violence.

Religion Books on Buddhism and the workplace seem especially effective because of the emphasis on impermanence.

Spirituality  Sharing information is not usually gossip, and one of the best ways to know what’s going on at work. And February is best understood as a time of transition rather than a gray gray month of despair.