Today’s theme is: Keystone Cops!
I now know that the exact value of a police hat in New Zealand is $78.17. And that the man would not have stolen them if he was sober. Natch.
For the billionth time, if you are going to stage some sort of mock workplace violence as part of a joke, drill, or in this case class lesson, please warn people first, because it is not the panicking people who call police that are the idiots in this situation.
I am completely angered by this story of a nurse who was handcuffed for following procedure. A police officer asked her to draw blood as part of a sobriety check. When she stated that the alleged drunk needed to be admitted first, she was handcuffed and hauled outside.
Two more cases of cops making asses of themselves: undercover drug officers caught playing Wii during a raid, and Bagelgate.
And finally, in Florida, garbage men and other “mobile professionals” are being trained to fight crime. I’m loving the phrase “mobile professionals.”
Wow, we just started getting a torrential downpour. Time to put buckets under the leaks in my roof. Tune in next week!
Today, it’s all about duality.
Nudity in the workplace, two different ways:
Seems that some off-duty police officers decided to have a Chinese Firedrill (hey, I don’t make up the racist names) — naked.
On the other side of the coin, a couple is suing Walmart, where photo counter employees turned them in for having nude photos of their children taking a bath. While I totally agree that the charges were ridiculous, I wonder if they have ever heard of digital cameras and home photo printers.
Cops and Robbers:
This week I found articles about a well-dressed elderly man with an oxygen tank who robbed a bank, and a man who was impersonating a cop in order to get through traffic, and pulled over the wrong guy — the mayor.
Alternatively, I could contrast that first story with the story of an elderly man who is actually earning his keep the traditional way–as a bartender. He’s 97 years old and he plans to be there until the place closes.
Positive and Negative:
Finally, here is the story of a woman using her powers for good, and one about two women using their powers for evil. Or at least for something rude and obnoxious.
Retroactively announced theme of the week: nice move, dumbass!
The key word of this article is the word “eventually.” As in, just how long were people watching p*rn in Walmart before somebody spoke up?
Speaking of stupid moves by employees, I am hoping this guy didn’t let a passenger drive a LIRR train on one of the days my parents were here. (Wrong train line… whew!)
Oooh! Ooooh! Another stupid move. I think we have our theme for the day. I’m going to go and update my header: When holding a safety drill in which employees will be held at gunpoint, you MIGHT want to let them in on the plan. Just a thought.
Here’s a meme I was completely unaware of. The “Lying Down Game” sounds stupid to me. And their employers agreed.
If you are employed by a public school, you probably shouldn’t cart a bus load of students over to your church to be baptized. I think that’s only okay in Texas.
Let these all serve as warnings to you. You’re welcome.
I just wrote the most horrendously huge check last week to put my baby girl in daycare. That’s why it comes as absolutely no surprise to me that this woman who ran an illegal daycare was able to afford a Jaguar and a 7,600-square-foot home with an indoor swimming pool and indoor basketball court.
There’s the traditional plumber’s crack, and then there is exposing your genitals to multiple women while claiming to have burned one’s self (while fixing plumbing?)
Requiring a thumbprint from a non-customer who is trying to cash a check at your bank may sound perfectly reasonable until you encounter someone who has no arms. At which point you might want to consider having alternatives?
A Tampa Bay Rays employee planted a fake bomb at Tropicana Field. As a practical joke. We’ve seen stuff like this before but the stupidity of some people never ceases to astound me.
I have a sort of random fondness for Fritz Coleman, weatherman… but never would I believe that God wants me to harass him. But hey, her book sounds, um, fascinating.
Workers for a Harrisburg company had their health insurance premiums subtracted from their paychecks by their employer, who then did some sort of magic trick with the premiums, and did not pay the entirety.
Workers now have no health insurance (and didn’t have any for months), and are supposed to retroactively reimburse the insurer.
Somehow I doubt that is going to happen.
There is very little information in this article or photo essay to really explain Harvard’s new brand of clothing (coming soon!), but I found this T-shirt in the photo essay hilarious. Clearly someone raided my wardrobe. From 1979. And the vacant-eyed models sporting Harvard apparel are equally funny.
If you’ve been a young adult recently (or currently are), you are probably not surprised that 30% of the uninsured are young adults, working adults who are not offered insurance through their employers.
From Healthcare reform’s biggest fans: young adults:
Adults 18 to 29 are the group most supportive of President Obama’s plan to overhaul healthcare, according to a recent poll by SurveyUSA. They are also the age group that most supports creating a government-run health insurance option.
Young people account for 30% of the uninsured population, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research foundation. They are least likely to be offered health insurance through employment benefits — just 53% of working young adults are eligible for employer-based coverage. And since their incomes tend to be low, buying coverage on their own is usually too expensive.
Experts disagree as to whether healthcare reform will help young adults. Though frankly, if you’re allowed to stay on your parents healthcare until an older age, and allowed to have a government plan, if you are poor or almost poor, I don’t see how this can hurt.
Well, I am beginning this post at 9:45 am. We’ll see what time the baby allows me to finish it.
Meanwhile, I used the hiatus to purge all of my old links. We’re starting fresh, and I’m trying to stay a little more on topic than I have in the past. How long will that last? I dunno.
*The interesting part of this article for me was actually the office rumor mill aspect: Business tycoon’s wife has affair and two children with his business partner.
*The review process is often a painful experience for both manager and employee. But it’s never been THIS painful in my personal experience: Boss beaten with baseball bat after giving poor performance review.
*”I’ll show you the size of my tee!”: Director of Planning and Development fired after exposing himself to woman on golf course.
*I just don’t get why this woman has to dress up as a Catholic schoolgirl while on a charity walk to work.
*If this man was my employee, I would fire him for being an idiot: Trapped in an elevator, man calls his boss rather than 911.
*And finally, the chuckle of the day: Passive-aggressive notes about store closures.
Remember that the cheese loved you more than you loved it. (Woo hoo! Only 15 minutes and the baby is still asleep! This means I can squeeze in another cup of coffee.)
Apparently female managers are 137 percent more likely to be sexually harassed than their male counterparts:
Even Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the primary investigator on the study, was surprised by the findings.
“It’s sort of a paradox,” she says. “You would expect that having that status and power over other employees would protect you from that behavior.”
Turns out it doesn’t, and McLaughlin’s conclusion is that “because of gender norms, people are still not accepting women in power positions.”
Today in WWN: Discrimination in the Workplace
If you are craving White Castle after the walk-in area has closed for the night, and you are handicapped, do not try to use the drive-in with your motorized scooter. It’s not a licensed vehicle and you won’t be served. On the other hand I am pretty sure you can get a ticket for DUI. (And, I might note, given the excessive greasiness of White Castle slyders, they might just be doing you a favor anyway.)
Meanwhile, if you are missing an arm, don’t go to Burger King, because they won’t cut your hamburger in half for you. Because it’s a liability issue of course. (This has got to be the most pathetic excuse ever, by the way.)
Here’s a brief story about a taco truck believed to be the target of a hate crime as it was burned down by molotov cocktails.
And finally, a councilman is angered by a hot dog stand that hires convicts. Because it seems “Misdemeanor Weiners” don’t strike him as funny.
Oh god I’m so hungry.
Lacking any sort of cohesive theme this week, I decided to pick some stories I bookmarked that are just plain over the top weird.
Here’s a story I don’t quite understand. Something about a clock tower, and a guy climbing up to do some maintenance, and then falling off the ladder in shock when he discovers a dead body up there. They never tell us who the dead guy was, and there’s this sort of weird sentence wherein the injured man is referred to in the past tense by an anonymous source. Presumably the dead man was not named Doc Brown, though.
I’m sure the police officers in charge of dealing with this incident will be telling the story at parties for years to come. Drunk guy, wrecked car, deciding to tow it (upside down) using a tractor, and it all ends up in Otter Creek.
I wish there was actual footage of a plane eating a luggage container but sadly there isn’t. A “slight problem” indeed.
It must have been extremely disconcerting to open a seemingly new wallet only to find ten human teeth inside. I just really want to know how they got in there. This would be a great jumpng off point for a creative writing exercise.
And finally, this could probably fit under harassment, but it’s just so what-the-effy that I put it here. A woman is hounded out of her job at a Muslim school because parents believe her to be a man–despite a doctor’s certificate to the contrary. I can’t decide if the parents knew she was a woman and were just being assholes because they are so against women wearing pants, or if they seriously thought that she was a man.
All that confusion is making me tired. Time for a nap.
We’re having some budget problems in California, mainly because we cap our property taxes on the price the house was originally assessed for, and not what it’s worth (though at this point, that’s about the same price for many of us). So we have no money as a state, which is ridiculous.
State employees have been told to take time off and are paid less for it, but it seems the employees can’t quite take the time off without feeling guilty or fearing for losing their own jobs:
Mr. Becht, who has managed to take two of his eight furlough days, said he was often overwhelmed on the front line dealing with customers at the motor vehicle office. He works about an hour of overtime a day to keep up with the crush of customers. Work is more stressful than ever, he said.
“I really don’t blame the management at our local level,” said Mr. Becht, who took a 9.2 percent cut in pay several months ago. “I understand they can’t let three or four people off when you’re already understaffed.”
But of the furlough, he added: “It’s not doing what it was designed to do. We were imagining three-day weekends. There was some optimism. It was a trade-off for sure, but people were O.K. The mood now, I would say, is down. People are working in fear because they don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
Today’s Theme: Workplace Robberies
The best part about this robbery comes at the end. It reads like a Kevin Smith film:
Suspect: “Give it to me, all of it. C’mon, c’mon, hurry.”
Victim: “Whatever, dude.”
Washington appears to be plagued by robberies in fact. This one involves a board spiked with nails and a decidedly less mellow clerk.
Meanwhile, in Dallas, the weapon of choice was a sword. Why do they always want cigarettes? The conclusion here is that smoking leads you to rob places.
As a woman I am strongly against the “she was asking for it” defense. However, when a lone woman delivery driver agrees to venture out after midnight in response to a suspicious call… It’s kind of expected that she will get beaten and robbed by a gang of teens. On the other hand she sounds kind of bad-ass going right back to work and refusing medical treatment.
Meanwhile, if you as a fired employee are going to go back to your former workplace and rob it, make sure your mask’s eyeholes are small enough to actually disguise who you are.
And just to make you feel better about humanity, here’s an exact-opposite-of-robbery story: A store owner returns the quarter of a million dollars (in cash!) that he found on the street, that turned out to most likely be from an armored truck.
In order to avoid hiring someone who might fall into a sort of “moral hazard,” credit checks are becoming increasingly more popular (33% of employers surveyed use them) as part of a hiring process. The thinking is, of course, if you’re in debt up to your ears, you may be a sloppy human being and/or steal to cover your debts. I’m not sure there is anything other than suspicion to justify this conclusion, but there it is. And, as a result, people who are unemployed, and in debt, have a much more difficult time landing a job because of the required credit check.
The Myth of the Two-Income Family raises some interesting thoughts:
*two-incomes today are equivalent to one income in the 1970s (with some caveats);
*the United States is “shockingly behind” the rest of industrialized nations in terms of maternity care and parental leave; and
*yet there is just about total silence in Academia and beyond on the issue.
Today’s theme: Stupid Workplace Policies
Please vote for whichever one you think is the stupidest.
It’s interesting to see what professions may be going extinct (providing you’re not in that profession!).
Realtors in California are finding it very hard going. Not only have home prices decreased dramatically, many buyers see no need for their services.
What other professions do you think will decline? There’s some hints here in terms of predictions about the future.
I’m going to be brief today, because my hips hurt and I’m tired and my husband appears to have food poisoning or maybe he just ate way too much of the leftover potatoes au gratin.
I have three articles that I’ve been saving for a rainy day. They don’t really fit in with anything else, except that they are about the economy and they are mostly irritating:
In Man’s Unique Job Search is Sign of the Times we read about a Florida man who is looking for work by standing around on a street corner with a posterboard advertising his unemployed status. Judging from a Googled profile on LinkedIn, it may well have worked.
In Recipe for Adventure: 52 Weeks, 52 Friends, I see a guy who would earn a smack upside the head and not a couch from me. But then, I’m not really a fan of anyone who chucks a perfectly good job in this economy and then sponges off his friends in the guise of being artistic and bohemian.
I could have sworn this was already written about in this blog, but I didn’t find anything in my search so perhaps Ms T and I merely bitched about it via email. Can Two People Eat on $67 a Week? Oh, it’s so difficult to give up the mesclun and butchered duck legs, I know.
Okay, I’m hobbling off to make some rice for the invalid.
Here are a few mini-summaries about workplace articles that I’m reading.
Tomorrow a bill will be introduced that would guarantee 7 paid sick days for employees at companies with more than 15 employees. We are the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have guaranteed short and long-term sick leave.
Did you know that bosses are often unaware of how closely they are watched by subordinates? Apparently other primates do this too.
And, of course, according to 7 Ways to Be Happier at Work, it’s very possible to be happier in the workplace, you just have to decide to do so. It’s easy enough to say….
Could anything be more pleasing than giant pink pie charts for results of an office romance survey? I don’t think so. And by “pleasing” I actually mean gag-able.
Today’s theme: Getting Fired
If a teacher tells a student who attempted suicide that his attempt was weak, and to “carve deeper next time,” isn’t that enough to get him fired? Apparently not.
How about making a student clean up the clog they created in a toilet using paper towels? Possibly.
What else can you get fired for…talking about buying medical marijuana for your aunt who has breast cancer is not a good idea, if you are a police dispatcher. I have to say despite being pro-legalization, I’m with the employers on this… the first rule of Pot Club is, you don’t tell all your coworkers.
You can also get fired for getting caught riding a 66-mile endurance race when you’ve been out on sick leave for more than 90 days.
As a patient, the last thing I would want is for one of the nurses to get laid off mid-surgery. I’m just saying.
And finally, the last thing you want to come home to after you get fired from your job? Your house, on fire.
And on that happy and uplifting note, have a great week everyone!