“In June 2010 Denver police officer Derrick Saunders was sentenced to 5 days in jail for driving 143 mph while drunk. The manager of safety fired Saunders, but yesterday the Civil Service Commission overturned the decision to fire him, based on ‘discretion and precedence.’” {From: Police officer fired for driving 143 mph while drunk gets his job back – Boing Boing.}
Forget getting back the job, I can’t believe this guy will be allowed to drive a car again.
So, apparently: Mind Wandering Can Boost Your Creativity—But Only After More Intense Brainstorming. That’s good news, I suppose–except that the phrase “mind wandering” tends to trigger the gag reflex of every mid-level manager in the world. Try telling your boss that you’ve just thought really hard about the problem you’re working on, but now you’ve decided to go out and fuck around for a little while so as to actually solve it. Their reaction is sure to be humorous, if not exactly good for your career.
And if you don’t have to work for a boss who gets to decide how you do your job–what are you worried about? You’re probably creative already!
So, so busy right now. The good thing about tackling a huge mountain of goals is the sense of accomplishment that comes from the realization that, in the end, you have managed to accomplish a tremendous amount of stuff. But you need to take a second to look back in order to see it.
And that has not yet happened, this week.
Maybe Saturday I’ll be able to look back on all this and… laugh? Cry? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make a list of all the things I didn’t finish this week that I will have to do when I go back to work.
Work work work.
I had to laugh when I saw this title featured over at Awful Library Books. Help your child pick a career! And you thought that the kids of today were under a lot of pressure to achieve.
On the other hand, though it’s quite out of date, at least that book features some realistic careers. I can’t count the number of kids in my extended family who want to be actors/actresses, which isn’t a problem, until you realize that their parents are taking them seriously. The next ten years are bound to be interesting.
Slashdot asks: Are Any Smart Phones Made Under Worker-Friendly Conditions? As pointed out by one of the commentors there, the answer seems to be no.
But smart phones aren’t a special case. Many of the products we use every day are manufactured by workers laboring under bad, sometimes horrendous, conditions, and from time to time we actually talk about it. Remember the hubbub over Nike’s sweatshops, back in the 90′s? Or Kathy Lee’s? Why do you think that somebody had to invent Fair Trade coffee?
It seems to be a fact of life that if you are a Westerner in a fairly affluent country, it seems there is almost nothing you can buy that is not the product of ethically dubious labor practices (or environmental depredation, come to that).
This creates something akin to the idea of original sin: We of the affluent West are born into a situation where we cannot help but support these questionable practices, because we give the people who employ them our money; because it is difficult to find someone to give it to who doesn’t employ those practices.
It’s inescapable. You will buy things that are not produced ethically, no matter how hard you try not to–sheer volume and lack of transparency ensures that something will slip through the cracks.
This current controversy is just the latest peak in the cycle, where we are all suddenly intensely concerned about global labor practices; but soon enough, the people linking to these stories on Facebook will come to discover how there are mistreated workers behind almost every single consumer product; they will realize how entrenched these foul business practices are; they will grasp the difficulty of trying to be an ethical consumer; they will decide to stop feeling guilty about all of this, and go back to ignoring the issue, until the next time.
One hopes that during each peak of the cycle, some small fraction of the populace becomes permanently attuned to this issue, while the rest of their comrades slough away into complacency. If that is the case, we may yet be able to make the effort required to truly address workers’ rights in a meaningful way.
For now I suspect that by this time next year, this whole issue will be back down to a low murmur amongst many.
Ha! You think cubicles are bad? My workspace at the office is a table. A long, long table that I share with other people. I would give up dessert for a year for a cubicle!
Lifehacker’s guide to beating burnout (the Short Version):
1. Quit shitty job
2. Get perfect job
Okay then!
A new job means building new habits and growing accustomed to new indignities. You just have to get used to it–and the process of getting used to things generally sucks.
I mean, I like where I am. There’s no problem on that score. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have to deal with a whole host of brand new pains in the ass, and I’m still in the callus-building stages of this new chapter in my life. It’s like losing weight, or getting fit: there are no shortcuts. Well, at least none that don’t result in grievous mental or bodily harm.
Speaking of mental calluses: A lot of what I’m dealing with has to do with adjusting my attitudes, and that’s a real bitch, considering my cognitive stubbornness. For example, I tend to think of the time between the moment I wake up in the morning, and the moment I return to my house at night as “lost,” or “stolen,” or “wasted.” That’s bad even when I’m only traveling 45 minutes to and from work every day, but my new commute is looooooooooooong. Seen from the perspective of my old attitude, I might as well be dead for 14 hours out of every weekday.
But life isn’t just the stuff that you want to do, it is, unfortunately, everything that happens to you, even the stuff that goes on when you leave your body for 14 hours everyday. However, trying to maintain a disassociated state for that long is grueling. You have to find little moments to be vulnerable, in secret, where you briefly allow the pain and misery touch your tender, quivering insides. And then you slap yourself in the face until you can’t feel it anymore, and then you’re ready to go back to work!
Life can be vibrant and exciting, if only you’re willing to let yourself experience it, even if you’d rather be buried alive.
Goddamn it. This is exactly the kind of stuff I need to stop thinking if this is going to work. I think there’s something wrong with me.
So, it turns out that most wolves are just opportunistic freeloaders. You can witness a similar pattern with humans in most large office environments.
I enjoy the clever use of physical space as much as anyone, but I have mixed feelings about this hallway work-area featured on Lifehacker. I suppose it’s quite cool really, but it puts me in mind of a temp job that I once worked, where me and my colleagues were placed at a long table in a corridor. And we were meant to be doing phone support. People who walked past either end of our little hallway call center nearly got their eardrums blown out.
