If you have an employed teenager, make sure you read the Five Worst Teen Jobs. There are some accounts of the fatalities involved in each profession, and let’s just say I see a trend: young males + machinery of all sorts = increased risk of injury.
I’m pondering the choices at the freelance folder for Five Mini-Vacations that Won’t Cost Much or Disrupt Your Schedule:
- Day at the park — Many cities and towns have parks that are open to the public. Often, admission to a city park is free or you can enter a state or national park (in the U.S.) or a low fee. Pack a picnic lunch and plan to spend the day exploring nature. Be sure to take advantage of any natural features (such as swimming) at the park that you visit.
- Movie night — Pop some popcorn, rent a few of your favorite movies, turn out the lights, and have your own movie marathon night right in your own home. Laugh, cry, and cheer for some of the best actors of all times (your favorites). Be sure to turn off the phone and any instant message services you subscribe to. For one evening, don’t give a thought to your freelancing business.
- Be a tourist in your own town — We often don’t visit the “attractions” located near to our homes. You can save a fortune in transportation costs and hotel bills by playing the tourist in your own town. Grab a list of local tourist attractions from the Internet and make that your guide for a day of fun. Be sure to bring your camera for those all-important tourist snapshots.
- Get active — Spend a day focusing on your favorite sport. Not only does physical activity relieve stress, it’s also good for you. As freelancers (and web workers), sometimes we live as though we are virtually chained to our computer monitors. I don’t need to tell you that’s not very healthy. So, grab your golf clubs or phone your tennis partner and spend an active morning (or afternoon) for a change.
- Volunteer your services — While this might not seem like a mini-vacation at first glance, volunteering can actually help you to relax and feel better about yourself. To find a place to volunteer, phone your favorite charity and ask how you can help. Also, many larger cities have volunteer networks that can match your specific skills with a need.
We’ve been doing a lot more of the local “staycations” on the weekend, which aren’t so much novel as they’re things we should probably do anyway (local parks, anyone?)
Any other ideas for cheap and non-disruptive ways to get away?
I can’t recommend any of these products in Groom for Success as I have no idea what is in most of them (Spray this chemical on your skirt, and it won’t stick to your legs, just never mind that cancer you get in five years), but the overall idea seems like a good one: details matter. You don’t want scuffed shoes or bad breath to be an interview killer. I also like keeping some emergency supplies like these in the car.
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.
I bought a little violet cardigan at Brooks Brothers many years ago as an alternative to a jacket, and I’ve really never fallen out of love with it. Now cardigans are everywhere in the workplace, as you can see in Bill Cunningham’s On the Streeet photo essay as women walk to work. It’s close to the perfect wardrobe piece.
Hint: We have no idea.
Dean Dad has an excellent post on the concept of the next wave of jobs:
I’ll admit to considerable uneasiness anytime I hear arguments like “X is the wave of the future. We need a program to prepare students for all those jobs!” Partially that’s because I entered grad school in the early 1990’s, prepared to capitalize on the Great Wave of Retirements; we all know how that wave turned out. Partially it’s because I worked at Proprietary U during and after the dot-com boom, so I saw an entire industry go from “desperate for talent” to “desperate to survive” almost overnight. Partially it’s because I’m seeing our Nursing grads suddenly struggle to find work, after many years during which new grads could write their own tickets. And partially it’s because so many of the giant corporations of my youth are unrecognizable now, if they still exist at all. (Government Motors? Really?)
If I knew what the hot industry would be five years from now, I’d buy stock in it. I don’t, and neither does anybody else. I read somewhere that at Clinton’s economic summit in 1992, nobody used the word “internet.” (You’d think Al Gore would have!) Back then, Kodak thought its major competition was Polaroid. Remember Polaroid? Hell, remember Kodak?
He also delves into the differences between job training and economic development.
Here are some tips for identifying and preventing burnout. They are specific to therapists, but good ideas for the rest of us too.
If you want to work for the city of Bozeman, Montana, you have to make your on-line networking usernames AND passwords available.
Aee! Because why would anyone possibly want any privacy?
And, thanks, Scott!
The New York Times has launched a business blog for small business owners. The first post is on the stimulus package and COBRA and unemployment insurance, which I’m pretty sure most of us misunderstand. However, once you understand it, you’ll understand why many small businesses have trouble affording actual employees and end up using contractors.
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.
A while ago, I recommended this format and content for a cover letter, and you’ll find that it comes up again in The Best Cover Letter I Ever Received. Short and not a word wasted.
Would you bike to work if you had access to a shower?
Take the Treehugger survey, and let me know in comments if The Shower Issue is what’s holding you back.
What can I say? It’s not an easy thing.
While on the East Coast, a suit may be a necessity, on the West Coast, a suit may disqualify you entirely. You may look great on paper, but like a stodgy old woman in that suit. And by “you,” I mean “me.”
At first, when I clicked through the photos of job interview outfits, I made little clucking noises of disapproval (yes, much like a stodgy old woman. And I do like the first suit, but I own it in dark brown). The more I thought about the outfits, the more wrong I thought I was.
Dressing for jobs interviews requires understanding the culture of the job:
Tammy Hammond, director of recruiting for action sports brand Quiksilver — where the top execs wear flip-flops to shareholder meetings — said, “Professional means something else to us. If you show up in a suit, it’s apparent that you don’t understand the culture. And for us, cultural fit is 80% of what we’re looking for. There are a lot of people who can do the job.”
And while banking and finance jobs are still formal attire required, other industries, particularly creative ones, are all about how you look, and you don’t want to look like a square. And by using the word square, I have shown that I am one.
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.”
My blog has been slow and quiet for a while as I’ve been thinking about what to do.
I’ve worked as an editor, writer, and occasional project manager in educational publishing (a.k.a The Textbook Industry) since 1997. As an industry, it appears to be re-envisioning itself in a slow and painful way that doesn’t generate a whole lot of work for me and my colleagues. Some people think professors need to be in charge of content and some people think that good content is already free on the Internet. So why would we need textbooks (and editors and actual writers of them)?
Part of what seems to be going on is the “all or nothing” thinking that I hate. Something is wrong in education, so it’s time to throw out the textbooks. And in my own experience, good teaching and learning happens when there are hands-on experiences, reading about stuff, discussing stuff with others, writing about what we’re learning, building stuff, calculating stuff, AND textbooks provide some of that (not all of it). Textbooks aren’t the beginning and ending of learning, and shouldn’t be used that way. They aren’t the God given truth. But they are useful tools.
At least they were for some of us.
So while it’s a bit silent here, I’ll be thinking, and feel free to read the last three years worth of posts on surviving the workday, as I figure out how to survive.
Given some of my mail, I believe that often we do not understand what exactly is making us hesitate to take a job offer. I’d like to offer an educated guess: culture.
While there are at least four things you should consider when evaluating an offer (salary, culture, management, daily tasks), culture is the one that is hardest to identify. It’s everything from what people are wearing, to how people are seated, to how late they stay during the weekday. Culture is the reason often given by people when they discriminate (e.g., “So and So didn’t fit into our culture”).
So when you interview, pay attention to the culture. It’s more important than you might think.
you appear not to help so much.
There is some “wisdom” in career planning and job counseling that if you are similar to your boss in terms of sex, you will have an easier time. This appears to not be true, especially for female employees with female bosses.
A recent study illustrated that the gender of the boss affected the experience that the employee had. And, of course, this is the experience of the employee, and not necessarily about the experience of the boss. Some findings include:
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- Women who had only one female boss reported more psychological distress (such as trouble sleeping, difficulty focusing on work, depression and anxiety) and physical symptoms (such as headaches, stomach pain or heartburn, neck and back pain and tiredness) than women who worked for one male boss.
- Women who reported to a mixed-gender pair of supervisors also reported more of these symptoms than their peers who worked for a single male boss.
- Men who worked for a single supervisor, regardless of the supervisor’s gender, had similar levels of distress.
- Men who worked for a mixed-gender pair had fewer mental and physical symptoms than those working for a lone male supervisor.
Your experience?
You know what illegal question I often get asked in job interviews?
What’s your nationality?
I get that question probably because my last name is Greek, and was shortened at some point during the immigration process so it ends in “son,” which suggests it’s Scandanavian, perhaps, but I sure don’t look Scandanavian.
I usually just say “Greek” if someone asks. And then we move on. However, asking about nationality and ethnicity during the hiring process is a no-no. So how do you answer those questions if the question is far more than you’re willing to answer? Legal Ways to Answer Illegal Questions gives some great tips.
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.
We talked last week about the questions that an interviewer should avoid asking, but what about the information that the interviewee chooses to disclose? How can that help or hurt?
We’ve all been with someone who discloses too much personal information, and it can be overwhelming (What are we supposed to do with the information?). But in a job interview, too much disclosure can be the kiss of death. That said, sometimes you may choose to disclose basic information about identity because the information you reveal will, in turn, reveal certain things about the proposed work environment.
Gay in the Academy is an essay that explores some of the ways to disclose sexual orientation during the search and interview process for a position in academia. It’s worth a read, as are the comments. Just to be clear, I’m not advising anyone disclose anything. But the essay is a thought-provoking exploration of what we gain by sharing.