There is little chance that meteorologists can solve the mysteries of weather until they gain an understanding of the mutual attraction of rain and weekends. ~Arnot Sheppard
Hey, minions. I’m seriously exhausted after this week, and a car just drove off a road into a house on the edge of campus so it’s going to be a hectic day. Here are your links, tell me what you’re doing this weekend, and excuse me I’m pretty busy!
Present shock – a fascinating idea, and an excellent interview on the subject. Does anyone suffer from it?
Ever feel link you haven’t accomplished anything with your life? Me too. Here’s some salt for us collectively. (Editor’s note: this kid is seriously cool.)
(Warning, profanity discussed). Some of these need to come back. I think I’ll need to add “Snails!” to my repertoire of in-case-I-stub-my-toe-near-impressionable-children alternatives.
If you have a job without any aggravations, you don’t have a job.
~Malcolm S. Forbes
Uh oh. My time at the PD is winding down and my inhibitions are loosening their grip on me. Either that or the early hours are already affecting me…
A patron came in to contest a ticket, and I went out of my way to try and help him craft an appeal, at his request. I even directed him towards some student groups that are working to change the policy if he wanted to voice his views more broadly. While answering his questions as best I could this 18 year old kid seemed to decide to make me the focal point of his frustrations. He gave me a lecture on the subject of university policy, call me dumb, and interrupted and snapped at me several times. Even the front desk officer was taken aback by this young man. I really hate patrons like this, but I kept it together. Until…
He asked what tone he should strike in his appeal, and I recommended, “Well, I understand you’re angry but I wouldn’t be argumentative with the appeals officer about the policy, just lay out your facts as to why this ticket is undeserved. ”
“Of course I’m not going to talk to him the way I’m talking to you,” he said and rolled his eyes with a terrific sound of disgust. That brief hacking sort of noise teenagers make when you do something “lame.”
My eyebrow shot up. “Then why are you talking to me this way? Why is it appropriate for you to be rude to me, especially since I’ve been trying to help you get out of paying a ticket, but not him? Frankly I don’t appreciate that. ”
His eyes stretched and he sort of mumbled something before he grabbed the map of campus (I’d provided) and marched off without another word. The desk officer gave me a discreet thumbs up.
I’m not proud, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a brief rush of satisfaction! I may turn over a bale of paper next, or run barefoot through the office. The Revolution has arrived! But you know, a sensible sort of one. Properly managed and not too violent, we don’t want to make a fuss.
I scribble this to you, kittens, bleary and cranky from my desk at work. I’ve been here since 6:30am.
After months of applications, a few interviews, unreturned phone calls, and more applications, J. and I figured that there was no work to be had for him around here – not too shocking a revelation, but still pretty unwelcome. We’d decided to head out to the East Coast to spend some quality time with my family, who we don’t get to see often enough, and do whatever odd work we could find out there. Last week we started making concrete plans.
Which is, of course, when J. got a last minute interview and a job offer.
I could just pout. Not because I’m not thrilled and grateful he found summer work, I am! But because this has more or less been the pattern of our lives for the past year – we make a plan, it’s a good plan, we start working towards that plan, and fwoop! The rug is tugged out from underneath us. We’re pros at righting ourselves when our balance is tampered with, but still. I’ll be spending some time out there by myself, and we’ll spend a couple of weeks there together on our way to London, but I was really looking forward to my summer in the woods. Ah well, I’ve already started coming up with some schemes to make up for it.
The only bad part about this job of his is that it starts at 7am, which means I must be deposited at my office with enough time for J. to get to work. He gets the car because his shift ends in the early afternoon and I’ll still have hours of work left. My last month at the PD will have some long hours (and we all know that a morning person, I am not!). On the other hand, I now have another previously untapped hour in which to work on projects. That’s pretty great, to be honest.
It’s just already been a long day, and my trainee is struggling. But it’s Monday so I feel both she and I are entitled.
“Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.” – Maya Angelou
Last time this week is was 70 degrees, bright and clear. Glancing outside my office window right now it’s snowing. Blech.
As always, TGIF! I’ve been doing some intensive training for my replacement this week, which has been rough, but on the other hand J. and I went to a lovely dinner party on Tuesday, we have friends coming over tomorrow evening, and I’m making progress on several of my innumerable projects. Random Spring snowstorms notwithstanding, the winter blahs are behind me I think, and things are looking brighter and brighter. Here are your links, minions, and let me know what you’re up to this weekend:
I may dislike cooking intensely, but I can also make you a magnificent roasted tomato soup from scratch. Chalk another one up to Mum for insisting I avoid this fate.
Lord Byron might have bee “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” but his physician is something more of a sad, ridiculous character.
Seriously? Locally there’s a somewhat unfortunate tendency to treat proposals as if you’re asking someone to prom. J. was the subject of some scolding from female friends when of our proposal they demanded, “How did you do it?!” and his response was, “I asked her and she said yes.” I have no complaints, note.
Fear that your social media presence will die with you? Fear no more, there’s an app for that.
Alas, poor Easter Egg Roll! Fun fact, I participated as a young child when my father was working in DC and still have a wooden egg signed by the then president squirreled away somewhere.
“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” ― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Trust. They seldom spent the energy to make busts in the ancient world of people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Except Caligula – he was cracked. (via)
I’ve been watching a parable in motion the last little while, minions, and the results of pondering on it have been varied.
I’m training my replacement at work. She is a very kind, good natured woman who loves her dogs and is a bit too generous to unappreciative family members. But she is getting old and is increasingly unable to do the job she has now, and the department (in an effort to care for its people) wants to shift her somewhere else without letting her go. It’s a very noble idea and I admire the sentiment behind it, but the application of it has been really frustrating to adapt to. Because, though she is a lovely woman, she lacks some basic work skills that people take for granted these days. I thought I would have to train her on responding to media requests, it turns out I’m teaching her how to cut and paste in electronic documents.
It’s uphill work and sometimes I get frustrated with her lack of focus and memory retention (she is older and not in excellent health), but working with her has been an insight into how I must look coming out of survivalist mode and into a new professional landscape. Here’s the problem I (and a few other friends I’ve talked to about this) am facing. I’m ambitious, I want to work hard, and I want to learn new skills. But I’m mediocre.
I’m not talking about personality or aptitude (although that may be a conversation to be had when my ego is less fragile), I mean that I am indistinguishable in many ways from a lot of other workers.
I work at a university, and every year the incoming class of freshman – though admittedly growing, in my opinion, more loutish every year – have skills that I don’t have. For the purposes of creating and marketing content, there are more ways now than there were when I graduated less than a handful of years ago. These kids understand them almost intuitively because they make up the world they move and operate in. I was born before the internet, the nephews and nieces we visited this evening have known how to operate smartphones since the could scoot haphazardly across the floor. Frankly that same dubious personality and aptitude might be my best selling points currently, because looking over the skills and resumes of friends (to say nothing of these freshmen)…I have got catching up to do!
When I say I’ve been in survivalist mode, I mean it. An entry level job where I have been able to gain some work skills, but precious few for the industry I want to work in, and even fewer local opportunities to pursue them elsewhere. There was no other work to be had when I graduated, and within two months of my graduation work got even harder to find. I was lucky I had the ability to put food in my mouth, so I hunkered down and focused on surviving – I’m only in retrospect realizing how stressed and scary it’s been, just surviving. I see how people get stuck doing it. I’ve always believed that to lever yourself up out of anything, poverty, ignorance, or bad circumstance, required a foothold of some kind, something to push yourself off of. I believe that now more than ever because I’ve been living without a foothold for a long time (with a good education even) and it’s rough. It’s limiting. It doesn’t allow you to pay enough attention to peripheral developments that can help you.
That’s what happened to my trainee. She learned how to do one thing and one thing only. In the meantime things developed (like email and word processors) and she was so busy surviving on her one skill that now she can no longer do it, the road to learning to do something else is a hundred times more challenging for everyone involved.
Moral of the story: never quit adapting, minions. Mediocrity is optional.
To that end I’m reaching out to friends and acquaintances I admire who can help point me in the direction to gain skills I lack. I’m using every interaction I have for the MP to try and learn something useful and use it to be more effective. I am trying to remember how to be creative and more proactive after a few years of monotony and prescription. I’m trying (and gah, the sentimentality of this hurts physically to type) to be more optimistic and brave than I’ve needed to be for a long time. It feels a bit scary and uncomfortable, to be honest, like stretching muscles and parts that have atrophied when I wasn’t looking. I’m not special at all, and that’s okay. It just needs to be remedied.
Alright, that’s it! Everyone out of the confessional! Er, unless you have some wise words or musings to add in which case let’s just quietly snag those wafers and wine to munch on and slip back in to chat.
I spent this week doing some victim escort duties for the investigations department, which is always a task to make you feel glum I’m afraid. I’ve also spent some time training my eventual replacement, which has been both a challenge and a lesson. This woman has been doing one thing and one thing only for 30+ years, letting a great many technological and practical professional advancements pass her by. Suddenly she needs to catch up on some extremely basic things (I’m talking cutting and pasting from one document to another) and she’s struggling. My resolve to learn some new programs and skills has been reinforced, believe me!
At the same time, I’m exactly a month and a half away from being done at the PD and the prospect is becoming more and more exciting (if financially perilous). I think J. and I will draw up some battle plans this weekend and get to work on them. Here are your links:
This was an excellent story about, in my opinion, holding on to your humanity with both hands when circumstances are screaming at you not to. People: inherently decent.
So, in addition to finishing out one job, working on another, planning two moves in the next six months, and trying to take on some training and other professional amplifiers, J. and I decided to read our way through this list. I think I may have some masochistic tendencies.
What is your relationship to stuff? I showed up at university with two suitcases, in a few months J. and I will be moving to another country in pretty much the exact same fashion.
So, there’s a new pope. The process of choosing one is a thousand year old process that we only know the very basics of. Here some cardinals give a bit of personal reflection and anecdotes about the week.
A really cute short film. I had an experience just like this as a little kid in Germany (I believe). I was walking alongside my parents looking at shop windows, suddenly I reached up to grab my mother’s hand – only to hear my mother call out to me from several feet behind. I glanced up to see a rather startled woman who was not my mother and darted straight back to Mum embarrassed.
There have been a lot of hard but positive steps for some local feminist movements that I’m involved in, so in recognition I bring you – this fabulous thing I found. Break your rule I implore you and for once read the comments!
The world is amazing, historical and archeological treasures beneath our feet! I once found a partially finished knapped flint in a dried up riverbed in Texas, and the village we lived in England is famous for a trove of ancient metal goods that someone found in a garden. Clearly the message is get digging!
The last two days have been gorgeous – hands down the brightest, clearest, warm-but-still-comfortably-cool-est days in months. Couples were draped across each other all over the campus lawns, disregarding the still prickly and half brown grass in a desperate attempt to soak up as much Vitamin D as physically possible before the inevitable downward trend (which weather.com assures me is imminent). Skirts and trousers were rolled up to expose pasty legs in need of color, inviting the usual commentary from the self-righteous. Students were playing lawn games and screeching like children. It’s as bad as Britain around here, the sun comes out and we go bonkers!
Alas I got to admire all this from behind the windows of the county buildings, my office, and the student center. I am really looking forward to my summer of transitional employment: I plan to tramp around in the woods and eat outdoors as much as possible.
As to more practical matters, I’d resolved to put in some serious time and effort to become more tech-savvy and multiple-medium capable during this same hedonistic summer, but Google is beating me to the punch. Google Reader is going away and I need something to replace it with. I’ve already checked out Netvibes and Bloglovin’ but I’m interested in a broad base of commentary. Techie minions to the front (Savvy and Venice, query your husbands too) and tell me what apps, tools, and services you use that I – but a novice in the ways of all things current – need to know!
“I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police.”
~Keith Richards
Stand down, darling, the kitchen is safe!
Things have gotten uncharacteristically serious lately here at Small Dog Snappy Comebacks and Humorous Life Stories Inc.! Regular programing will resume immediately.
I came into work this morning to find a fine white powder covering my desk. Honest to goodness my first thought was, “Great. I don’t know how to clean up cocaine. Who spilled this?” Luckily it turns out repairmen were just crawling around our ceiling space last night and knocking dust loose.
“While I don’t believe that money guarantees happiness, I know it helps. Because money can buy you the freedom to live life 100% on your own terms.” – Brian Tracy
I’m loathe to confess this, ducklings, but it’s the truth: I’m a walking cliche. Money concerns have stressed me out over the past year and a half, and it’s probably made me a bit less good humored. Winding down my first Real Live Grownup job is contributing somewhat to that stress. I know it’s the right time to leave, J. has a signed contract to start a new position in mere months, we’re not going to starve and we’ve planned pretty wisely for it, but the truth is I’m a bit freaked out.
Getting our student loans for J.’s graduate degree and then immediately turning around and paying it to a school was a whiplash inducing experience: I’d never personally handled that much money in my life and in a matter of weeks it came and went. Our usual expenses became much more tightly managed with those loan payments every month. We’ve streamlined and budgeted and still almost every penny is spoken for each paycheck. It’s a satisfactory but not very reassuring state.
Here’s the thing – we’re good with money. Really! I put 10% of each paycheck into savings without exception, I pay into my 401k and have made smart choices in managing it, we take care of our property for reselling when it becomes necessary, and we’re not extravagant. J. and I both operate under the frugality now, security later mentality; we believe in delayed gratification. But money and its management have gotten a lot more complex over the last few years and frankly I now understand why my parents (who were not wealthy but were very comfortable when I was growing up) were always talking about it and making financial adjustments and budgets. It doesn’t matter how good you are with it, I think money is terrifying, especially when you don’t make much.
And I don’t. Part of the reason I feel it’s the right time for me to try and move on is because I don’t think I’m paid enough – which feels weird to write. I spent the first couple years of my job just thankful to have it, but I’ve watched duties and responsibilities add up without review of what those jobs are actually worth and it’s been frustrating. The university doesn’t do merit based wage increases and the opportunities for raises are almost nonexistent. My boss actually told me at my last annual review a month or so ago that if I were staying they probably would have had HR come in and complete an inquiry to see if my salary should be raised. Which is nice to hear, but would have been nicer a year ago when my duties were upped significantly after Hennessy quit. I know that I’ll probably start whatever job I take next at a much lower rate than what I currently have (which, I promise, is saying something), but I’ll be willing if I have the option of merit based raises, especially since I expect to start at a bottom rung wherever I get a foot in the door and am willing to work hard to move up.
I graduated just before the financial meltdown, I got a job literally just as Lehman Brothers collapsed and when faced with the pretty terrifying prospect of joining my friends and associates in parents’ basements or collecting unemployment, I chose safety and stayed where I was. Probably longer than I should have, if I’m honest. Nowadays I’m ready for a bit more risk.
A few financial boons have eased the nervousness somewhat as we plan our escape and next stage. Dad found an old bond in my name that I can collect on (after completing the task of tracking down who holds it now since the companies and ownership have transferred quite a bit, especially since the Recession hit). That baby is going straight towards loans and savings! J. picks up odd jobs where he can and assisted writing an article for a business magazine which brought in some extra income. We’re not starving – if I’m objective and rational we are a long ways off from it.
But. If the last four years have taught me anything, watching my grandparents’ retirement vanish practically overnight with the financial collapse, feeling my financial obligations grown disproportionately to my income, working on the MP and seeing how hard hit some professions in particular have been by the new financial reality…it’s that I know exactly how quickly monetary security can go away. I think I’ve become just a little more paranoid.
Weigh in, minions, and be honest! Have financial concerns taken on a different hue to you because of external forces? What have the past couple of years looked like for the Minion Coterie? Do money and financial planning cause you stress, even when you’re good at it? Am I unnecessarily paranoid – or is this worry common? Talk to me, I’m really interested in a broad perspective here.
PS – As a further effort to cut expenses I just made my last want-based purchase for the entirety of 2013. Hold me to it, minions, if I breathe a word about shopping in anything but hypothetical terms before Christmas, strike me down!
Yesterday a small museum on campus currently being renovated defied the odds and physics when a supposedly inflammable material caught fire. No one was hurt and the area in question was basically a construction site so no collections were even in the area to be damaged. All in all, a hugely surprising but manageable emergency. What followed, based on communication from concerned citizens:
“The museum is on fire!”
“Thank you, we’ve got first responders on the way.”
“Did you guys know the museum is on fire?!”
“Yes, we’re responding now.”
“My daughter just called me and told me the university was on fire!”
“No, sir, just one building and it’s been contained.”
“OMG I just saw on Twitter that the university has burned down, are classes cancelled?!”
“You’ll need to talk to your professors but I’m going to go out on a limb and say not a chance.”
Small Dog Syndrome 