One of the benefits of carrying the equivalent of a computer with me all the time in the form of an iPhone (any modern cell phone or even a scrap of paper would do here) is that I keep a long list of future blog post topics in a small document handy at all times. Any moment that the mood strikes me I write down a short and effective blurb about whatever struck a nerve with me just awaiting future attention in a posting. In this case, the only words that needed to be recorded were somewhat contradictory “Antisocial Society” and these words from a solid two weeks ago were sufficient to call forth the following random banter…
I recall with some distinctness, in a time not so long ago but much more clement than today, sitting on a bench in a public park next to some playground equipment. Amanda and Izzy were doing the usual playground thing, sitting (somewhat conspiratorially) in a secluded nook of the playground with a mysterious third party. A small girl had joined them and they seemed to be bantering playfully end joyfully enough. Personally I was glad that they found a friend or at least someone who is as close to being a friend as you can be given they’ll never see each other again. All was well until a woman with a hawkish proboscis and a severe hairstyle swooped in, said something to the girl and took her away to another part of the playground.
To be honest, I was a bit mystified. Neither of my children has any outwardly obvious signs of plague. There was no conflict between the three. They seemed to be getting along swimmingly yet for some reason beyond my ability to conceive, it seemed appropriate to the woman I shall refer to simply as ‘Hawknose’ to break up the trio. After Hawknose’s intervention, the little girl played briefly in another part of the park and then slowly gravitated back to my girls who had since moved on to some other activity. Apparently there was a brief emergency at The Hall of Justice or something for a bit because Hawknose was not to be seen in the area to break them up again until considerably later when it was time for her and her child to go elsewhere. Whatever it was that caused her to intervene before was apparently only temporary.
I couldn’t help but view this whole episode as a bit on the antisocial side but then I took a look around at the parents of these children. The children, as a group, were doing their best to mingle a bit but the parents stood around as if on their own separate islands. No two islands touching for more than an instant, a glance, a passing word. For a social animal that is supposed to thrive on interaction, we certainly seem to do a great job of isolating ourselves. It’s a pity too because most of the islands looked pretty damn bored staring at their kids and hoping that they don’t slip and break their necks on a banana peel or some bit of random trash on the ground.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Never Too Young
As a general rule I’m intensely well-insulated against popular culture. Fads and trends come and go and I don’t bat an eye because I’m listening to music made before I was born and I couldn’t tell Lady GaGa from Carrie Underwood if you put them both in front of me. So the majority of stupid things that society does pass by without my commentary. However, the other day I was listening to LBC while they were doing an ever-popular phone-in opinion show. Apparently there was a bit of an uproar going on at the moment because of something called “Junior Jazzles.” After listening to this, I’m disappointed in society.
Until I did a bit of digging on the topic, I wasn’t really sure of the origins here. It seems there’s a product for women called ‘Vajazzles’ that can be used to decorate certain bits of their anatomy. This in itself is distasteful enough and I’m not sure why a woman would wish to put tiny plastic speedbumps onto an already sensitive area of her anatomy but if she wishes to do so I suppose that’s her business. The “Junior Jazzles” product is, it seems, an equivalent product for the younger set. As repulsed as I feel at the adult version of this product the child’s version is an outright travesty. Sadder still is that a company produced and marketed this product in the belief that society would accept it. If you look at some of the things that society does accept as reasonable for small children, it’s not entirely surprising they would come to this conclusion because in most cases Americans are perfectly fine with sexualizing and assigning gender roles to even the smallest of children.
For small boys this gender role assignation doesn’t tend towards the sexual but is clearly intended to put boys in their proper place early in life. They’re given trucks and tools and other various toys to play with that illustrate very clearly their future place in society. Men are meant to do, to work, to make the world better in an outwardly grandiose fashion. They’re to be valued for what they can do with their hands and their minds and except for the occasional dress-up for Easter pictures, outward appearance isn’t so important. Boys are taught at a very young age that when they get older they’re going to get out into the world and make a difference in the world whether it’s building a bridge or driving a truck.
While the boys are playing with trucks, girls get dolls and kitchenware and fancy dress-up clothes to play with because their role will be one of having children and cooking and dressing up, apparently. The contribution of women, based on these gender roles assigned so early in life, seems obnoxiously male-centered. The woman will bear and raise the man’s children and cook the man’s meals and make sure she always looks good for the man. That way the man can do his job of going out into the world and doing the real work. This seems a sadly empty existence for the woman and I’m glad that for the most part it’s evaporating as a lifestyle as time goes on. We still give our girls dolls and kitchenware to play with but increasingly as they grow into women, they ignore these early attempts at enslavement. So I would happily report that at least some small progress has been made since the 50s.
The part of this in which we seem to have slipped backwards horrifyingly in the last several decades is that society still seems to believe that a woman’s role is to be attractive to the man. Women today seem to spend more time than ever trying to dress themselves up to meet some arbitrary and hopeless standard of attractiveness that is assigned to them by men. They primp, powder, push and prod every single part of themselves in an attempt to be sexy and the saddest part of all is that this starts practically the day they’re born.
There are a lot of practices in this society that I find absolutely revolting. You can buy high heels for children. The intent of a high-heeled shoe, as least as I understand it from my outside male perspective, is to increase the apparent length of the leg-line and make the leg more sexually attractive. Why does a small child’s leg need to be made to look more sexually attractive? What kind of perversion is that? Children in dance and gymnastics classes are typically dressed in outfits that leave very little to the imagination. What need is there such tiny outfits? Most horrifying of all, I often see children wearing make-up. I wonder what the parent’s reaction would be if they realized that the origin of female make-up is to simulate the flushed appearance of the woman during sexual arousal. Why do you need your small child to look like she’s sexually aroused?
In most cases I think that as a society we’re just ignorant of the impacts we have on our children when we assign them such stereotypical roles so early in life. When we dress them up, or worse yet, put them in a pageant, we teach them that their appearance is the most important thing about them. Wouldn’t it be better to teach our girls that they too can go out into the world and do something great rather than sit passively and simply be eye-candy or a maid for some man?
Until I did a bit of digging on the topic, I wasn’t really sure of the origins here. It seems there’s a product for women called ‘Vajazzles’ that can be used to decorate certain bits of their anatomy. This in itself is distasteful enough and I’m not sure why a woman would wish to put tiny plastic speedbumps onto an already sensitive area of her anatomy but if she wishes to do so I suppose that’s her business. The “Junior Jazzles” product is, it seems, an equivalent product for the younger set. As repulsed as I feel at the adult version of this product the child’s version is an outright travesty. Sadder still is that a company produced and marketed this product in the belief that society would accept it. If you look at some of the things that society does accept as reasonable for small children, it’s not entirely surprising they would come to this conclusion because in most cases Americans are perfectly fine with sexualizing and assigning gender roles to even the smallest of children.
For small boys this gender role assignation doesn’t tend towards the sexual but is clearly intended to put boys in their proper place early in life. They’re given trucks and tools and other various toys to play with that illustrate very clearly their future place in society. Men are meant to do, to work, to make the world better in an outwardly grandiose fashion. They’re to be valued for what they can do with their hands and their minds and except for the occasional dress-up for Easter pictures, outward appearance isn’t so important. Boys are taught at a very young age that when they get older they’re going to get out into the world and make a difference in the world whether it’s building a bridge or driving a truck.
While the boys are playing with trucks, girls get dolls and kitchenware and fancy dress-up clothes to play with because their role will be one of having children and cooking and dressing up, apparently. The contribution of women, based on these gender roles assigned so early in life, seems obnoxiously male-centered. The woman will bear and raise the man’s children and cook the man’s meals and make sure she always looks good for the man. That way the man can do his job of going out into the world and doing the real work. This seems a sadly empty existence for the woman and I’m glad that for the most part it’s evaporating as a lifestyle as time goes on. We still give our girls dolls and kitchenware to play with but increasingly as they grow into women, they ignore these early attempts at enslavement. So I would happily report that at least some small progress has been made since the 50s.
The part of this in which we seem to have slipped backwards horrifyingly in the last several decades is that society still seems to believe that a woman’s role is to be attractive to the man. Women today seem to spend more time than ever trying to dress themselves up to meet some arbitrary and hopeless standard of attractiveness that is assigned to them by men. They primp, powder, push and prod every single part of themselves in an attempt to be sexy and the saddest part of all is that this starts practically the day they’re born.
There are a lot of practices in this society that I find absolutely revolting. You can buy high heels for children. The intent of a high-heeled shoe, as least as I understand it from my outside male perspective, is to increase the apparent length of the leg-line and make the leg more sexually attractive. Why does a small child’s leg need to be made to look more sexually attractive? What kind of perversion is that? Children in dance and gymnastics classes are typically dressed in outfits that leave very little to the imagination. What need is there such tiny outfits? Most horrifying of all, I often see children wearing make-up. I wonder what the parent’s reaction would be if they realized that the origin of female make-up is to simulate the flushed appearance of the woman during sexual arousal. Why do you need your small child to look like she’s sexually aroused?
In most cases I think that as a society we’re just ignorant of the impacts we have on our children when we assign them such stereotypical roles so early in life. When we dress them up, or worse yet, put them in a pageant, we teach them that their appearance is the most important thing about them. Wouldn’t it be better to teach our girls that they too can go out into the world and do something great rather than sit passively and simply be eye-candy or a maid for some man?
Sunday, April 17, 2011
The Real “Job One”
In my last post I spent a lot of time taking the managers of the world to task on trying to squeeze as much as they possibly can from their subordinates. I can’t help but feel it’s only fair if I turn the pillow over and take a look at the issue of employment from the side of the employee and their responsibilities toward their manager and how to effectively maintain that relationship.
When most employees start a job they think about their job duties in terms of some specific task they’ve been hired to perform. Programmers think that they’re there to write code or a baker might think they’re there to pump out pastries as fast as they can and doubtless there is some aspect of that to any job but it’s not the most important thing you’ll do in any given day. The real Job One of any employee is to foster a relationship with their manager and make themselves as easy to manage as possible. An average manager has seven direct reports and in a perfect world managing that many people would be trivially easy. Unfortunately, it’s not because the roll of a manager, in addition to managing the relationship between his employees and his own superiors is to fill in any gaps left by his employees. Ultimately your manager is responsible for the success of the entire group whereas the employee is responsible only for the success of his or her specific set of tasks. If you screw up, the person above you in the org chart pays the price in some way. So it’s in your best interest to make that person’s job as easy as possible. Doing so reflects well on your manager and also reflects well on you.
So what specifically is one to do for one’s manager? The first thing I tell the people I work with is that it’s their number one priority to raise things up to management that they think are wrong or need improvement. Many times the reaction to this statement is, “shouldn’t they know already?” The truth to this is, though, that most of the time they don’t. Even in the case that a person does a job and is then promoted to manager over that same job they used to do, the second the promotion occurs they begin to become less and less well-suited to manage that job. Jobs change over time. So the norms from the time when they did the job slowly slide into the past and become obsolete. Unless you take the time to let them know what’s really going on, they’ll manage with the only information they have, which is from ten years ago when they were doing it themselves. So providing your management with the skivvy on day to day operations is essential.
Once employees realize that managers don’t know everything, they sometimes next fall into a trap of being fearful to tell the truth about what’s going on. Mostly commonly this comes up when managers need to know that there’s just too much work to actually get done. They’ll assume that it’s viewed as a weakness if you have to say that you can’t do everything you’ve been assigned. In some cases this is a well-founded fear. If your manager is a complete jerk then he may not care that you have too much to do. Alternatively, the company may just be unable to staff appropriately to do the allotted work. Or, and you’re not going to like this, you may just not be well-suited for the job you’re doing. Any one of these three may be the case and for the first two you lose nothing by raising up your concern. If your manager was a jerk before he’ll be a jerk after so at least you got it off your chest. It’s the third case that makes people worry. They think that if they raise up a concern and it’s found that they’re just not good at their job then they’ll get fired. But why would you want to stay at a job that you suck at? With all the employment options in this country, it’s uniquely silly to slave away at a job you just don’t excel in. If you’re really no good at it, then chances are you’re not passionate about it and you probably don’t really enjoy it anyway. So what are you losing except your whole life by hanging on to a crappy job? Go do something you really enjoy. The overarching point here is that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Give your manager good feedback about what’s going on and the outcomes are all positive in the long term.
So now that we’re all telling our managers what’s going on in our jobs each day, let’s see things from their viewpoint. The first thing to know is that managing people… well, to put it simply, managing people is really, really hard. Think of it this way: if you’re a baker, you come in every day, you mix up the dough, you put it in the oven for a prescribed amount of time and it comes out looking at least somewhat like bread. Easy. Predictable. Routine. Most jobs are like this. There’s some known set of inputs and the result is some known set of outputs. They can be tangled at times but in general you know what you get out from what you put in. Managing people is an entirely different kettle of fish. Every single person in a company is different and reacts in a specific way. Each one has various things which motivate them and annoy them and make them enjoy their job (or not). Most of the time they each have their own unique communication style so not only must you try to figure out how to make them happy but you must also figure out how to translate what they actually SAY into what they actually MEAN. So when you combine individual uniqueness with sometimes inscrutable communication styles, you get a job that is not only difficult but sometimes downright frustrating to the point of impossible.
The other major point to remember here is that your manager is human too. Just as you come in to work every day and want to be successful, she too wants desperately to do well. She has a boss to whom she reports. When you don’t give accurate information about what’s going on in your job or use communication styles that she has to spend extra time unraveling you’re making her job a lot harder. Remember that as frustrated as you may be with customers or clients or end-users or whoever consumes the work you do from day-to-day, your boss’s relationship to you is similar from their perspective. You are a direct consumer of your boss’s management skills. If you make it harder for them to do their job then you’re the equivalent of the customer at the bakery who changes their mind 15 times about what the birthday cake should say on it.
Remember too that unless you work for the CEO directly, your boss also has a boss. Just because you tell them something is wrong or needs to change doesn’t mean they have the power and influence within the company to actually do anything about it. That doesn’t mean they’re not listening. It also doesn’t mean that they don’t agree with you. Just because they’re management doesn’t mean they are always heard or listened to by those above them.
In summary, management of a team, while in title it resides with one central leader, is everyone’s responsibility. Nobody really knows what’s going on in your job except you. The most important thing you can do is to accurately and promptly report to your manager so that he can do what’s best for everyone. Only the manager has visibility across all parts of the team as well as knowing what’s expected from above in the org chart. It’s also worth repeating that managers are just people too. From the bottom of the chain of command it’s easy to look up and think that everyone’s sitting in an ivory tower of authority above you. Fortunately, that’s not really true. Everyone in an organization has a boss and the CEO usually has a banker. Personally, I’d rather have a boss.
When most employees start a job they think about their job duties in terms of some specific task they’ve been hired to perform. Programmers think that they’re there to write code or a baker might think they’re there to pump out pastries as fast as they can and doubtless there is some aspect of that to any job but it’s not the most important thing you’ll do in any given day. The real Job One of any employee is to foster a relationship with their manager and make themselves as easy to manage as possible. An average manager has seven direct reports and in a perfect world managing that many people would be trivially easy. Unfortunately, it’s not because the roll of a manager, in addition to managing the relationship between his employees and his own superiors is to fill in any gaps left by his employees. Ultimately your manager is responsible for the success of the entire group whereas the employee is responsible only for the success of his or her specific set of tasks. If you screw up, the person above you in the org chart pays the price in some way. So it’s in your best interest to make that person’s job as easy as possible. Doing so reflects well on your manager and also reflects well on you.
So what specifically is one to do for one’s manager? The first thing I tell the people I work with is that it’s their number one priority to raise things up to management that they think are wrong or need improvement. Many times the reaction to this statement is, “shouldn’t they know already?” The truth to this is, though, that most of the time they don’t. Even in the case that a person does a job and is then promoted to manager over that same job they used to do, the second the promotion occurs they begin to become less and less well-suited to manage that job. Jobs change over time. So the norms from the time when they did the job slowly slide into the past and become obsolete. Unless you take the time to let them know what’s really going on, they’ll manage with the only information they have, which is from ten years ago when they were doing it themselves. So providing your management with the skivvy on day to day operations is essential.
Once employees realize that managers don’t know everything, they sometimes next fall into a trap of being fearful to tell the truth about what’s going on. Mostly commonly this comes up when managers need to know that there’s just too much work to actually get done. They’ll assume that it’s viewed as a weakness if you have to say that you can’t do everything you’ve been assigned. In some cases this is a well-founded fear. If your manager is a complete jerk then he may not care that you have too much to do. Alternatively, the company may just be unable to staff appropriately to do the allotted work. Or, and you’re not going to like this, you may just not be well-suited for the job you’re doing. Any one of these three may be the case and for the first two you lose nothing by raising up your concern. If your manager was a jerk before he’ll be a jerk after so at least you got it off your chest. It’s the third case that makes people worry. They think that if they raise up a concern and it’s found that they’re just not good at their job then they’ll get fired. But why would you want to stay at a job that you suck at? With all the employment options in this country, it’s uniquely silly to slave away at a job you just don’t excel in. If you’re really no good at it, then chances are you’re not passionate about it and you probably don’t really enjoy it anyway. So what are you losing except your whole life by hanging on to a crappy job? Go do something you really enjoy. The overarching point here is that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Give your manager good feedback about what’s going on and the outcomes are all positive in the long term.
So now that we’re all telling our managers what’s going on in our jobs each day, let’s see things from their viewpoint. The first thing to know is that managing people… well, to put it simply, managing people is really, really hard. Think of it this way: if you’re a baker, you come in every day, you mix up the dough, you put it in the oven for a prescribed amount of time and it comes out looking at least somewhat like bread. Easy. Predictable. Routine. Most jobs are like this. There’s some known set of inputs and the result is some known set of outputs. They can be tangled at times but in general you know what you get out from what you put in. Managing people is an entirely different kettle of fish. Every single person in a company is different and reacts in a specific way. Each one has various things which motivate them and annoy them and make them enjoy their job (or not). Most of the time they each have their own unique communication style so not only must you try to figure out how to make them happy but you must also figure out how to translate what they actually SAY into what they actually MEAN. So when you combine individual uniqueness with sometimes inscrutable communication styles, you get a job that is not only difficult but sometimes downright frustrating to the point of impossible.
The other major point to remember here is that your manager is human too. Just as you come in to work every day and want to be successful, she too wants desperately to do well. She has a boss to whom she reports. When you don’t give accurate information about what’s going on in your job or use communication styles that she has to spend extra time unraveling you’re making her job a lot harder. Remember that as frustrated as you may be with customers or clients or end-users or whoever consumes the work you do from day-to-day, your boss’s relationship to you is similar from their perspective. You are a direct consumer of your boss’s management skills. If you make it harder for them to do their job then you’re the equivalent of the customer at the bakery who changes their mind 15 times about what the birthday cake should say on it.
Remember too that unless you work for the CEO directly, your boss also has a boss. Just because you tell them something is wrong or needs to change doesn’t mean they have the power and influence within the company to actually do anything about it. That doesn’t mean they’re not listening. It also doesn’t mean that they don’t agree with you. Just because they’re management doesn’t mean they are always heard or listened to by those above them.
In summary, management of a team, while in title it resides with one central leader, is everyone’s responsibility. Nobody really knows what’s going on in your job except you. The most important thing you can do is to accurately and promptly report to your manager so that he can do what’s best for everyone. Only the manager has visibility across all parts of the team as well as knowing what’s expected from above in the org chart. It’s also worth repeating that managers are just people too. From the bottom of the chain of command it’s easy to look up and think that everyone’s sitting in an ivory tower of authority above you. Fortunately, that’s not really true. Everyone in an organization has a boss and the CEO usually has a banker. Personally, I’d rather have a boss.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
The Over/Under on Overtime
Society puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of managers in the workplace. There are a thousand books you can read about how to manage people and how to get the most out of your employees. Each view on the topic is slightly different but the fundamental underpinning of all of them is that as a manager, the harder you drive your staff and the more hours they work for you the better. If employees end up working 50 to 60 hours a week, it’s cause for celebration and adulation among the management staff.
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that whenever employees work overtime it’s a sign of absolute failure. Your employees almost never work overtime because of something they did wrong. In the cases when they do screw up and consistently end up working overtime, they’re just not a good fit for the work they’re doing in the first place. Most typically when employees find themselves at their desk beyond the usual 40 hour workweek it’s because someone above them screwed up. Too much work was scheduled or the company was just too focused on revenue to hire appropriate staff for the workload or some other employee just isn’t doing their job in the first place. All of these lead to staff that resort to after-hours heroics to get their work done. So to the managers of the world, when a single employee submits timesheets for 50+ hours a week, it’s a sign that you need to take a serious look at them. When your whole staff submits timesheets for 50+ hours a week, you need to take a serious look at yourself. When you find yourself actually asking your staff to work overtime every week, you need to take a serious look at your whole company.
What is underappreciated about this situation is that it’s not really in the company’s best interest to have employees working overtime. Even in the situation in which it’s not something you have to pay for directly, it is something you will eventually have to deal with. Employees who work overtime to compensate for the failure of others are your best workers. They really care about their jobs and the work they do and most importantly, they really care about your company. These are the people that great companies are built around. When you consistently demand more from them week after week, you only hasten the time when these key individuals are going to take their resolve and dedication somewhere else. The costs of replacing a good employee are astronomical. In some cases, it’s just plain impossible and when it happens your company might never be the same.
Further, when employees work overtime it’s not just their tenure with the company that suffers. If your staff is forced to work longer hours you can bet that it’s not the most efficient work they’re doing. When a person realizes that they’re “stuck at work” for 50 hours a week it’s likely that an increasing percentage of that time is just lost to the ether of water cooler banter and other random distractions. An employee who knows they can put in their 8 hours in a day and then go home to her family is more likely to be focused on her work and actually produce better output. Not to mention, when the time comes that you have to ask for more hours because a big project is due, they’ll look at it as a novelty and put more energy into it than they would have if they’d been forced to work overtime every single week. When overtime becomes the norm, then work is reduced to a mindless grind. Employees come in, sit at their desks and grind through their jobs in an almost Zen state. Innovation in this environment is almost nil. There’s no reason to do things better or more efficiently because what is most certain to greet them the next week is yet another week of too much work. In an environment in which there’s a proper balance between life and work, employees feel relaxed and free to innovate. In some technical trades especially, demanding fewer hours actually nets you more work. An employee who feels valued by his company and is allowed to work in an environment that respects his free time is more likely to contribute that free time back to the company in one form or another whether it’s thinking about the big project on the ride home or sitting down to create some new tool that will make their job easier in the future. Happy employees will naturally contribute more to your company all by themselves. If you enslave them they’ll do exactly what’s expected and then go home to complete their résumés.
Some of you out there may read this and say to yourselves that you realize all this but that you’ve got it covered. Your company, you say, has a policy. In your company, everybody’s expected to work 50 hours a week. You even tell your new hires that when they hire on so it’s expected. It’s equal for everyone so it’s OK. Unfortunately, this is a crock. Even if your company has a policy that raises the bar of expectations, the simple fact is that you can’t raise the bar for the entirety of society. Every company in the world isn’t just competing internally but is in fact in competition directly with every other company in the area for quality employees. The greater the gap between your company’s expectations of employees and those of your competitors, the greater the chance that those tried and true employees that you’ve relied on for years are going to wave the white flag and go somewhere else.
What’s saddest of all about this situation is that employees really do want to do well. They want to be appreciated for what they do and feel that they’re contributing positively to the company. When you consistently expect people to work overtime, you reduce passionate and dedicated employees who would have worked longer hours for you anyway into mere drudges who pound out the hours as a matter of required course.
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that whenever employees work overtime it’s a sign of absolute failure. Your employees almost never work overtime because of something they did wrong. In the cases when they do screw up and consistently end up working overtime, they’re just not a good fit for the work they’re doing in the first place. Most typically when employees find themselves at their desk beyond the usual 40 hour workweek it’s because someone above them screwed up. Too much work was scheduled or the company was just too focused on revenue to hire appropriate staff for the workload or some other employee just isn’t doing their job in the first place. All of these lead to staff that resort to after-hours heroics to get their work done. So to the managers of the world, when a single employee submits timesheets for 50+ hours a week, it’s a sign that you need to take a serious look at them. When your whole staff submits timesheets for 50+ hours a week, you need to take a serious look at yourself. When you find yourself actually asking your staff to work overtime every week, you need to take a serious look at your whole company.
What is underappreciated about this situation is that it’s not really in the company’s best interest to have employees working overtime. Even in the situation in which it’s not something you have to pay for directly, it is something you will eventually have to deal with. Employees who work overtime to compensate for the failure of others are your best workers. They really care about their jobs and the work they do and most importantly, they really care about your company. These are the people that great companies are built around. When you consistently demand more from them week after week, you only hasten the time when these key individuals are going to take their resolve and dedication somewhere else. The costs of replacing a good employee are astronomical. In some cases, it’s just plain impossible and when it happens your company might never be the same.
Further, when employees work overtime it’s not just their tenure with the company that suffers. If your staff is forced to work longer hours you can bet that it’s not the most efficient work they’re doing. When a person realizes that they’re “stuck at work” for 50 hours a week it’s likely that an increasing percentage of that time is just lost to the ether of water cooler banter and other random distractions. An employee who knows they can put in their 8 hours in a day and then go home to her family is more likely to be focused on her work and actually produce better output. Not to mention, when the time comes that you have to ask for more hours because a big project is due, they’ll look at it as a novelty and put more energy into it than they would have if they’d been forced to work overtime every single week. When overtime becomes the norm, then work is reduced to a mindless grind. Employees come in, sit at their desks and grind through their jobs in an almost Zen state. Innovation in this environment is almost nil. There’s no reason to do things better or more efficiently because what is most certain to greet them the next week is yet another week of too much work. In an environment in which there’s a proper balance between life and work, employees feel relaxed and free to innovate. In some technical trades especially, demanding fewer hours actually nets you more work. An employee who feels valued by his company and is allowed to work in an environment that respects his free time is more likely to contribute that free time back to the company in one form or another whether it’s thinking about the big project on the ride home or sitting down to create some new tool that will make their job easier in the future. Happy employees will naturally contribute more to your company all by themselves. If you enslave them they’ll do exactly what’s expected and then go home to complete their résumés.
Some of you out there may read this and say to yourselves that you realize all this but that you’ve got it covered. Your company, you say, has a policy. In your company, everybody’s expected to work 50 hours a week. You even tell your new hires that when they hire on so it’s expected. It’s equal for everyone so it’s OK. Unfortunately, this is a crock. Even if your company has a policy that raises the bar of expectations, the simple fact is that you can’t raise the bar for the entirety of society. Every company in the world isn’t just competing internally but is in fact in competition directly with every other company in the area for quality employees. The greater the gap between your company’s expectations of employees and those of your competitors, the greater the chance that those tried and true employees that you’ve relied on for years are going to wave the white flag and go somewhere else.
What’s saddest of all about this situation is that employees really do want to do well. They want to be appreciated for what they do and feel that they’re contributing positively to the company. When you consistently expect people to work overtime, you reduce passionate and dedicated employees who would have worked longer hours for you anyway into mere drudges who pound out the hours as a matter of required course.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Off the Grid
The other night I bought a new phone. This phone is a lot different from its predecessor in a lot of very important ways. For example, when I ask it to send a text message, it is not required that I go make a sandwich while I wait for it to complete that task. Additionally, when people attempt to call me (which they rarely really attempt to call me) it actually makes a noise as if it wishes in some very kind way to alert me to the fact that someone is trying to contact me. It is features like these that have allowed me to craft a relationship with this new phone in such a short period of time which is far superior to previous phone relationships I’ve had in which I wish nothing more than to hurl the phone across the room and batter it against a wall rejoicing as it explodes into a million little pieces.
With this wonderful piece of technology I can read my email both from work and from my ever-busy personal email account in real time. I can download an app that will alert me immediately whenever one of my beloved Facebook friends posts a new photograph of a happy kitten clinging by its delicate, tiny claws to a clothesline. “Oh! Hang in there kitty,” I will doubtless gasp! For the small sum of 99 cents I can get an app that will tell me whenever anyone else who’s running that app is in the neighborhood and I even know where everyone I’ve ever met is at every single moment of every single day. And don’t even get me started on the amazing hourly updates on the doings of everyone’s favorite Croatian Footballer Slaven Bilic. Twitter you will be my lifeline to the world!
I could, but frankly, fuck that. Why in the hell would I need to know in near real time, while I’m driving down the street, when some damned blog spammer from upper Yakutsk leaves me a blog comment that says, “I’m glad to be able to join this wonderful community.” Seriously. So this phone will be just that. A phone. If somebody REALLY thinks they need to contact me, they can call but I’m done with being outside in the forest and hearing the phone go “BLOOP” because someone sent me an offer to download an illegal copy of some movie that I’ve never heard of and will doubtless never watch.
In a slightly more serious vein, it’s easy to get addicted to the constant input that today’s overly-connected age offers us. We can choose to deluge ourselves with any number of things at all times. I can listen to radio live from Australia, monitor a dozen email accounts and be alerted to the goings on of enough people that I’d be able to accomplish precious little else except passively accept that input. The consequence of all that is that instead of focusing on each other and forging relationships with people who are actually in the room, we’re all constantly staring at our phones. The ‘new email’ alert sounds and the tension builds second by second to see who will check their phone first to see if this email is the pirated movie download I’ve been waiting for all these years!
So with that, I’m done with the age of communications. My phone will serve me and be my slave, not the other way around. And with that out of the way… let’s do lunch!
With this wonderful piece of technology I can read my email both from work and from my ever-busy personal email account in real time. I can download an app that will alert me immediately whenever one of my beloved Facebook friends posts a new photograph of a happy kitten clinging by its delicate, tiny claws to a clothesline. “Oh! Hang in there kitty,” I will doubtless gasp! For the small sum of 99 cents I can get an app that will tell me whenever anyone else who’s running that app is in the neighborhood and I even know where everyone I’ve ever met is at every single moment of every single day. And don’t even get me started on the amazing hourly updates on the doings of everyone’s favorite Croatian Footballer Slaven Bilic. Twitter you will be my lifeline to the world!
I could, but frankly, fuck that. Why in the hell would I need to know in near real time, while I’m driving down the street, when some damned blog spammer from upper Yakutsk leaves me a blog comment that says, “I’m glad to be able to join this wonderful community.” Seriously. So this phone will be just that. A phone. If somebody REALLY thinks they need to contact me, they can call but I’m done with being outside in the forest and hearing the phone go “BLOOP” because someone sent me an offer to download an illegal copy of some movie that I’ve never heard of and will doubtless never watch.
In a slightly more serious vein, it’s easy to get addicted to the constant input that today’s overly-connected age offers us. We can choose to deluge ourselves with any number of things at all times. I can listen to radio live from Australia, monitor a dozen email accounts and be alerted to the goings on of enough people that I’d be able to accomplish precious little else except passively accept that input. The consequence of all that is that instead of focusing on each other and forging relationships with people who are actually in the room, we’re all constantly staring at our phones. The ‘new email’ alert sounds and the tension builds second by second to see who will check their phone first to see if this email is the pirated movie download I’ve been waiting for all these years!
So with that, I’m done with the age of communications. My phone will serve me and be my slave, not the other way around. And with that out of the way… let’s do lunch!
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Schrödinger's Other Blog
Very nearly six years ago I wrote an entry about how the mere act of observing someone’s blog creates the potential for that blog and its contents to change (link). I had no end of fun comparing the world of online authorship to that of Quantum Mechanics. Now, half a decade later, one of my readers has indicated that it’s just possible that I’m white-washing my past and, in fact, my own persona, for the purposes of making a good impression on my readers. The sad fact is though, that like every writer who expects his work to be read by others, I am.
Some things have to be revised because it’s just not proper to be absolutely candid when other people are involved. There are certain people in my life that I don’t write about and that I will never write about because their stories are not mine to write. It’s all well and good for me to reveal myself as the opinionated and mildly assholish person that I am, but it’s entirely another for me to tell the world anything about the few people who currently or at one time found themselves in my innermost circle. So in that respect, yes, vast tracts of my history are missing from the chronicles of my life that this blog and my autobiography (link) represent. While some might see that as revisionist I see that as simple common courtesy. If you find yourself saddened by your absence from these pages or upset by your reduction to a single pronoun within them, then I apologize. It is not because your presence was not appreciated in my life but because I simply wish to respect your privacy and let the story of your life be written by the one who was closest to it. It is to the detriment of this blog and to the detriment of my story that you are (all) omitted, but it seems only right that it be so. If you wish to be heard, read one of the 27 entries I’ve written on the topic of “why you, yes you, should write” and write your own story.
Vast asides spoken in poorly enunciated stage whispers behind us, the other half of the comment was that I’m white-washing my own personality, preferences and desires as I portray them here. I would posit that any writing of a personal nature portrays who we want to be and how we want others to see us. Nothing I write here is untrue. I aspire to be all that I describe here. The things I write constitute my own moral compass, my standard for behavior, my sense of right and wrong. However, that is a much different thing than saying that I can adhere to my own image of absolute moral rectitude with 100% regularity. The very definition of humanity is at least in part one of admitting that we are all flawed and I am no less so than anyone else despite the somewhat egotistical bent to some of my posts. Further, since I don’t subscribe to religion of any sort, I must sieve out right and wrong in my own way and my vehicle for doing that is what you see before you. I claim no divinity or perfection even in a religion crafted carefully around my own deeply-held beliefs.
To summarize, yes, I agree that sometimes my writings do fall away from strict and absolute truth, but I think the reasons for this are both clear and necessary. On both accounts I wish it were not so. I wish that society was open and honest enough with itself that we could all share our stories openly and honestly and without reservations. That we could all sit down and read every side of every story. I wish too that I was perfect in the execution of my own belief systems, cobbled together so haphazardly from my own experiences. The former I have no remedy for. The latter I can simply say that I will persist in my attempts to do better. I value those who have the courage to come forward and tell me if I deviate from the truth in any item no matter how seemingly minor. I will take your observations to heart and do my utmost to stay on the narrow but meandering path that I have chosen for myself in life.
Some things have to be revised because it’s just not proper to be absolutely candid when other people are involved. There are certain people in my life that I don’t write about and that I will never write about because their stories are not mine to write. It’s all well and good for me to reveal myself as the opinionated and mildly assholish person that I am, but it’s entirely another for me to tell the world anything about the few people who currently or at one time found themselves in my innermost circle. So in that respect, yes, vast tracts of my history are missing from the chronicles of my life that this blog and my autobiography (link) represent. While some might see that as revisionist I see that as simple common courtesy. If you find yourself saddened by your absence from these pages or upset by your reduction to a single pronoun within them, then I apologize. It is not because your presence was not appreciated in my life but because I simply wish to respect your privacy and let the story of your life be written by the one who was closest to it. It is to the detriment of this blog and to the detriment of my story that you are (all) omitted, but it seems only right that it be so. If you wish to be heard, read one of the 27 entries I’ve written on the topic of “why you, yes you, should write” and write your own story.
Vast asides spoken in poorly enunciated stage whispers behind us, the other half of the comment was that I’m white-washing my own personality, preferences and desires as I portray them here. I would posit that any writing of a personal nature portrays who we want to be and how we want others to see us. Nothing I write here is untrue. I aspire to be all that I describe here. The things I write constitute my own moral compass, my standard for behavior, my sense of right and wrong. However, that is a much different thing than saying that I can adhere to my own image of absolute moral rectitude with 100% regularity. The very definition of humanity is at least in part one of admitting that we are all flawed and I am no less so than anyone else despite the somewhat egotistical bent to some of my posts. Further, since I don’t subscribe to religion of any sort, I must sieve out right and wrong in my own way and my vehicle for doing that is what you see before you. I claim no divinity or perfection even in a religion crafted carefully around my own deeply-held beliefs.
To summarize, yes, I agree that sometimes my writings do fall away from strict and absolute truth, but I think the reasons for this are both clear and necessary. On both accounts I wish it were not so. I wish that society was open and honest enough with itself that we could all share our stories openly and honestly and without reservations. That we could all sit down and read every side of every story. I wish too that I was perfect in the execution of my own belief systems, cobbled together so haphazardly from my own experiences. The former I have no remedy for. The latter I can simply say that I will persist in my attempts to do better. I value those who have the courage to come forward and tell me if I deviate from the truth in any item no matter how seemingly minor. I will take your observations to heart and do my utmost to stay on the narrow but meandering path that I have chosen for myself in life.
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Eleanor Rigby
Almost two years ago I wrote a post that was a sad analogy of my own life and today I was told a story that made me realize with great clarity that there are a lot of people in that same situation. What’s more, they are the least deserving of that situation of us all. Sadly, the details of this particular situation are not mine to tell but it did make me think about the complex interactions between people and the reasons why they sometimes fail.
There are a lot of really lonely people in the world who, for whatever reason, just fail to connect with those around them. They find themselves isolated and alone in the world despite the fact that they’re very giving people who have a lot to contribute to the life of another yet nobody comes to their door to accept that gift. Worse than a man in solitary confinement, walking through day-to-day life looking at other people interacting with one another while you feel connected to no one is akin to emotional suffocation. The human animal is a social one and denying them that outlet is as dangerous as withholding food or water. But the question arises, why are people lonely in the first place? How can it be that someone can fail to connect when there are six billion people out there to connect with? Clearly it’s not the fault of the six billion if this connection fails to occur, so the fault, if there is a fault, must lie with the person who is lonely.
It would seem that the underlying causes for failing to connect personally with others fall into three broad categories. The first is simply that the person in question fails to actually make emotional contact with anyone. Typically this is because of some level of shyness or personal reserve. They avoid social situations altogether or when they do, they don’t actually approach anyone. Often this can be caused by low self-worth, the thought “why would anyone want to talk to me?” being a common thread or the idea that others won’t want to be disturbed by whatever they have to say. When someone is repeatedly in social situations and fails to make contact it builds cumulatively and reinforces the idea that their presence and participation is not welcomed or wanted.
The second category is simply a failure to recognize the outreach of others. Social interactions are two-way streets and as much as the shy person may stay couched in their safe corner there are always others in the group who are reaching out. Unfortunately, just because the outreach is made doesn’t mean that it’s recognized as such and reacted to appropriately. Often, if the person is isolated enough emotionally the interaction with someone else may actually come as a huge shock and make it difficult to react to. Like a person awoken suddenly from a deep slumber, it is sometimes hard to shift gears quickly between the sum of one’s inner thoughts and interacting with someone else. By the time this shift occurs, the other person has moved on. The result is one person who becomes even more shy and reserved out of embarrassment and another who won’t reach out again because the results were so poor the first time. Like the first category, this issue is cumulative and over time the results can completely tear down one’s self-esteem.
The third part of the problem is the most complex and the most difficult to remedy. Even in the case that contact has been made and recognized this is no guarantee that any relevant interaction will actually take place. Symptoms of this include the blank stare one receives from a joke that absolutely nobody “got” or long periods of non-participation because the topic at discussion just doesn’t appeal to one person in the group. Often the only cure for this particular ill is to find a different crowd altogether that does share more common interests. Fortunately for the vast majority of people, this isn’t a problem. Given an interest in sports you can have a conversation with just about anyone. Woe though to the non-sports fan. This does, however, bring us to an interesting subset of the problem. In many cases there develops a situation in which the only relevant contact between people happens to revolve around their shared workplace. They can chatter along all day work but any interaction outside of that fades rapidly because there’s just not enough common ground. While work-based interactions can be satisfying to a point, they don’t have the real power of a truly personal connection. They are a starting point rather than an end point.
So now that I’ve blathered on in a most clinical manner for a couple of pages, where does that leave us? What do we do about this or do we even care? What would be lost if some part of the population just stayed off in the corner out of the way and let the rest of us talk about the “big game”? Is it worth fostering relationships of any kind with the oddballs of the world? I leave that question as an exercise to the reader, but personally I’d like to find a few of these people and dig about in their heads for a bit. I find it utterly impossible to talk about sports or video games or lawn care or whatever the plebian masses banter on about for any length of time at all and as a result I don’t tend to make a lot of personal connections with people. The story I was told last night though assures me that they’re out there. The interesting masses live quietly at the fringes of our society and lack only an invitation to dinner. (or perhaps twenty invitations if they’re shy)
There are a lot of really lonely people in the world who, for whatever reason, just fail to connect with those around them. They find themselves isolated and alone in the world despite the fact that they’re very giving people who have a lot to contribute to the life of another yet nobody comes to their door to accept that gift. Worse than a man in solitary confinement, walking through day-to-day life looking at other people interacting with one another while you feel connected to no one is akin to emotional suffocation. The human animal is a social one and denying them that outlet is as dangerous as withholding food or water. But the question arises, why are people lonely in the first place? How can it be that someone can fail to connect when there are six billion people out there to connect with? Clearly it’s not the fault of the six billion if this connection fails to occur, so the fault, if there is a fault, must lie with the person who is lonely.
It would seem that the underlying causes for failing to connect personally with others fall into three broad categories. The first is simply that the person in question fails to actually make emotional contact with anyone. Typically this is because of some level of shyness or personal reserve. They avoid social situations altogether or when they do, they don’t actually approach anyone. Often this can be caused by low self-worth, the thought “why would anyone want to talk to me?” being a common thread or the idea that others won’t want to be disturbed by whatever they have to say. When someone is repeatedly in social situations and fails to make contact it builds cumulatively and reinforces the idea that their presence and participation is not welcomed or wanted.
The second category is simply a failure to recognize the outreach of others. Social interactions are two-way streets and as much as the shy person may stay couched in their safe corner there are always others in the group who are reaching out. Unfortunately, just because the outreach is made doesn’t mean that it’s recognized as such and reacted to appropriately. Often, if the person is isolated enough emotionally the interaction with someone else may actually come as a huge shock and make it difficult to react to. Like a person awoken suddenly from a deep slumber, it is sometimes hard to shift gears quickly between the sum of one’s inner thoughts and interacting with someone else. By the time this shift occurs, the other person has moved on. The result is one person who becomes even more shy and reserved out of embarrassment and another who won’t reach out again because the results were so poor the first time. Like the first category, this issue is cumulative and over time the results can completely tear down one’s self-esteem.
The third part of the problem is the most complex and the most difficult to remedy. Even in the case that contact has been made and recognized this is no guarantee that any relevant interaction will actually take place. Symptoms of this include the blank stare one receives from a joke that absolutely nobody “got” or long periods of non-participation because the topic at discussion just doesn’t appeal to one person in the group. Often the only cure for this particular ill is to find a different crowd altogether that does share more common interests. Fortunately for the vast majority of people, this isn’t a problem. Given an interest in sports you can have a conversation with just about anyone. Woe though to the non-sports fan. This does, however, bring us to an interesting subset of the problem. In many cases there develops a situation in which the only relevant contact between people happens to revolve around their shared workplace. They can chatter along all day work but any interaction outside of that fades rapidly because there’s just not enough common ground. While work-based interactions can be satisfying to a point, they don’t have the real power of a truly personal connection. They are a starting point rather than an end point.
So now that I’ve blathered on in a most clinical manner for a couple of pages, where does that leave us? What do we do about this or do we even care? What would be lost if some part of the population just stayed off in the corner out of the way and let the rest of us talk about the “big game”? Is it worth fostering relationships of any kind with the oddballs of the world? I leave that question as an exercise to the reader, but personally I’d like to find a few of these people and dig about in their heads for a bit. I find it utterly impossible to talk about sports or video games or lawn care or whatever the plebian masses banter on about for any length of time at all and as a result I don’t tend to make a lot of personal connections with people. The story I was told last night though assures me that they’re out there. The interesting masses live quietly at the fringes of our society and lack only an invitation to dinner. (or perhaps twenty invitations if they’re shy)
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Meet your Meat
For several years I’ve toyed with the idea of vegetarianism. While I can’t claim that there’s ANY way I can go as far as veganism, I really do feel badly about the sad and pervasive inefficiency of eating meat products. Add to this the fact that the whole industry is just terribly cruel and you can build a good case for not subsidizing it with our dollars. Most of this just rattled away in the back of my mind until I visited a local dairy farm the other day.
Firstly, let me say that I went into this with a fairly open mind. I imagined a tour of a facility that was at least grounded in some level of realism. Sure, animals are going to be dirty and crowded and I was prepared to deal with that. I spent a fair bit of my life around a small farm so I get the farming thing. You do what you have to do to get your product to market. Fine. I can accept that much. You know what really just turned my stomach? You walk into the place and instantly you’re hit with the barrage of marketing. How environmentally friendly the farm is. How incredibly clean it is. How healthy the product is for you. A fucking animatronic tree babbles on for 10 minutes about how much the native wildlife just LOVES the farm because of all the wilderness areas that have been left untouched. There’s a 3D movie that talks about how healthy milk is for you and how clean and sterile the environment is for these cows. I may not know much but I do know enough to realize that any time a company spends that much time telling you how clean and sterile their product is and how good it is for the environment that they are totally fucking feeding you bullshit.
So let’s get down to facts. Facts from the tour. The tour that was promoting the farm and how great it was. Firstly, do you have any idea how wasteful this whole thing is? Their big line was, “From grass to your glass.” The premise being that these miraculous cows turn grass into milk. It’s like magic! Well firstly, that’s utter bullshit (no pun intended). These cows would be lucky if they’ve ever SEEN grass let alone had the opportunity to consume it. Every day, the video happily proclaims, the average cow eats… get this… 100 pounds of grain. Yeah. You read that right. One hundred pounds of grain, 30 gallons of water and in exchange you get 10 gallons of milk and, one can only assume, 100+ pounds of excrement. Do you have any idea how many people you could feed with 100 pounds of grain or similar vegetable products? People are starving on this planet and yet we’re force-feeding grain to dairy cows. The video made all sorts of wonderful claims about how the cows live in luxurious conditions. They have clean sand every week in their pens (because cows in their native habitat no doubt hang out at the beach so this is utterly natural) and they have all the food they want, available 24 hours a day, and even get to go (I shit you not) “hang out with each other” in a special area of their pen. Their description makes it sound more like a retirement home than the abattoir that it really is.
The marketing also went to great lengths, repeatedly, to talk about how clean and sanitary their product was, how they “harvest” the milk and sanitize the udders and cool it down rapidly to make sure it stays fresh. It just sounds so yummy and delicious! That is until you see the cows on the huge rotary milker covered with their own shit. Seriously, their pens are filled with sand, so I’m fairly certain that brown material covering them is probably not mud. If you put antiseptic on a shit-covered cow and then suck the milk out of it, is that really sanitary? Or is it just “kinda” sanitary? Close enough for the USDA, perhaps. Just worth keeping in mind, I suppose, that every drink of milk contains some amount of cow shit.
What struck me most of all was the birthing barn. Here you had cows that had been force-fed to the point of being utterly obese, filled with hormones and unable to give birth to their own children without the assistance of a stout rope. The audio voice-over claimed, “only 5% of births need assistance” but even our small sample size proved that an utterly contrived statistic. These poor animals, stretched beyond all proper bounds of nature’s intention by human greed and force-feeding, have as much chance of giving birth naturally as an obese woman does of running a marathon. In many cases their udders are so grossly distended that they can barely walk in a straight line let alone give birth naturally.
In summary, the dairy farm is a dim parody of nature. While the voice-over proudly proclaims how happy the cows are and, most disturbingly, how smart and easily trained they are, they live out existences that are more closely akin to something from an H.P. Lovecraft novel than anything else. Once they serve out their useful lives in the dairy they head to the slaughterhouse to “give their all” as the tour guide said when it was asked of her. What logical sense does that make? Who in their right mind subsidizes an industry that is not only horrendously wasteful but just idiotically cruel? In our pursuit of cheap calories, we’ve created a monstrosity, a travesty of all logical justice.
I, for one, am off dairy. I’ll admit that it will be difficult to give up cheese but the image of the shit-stained udders of dozens of cows being suckled by probing mechanical nozzles is more than sufficient to put me off milk and beef. How can we justify such an industry? As intense as the marketing is, I shudder to think what the reality is hidden behind the sanitized version we see on the tour. Perhaps if I put these products aside it can help make the huge pile of shit a bit smaller. Perhaps if we all do it will vanish entirely.
Firstly, let me say that I went into this with a fairly open mind. I imagined a tour of a facility that was at least grounded in some level of realism. Sure, animals are going to be dirty and crowded and I was prepared to deal with that. I spent a fair bit of my life around a small farm so I get the farming thing. You do what you have to do to get your product to market. Fine. I can accept that much. You know what really just turned my stomach? You walk into the place and instantly you’re hit with the barrage of marketing. How environmentally friendly the farm is. How incredibly clean it is. How healthy the product is for you. A fucking animatronic tree babbles on for 10 minutes about how much the native wildlife just LOVES the farm because of all the wilderness areas that have been left untouched. There’s a 3D movie that talks about how healthy milk is for you and how clean and sterile the environment is for these cows. I may not know much but I do know enough to realize that any time a company spends that much time telling you how clean and sterile their product is and how good it is for the environment that they are totally fucking feeding you bullshit.
So let’s get down to facts. Facts from the tour. The tour that was promoting the farm and how great it was. Firstly, do you have any idea how wasteful this whole thing is? Their big line was, “From grass to your glass.” The premise being that these miraculous cows turn grass into milk. It’s like magic! Well firstly, that’s utter bullshit (no pun intended). These cows would be lucky if they’ve ever SEEN grass let alone had the opportunity to consume it. Every day, the video happily proclaims, the average cow eats… get this… 100 pounds of grain. Yeah. You read that right. One hundred pounds of grain, 30 gallons of water and in exchange you get 10 gallons of milk and, one can only assume, 100+ pounds of excrement. Do you have any idea how many people you could feed with 100 pounds of grain or similar vegetable products? People are starving on this planet and yet we’re force-feeding grain to dairy cows. The video made all sorts of wonderful claims about how the cows live in luxurious conditions. They have clean sand every week in their pens (because cows in their native habitat no doubt hang out at the beach so this is utterly natural) and they have all the food they want, available 24 hours a day, and even get to go (I shit you not) “hang out with each other” in a special area of their pen. Their description makes it sound more like a retirement home than the abattoir that it really is.
The marketing also went to great lengths, repeatedly, to talk about how clean and sanitary their product was, how they “harvest” the milk and sanitize the udders and cool it down rapidly to make sure it stays fresh. It just sounds so yummy and delicious! That is until you see the cows on the huge rotary milker covered with their own shit. Seriously, their pens are filled with sand, so I’m fairly certain that brown material covering them is probably not mud. If you put antiseptic on a shit-covered cow and then suck the milk out of it, is that really sanitary? Or is it just “kinda” sanitary? Close enough for the USDA, perhaps. Just worth keeping in mind, I suppose, that every drink of milk contains some amount of cow shit.
What struck me most of all was the birthing barn. Here you had cows that had been force-fed to the point of being utterly obese, filled with hormones and unable to give birth to their own children without the assistance of a stout rope. The audio voice-over claimed, “only 5% of births need assistance” but even our small sample size proved that an utterly contrived statistic. These poor animals, stretched beyond all proper bounds of nature’s intention by human greed and force-feeding, have as much chance of giving birth naturally as an obese woman does of running a marathon. In many cases their udders are so grossly distended that they can barely walk in a straight line let alone give birth naturally.
In summary, the dairy farm is a dim parody of nature. While the voice-over proudly proclaims how happy the cows are and, most disturbingly, how smart and easily trained they are, they live out existences that are more closely akin to something from an H.P. Lovecraft novel than anything else. Once they serve out their useful lives in the dairy they head to the slaughterhouse to “give their all” as the tour guide said when it was asked of her. What logical sense does that make? Who in their right mind subsidizes an industry that is not only horrendously wasteful but just idiotically cruel? In our pursuit of cheap calories, we’ve created a monstrosity, a travesty of all logical justice.
I, for one, am off dairy. I’ll admit that it will be difficult to give up cheese but the image of the shit-stained udders of dozens of cows being suckled by probing mechanical nozzles is more than sufficient to put me off milk and beef. How can we justify such an industry? As intense as the marketing is, I shudder to think what the reality is hidden behind the sanitized version we see on the tour. Perhaps if I put these products aside it can help make the huge pile of shit a bit smaller. Perhaps if we all do it will vanish entirely.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
In Defense of Women
It has occurred to me that as of late I have found myself increasingly confrontational. I delivered my polemic from yesterday morning to the Lafayette Journal and Courier in the hopes that someone might take sufficient notice to make the issue of which I write visible to a larger crowd than the small one that reads this blog. Since the article on economic inequality on March 19th, (“On Organized Labor”), I’ve found myself increasingly controversial and ready to face whatever negativity that might result from my opinions. Whether any of this prolixity is justified is left as an exercise to the reader but suffice it to say that I grow increasingly unimpressed with the society in which we live.
For today’s rant I take up a topic that I’ve touched on before in the long history of this blog but never with quite this level of specificity. It seems that there exists in this country a silent war on women. I was greeted this morning by a post from Sarah Kimmett in defense of the right of a woman to breastfeed her baby in some public place aside from a restroom. While the imagery of her post was… well, a tad unsettling, her point was well taken. Why should a woman who wishes to feed her baby, in the most natural way possible, and in the most healthy and responsible way possible, be consigned to do so in a public restroom? Because of a group of ultra-conservative, ultra-religious assholes, we’ve vilified the natural act of feeding a child. It’s become something to be hidden away in a dark corner like taking a shit. Feeding your baby is not the moral equivalent of dropping a deuce. Stop treating it like it is.
My personal experience with this is fairly limited. I’ve seen a few women breastfeeding in my day but not many. The most poignant that I recall was, somewhat ironically, in the Field Museum in Chicago. Amongst the displays of primitive man and bones of long-dead Dinosaurs, I saw a woman quietly sitting in the stairwell feeding her child. She wasn’t terribly exposed. She wasn’t a repugnant display of human flesh. She was simply and discretely and quietly feeding her baby. I didn’t feel repulsed or disgusted. What did I feel? I felt an overwhelming sense of well-being. Here was a woman who was sharing of herself to bring life and joy to the next generation of humankind. The image of her still dances through my mind all these years later. In some utterly bizarre way this image gives me hope for humanity. It lets me know that there is hope for all of us, that we are still one big human family that cares for one another generation after generation. I would be sad if some close-minded bigots kept me from having that feeling. Every time that I see a group of people on television I’m greeted by a sign that says, “Support our Troops.” It would be nice if once in a while we saw a sign that said, “Support our Moms.” Their jobs are no less important, but their song goes unsung.
Closely related to this, I’ve been increasingly confronted as of late with men, or at least stories of men, who are stuck in the year 1953. There is still a small cohort of mankind who believes that there is something called “women’s work” and that women are uniquely qualified to carry it out. To them I will merely say, the year is 2011 and it is time to dispose of your old value systems. The women of today are capable of much more than their assigned roles from 60 years ago. June Cleaver didn’t bring home a paycheck, run the house and keep junior’s fingernails trimmed in the way that today’s modern woman does. Because of this added responsibility, she deserves not only your respect but very nearly your worship. She balances more things in a day than an average man could possibly conceive of. Appreciate her for all that she is and she will, I assure you, more than compensate you for your attentions. Men of the world, do not wage war on your women. Stand beside them and recognize them for the awe-inspiring allies that they are.
For today’s rant I take up a topic that I’ve touched on before in the long history of this blog but never with quite this level of specificity. It seems that there exists in this country a silent war on women. I was greeted this morning by a post from Sarah Kimmett in defense of the right of a woman to breastfeed her baby in some public place aside from a restroom. While the imagery of her post was… well, a tad unsettling, her point was well taken. Why should a woman who wishes to feed her baby, in the most natural way possible, and in the most healthy and responsible way possible, be consigned to do so in a public restroom? Because of a group of ultra-conservative, ultra-religious assholes, we’ve vilified the natural act of feeding a child. It’s become something to be hidden away in a dark corner like taking a shit. Feeding your baby is not the moral equivalent of dropping a deuce. Stop treating it like it is.
My personal experience with this is fairly limited. I’ve seen a few women breastfeeding in my day but not many. The most poignant that I recall was, somewhat ironically, in the Field Museum in Chicago. Amongst the displays of primitive man and bones of long-dead Dinosaurs, I saw a woman quietly sitting in the stairwell feeding her child. She wasn’t terribly exposed. She wasn’t a repugnant display of human flesh. She was simply and discretely and quietly feeding her baby. I didn’t feel repulsed or disgusted. What did I feel? I felt an overwhelming sense of well-being. Here was a woman who was sharing of herself to bring life and joy to the next generation of humankind. The image of her still dances through my mind all these years later. In some utterly bizarre way this image gives me hope for humanity. It lets me know that there is hope for all of us, that we are still one big human family that cares for one another generation after generation. I would be sad if some close-minded bigots kept me from having that feeling. Every time that I see a group of people on television I’m greeted by a sign that says, “Support our Troops.” It would be nice if once in a while we saw a sign that said, “Support our Moms.” Their jobs are no less important, but their song goes unsung.
Closely related to this, I’ve been increasingly confronted as of late with men, or at least stories of men, who are stuck in the year 1953. There is still a small cohort of mankind who believes that there is something called “women’s work” and that women are uniquely qualified to carry it out. To them I will merely say, the year is 2011 and it is time to dispose of your old value systems. The women of today are capable of much more than their assigned roles from 60 years ago. June Cleaver didn’t bring home a paycheck, run the house and keep junior’s fingernails trimmed in the way that today’s modern woman does. Because of this added responsibility, she deserves not only your respect but very nearly your worship. She balances more things in a day than an average man could possibly conceive of. Appreciate her for all that she is and she will, I assure you, more than compensate you for your attentions. Men of the world, do not wage war on your women. Stand beside them and recognize them for the awe-inspiring allies that they are.
Fourth Reich
If you talk to most people about Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews during World War II or the death of a million and a half Armenians in 1915 or even the work of the Khmer Rouge killing two million Cambodians in the seventies, the predictable quizzical refrain is, “How could they DO such a thing?!” Unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon, and the ideological roots of such thinking are alive and well in the United States even today.
Our story begins innocently enough… Yesterday I went to the camera store for my semi-annual shopping trip. I judged myself in “need” of a good macro lens and so, having had good luck at a store in Lafayette I traveled hither and availed myself of the help, selected an appropriate lens and then found myself in the awkward, “Oh jeeze, now the salesman wants to talk about something unrelated to photography” situation. The guy certainly didn’t look like a Nazi; he was about medium build, balding, late 50s with a queer expression that makes you wonder if his mental acuity is fading a bit. Somehow he got onto the topic of crime in the surrounding county and how it had risen dramatically over the past few years. I mentally braced myself when he said the words, “You know why crime is up so much don’t ya?”
He then went on for a full five minutes about how Mexicans and African Americans had invaded from Chicago. He told stories of welfare moms (all with six kids by six fathers he noted), apparently by the dozens, would go to the fair and “let their kids loose to run around unattended and ruin the whole thing for everyone”. The reason they were here was simple, he said. They came because Illinois is out of welfare money and the mayor of Chicago told them to come to Lafayette because Indiana still has plenty. The Mexicans are here because, as you may have heard, there’s a big sign at the Mexican border that says, “Come to Lafayette, Indiana. We have good jobs for you.”
It’s endlessly fascinating to me that I’ve heard many of these stories before but the details and the place names are always different. If they’re all to be believed, then the border with Mexico must just be crowded with signs as far as the eye can see for every burg, hamlet and village in America that’s seeking out cheap labor from Lafayette to Frankfort to South Park, Colorado. It perplexes me even further that if the speaker believes his own story, why does he have such vitriol for the people who have come to Lafayette rather than the situations that brought them here? If the influx of African-Americans is bothersome, why be mad at them for their very existence? Why not vent your angst on the society that made it profitable and reasonable for them to get into their situation in the first place? Why not write a letter to the mayor of Chicago telling him to stop sending his huddled masses down I-65? Is it really their fault for existing? If Mexicans are coming here in droves because of signs then why not boycott the companies who put up the signs to attract them in the first place? If one is going to hate a group of people then at the very least the reasons for doing so should make logical sense rather than being cobbled together from bits and pieces of yokel-pseudowisdom.
So what’s the truth here? Are there really people on the welfare rolls out there with six kids by six different dads collecting taxpayer dollars? Certainly there are. No denying that. But whose fault is that really? If these people exist it’s not because of some inherent flaw in their persons so much as a gap in the systems of education and government that created them. The difference between a welfare mother of six and a successful professional woman is merely a matter of situation and education. As long as America tolerates the existence of a class of ultra-rich elites there will be a class of ultra-poor to balance them out. The question of Mexican immigration has been a hot-button one for decades and somehow it’s perceived to be the fault of the immigrants themselves that American companies demand their cheap and undocumented labor. Of course companies want to keep their costs low and in many cases have no choice about it because the American people have such an insatiable demand for cheap goods. If you have a problem with immigration then you should start by making sure that none of the goods and services you buy are sourced with the labor of immigrants. That will mean that you’ll pay a lot more for them because the equivalent American worker won’t accept $20 a day in wages. But that’s OK, right? No price too high to make sure we don’t have to hear Spanish in the grocery store!
In the end, I’m not sure whether to be angry or sad at the situation. The camera shop salesman’s viewpoint, as loathsome as it is, seems to be a very popular one. And that’s the scary part. It’s thoughts such as these, spread person to person and quickly accepted as reality, that start atrocities such as the Jewish Holocaust. The simple and virulent idea that, “things are bad and it’s the fault of THOSE people,” spreads far too easily and once it permeates a society it lacks only a persuasive leader to turn from an underground movement to an all-out war. We cannot continue to think this way about the people around us. Like it or not, we’re all in this together so rather than spending your wrath hating the person next to you let’s embrace what we’ve got and try to make things better for all of us. Vote for parties that support responsible social programs that help bring people up from poverty and ignorance (if you can find one). Volunteer at literacy programs and give to organizations that help those in need. While the forgotten masses at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder may seem the least important, they also have the most potential. And when you see injustice or ignorance in your community then stand up and talk about it. Don’t let your quiet non-vote contribute to the growing river of hatred and blame that runs through our communities.
Our story begins innocently enough… Yesterday I went to the camera store for my semi-annual shopping trip. I judged myself in “need” of a good macro lens and so, having had good luck at a store in Lafayette I traveled hither and availed myself of the help, selected an appropriate lens and then found myself in the awkward, “Oh jeeze, now the salesman wants to talk about something unrelated to photography” situation. The guy certainly didn’t look like a Nazi; he was about medium build, balding, late 50s with a queer expression that makes you wonder if his mental acuity is fading a bit. Somehow he got onto the topic of crime in the surrounding county and how it had risen dramatically over the past few years. I mentally braced myself when he said the words, “You know why crime is up so much don’t ya?”
He then went on for a full five minutes about how Mexicans and African Americans had invaded from Chicago. He told stories of welfare moms (all with six kids by six fathers he noted), apparently by the dozens, would go to the fair and “let their kids loose to run around unattended and ruin the whole thing for everyone”. The reason they were here was simple, he said. They came because Illinois is out of welfare money and the mayor of Chicago told them to come to Lafayette because Indiana still has plenty. The Mexicans are here because, as you may have heard, there’s a big sign at the Mexican border that says, “Come to Lafayette, Indiana. We have good jobs for you.”
It’s endlessly fascinating to me that I’ve heard many of these stories before but the details and the place names are always different. If they’re all to be believed, then the border with Mexico must just be crowded with signs as far as the eye can see for every burg, hamlet and village in America that’s seeking out cheap labor from Lafayette to Frankfort to South Park, Colorado. It perplexes me even further that if the speaker believes his own story, why does he have such vitriol for the people who have come to Lafayette rather than the situations that brought them here? If the influx of African-Americans is bothersome, why be mad at them for their very existence? Why not vent your angst on the society that made it profitable and reasonable for them to get into their situation in the first place? Why not write a letter to the mayor of Chicago telling him to stop sending his huddled masses down I-65? Is it really their fault for existing? If Mexicans are coming here in droves because of signs then why not boycott the companies who put up the signs to attract them in the first place? If one is going to hate a group of people then at the very least the reasons for doing so should make logical sense rather than being cobbled together from bits and pieces of yokel-pseudowisdom.
So what’s the truth here? Are there really people on the welfare rolls out there with six kids by six different dads collecting taxpayer dollars? Certainly there are. No denying that. But whose fault is that really? If these people exist it’s not because of some inherent flaw in their persons so much as a gap in the systems of education and government that created them. The difference between a welfare mother of six and a successful professional woman is merely a matter of situation and education. As long as America tolerates the existence of a class of ultra-rich elites there will be a class of ultra-poor to balance them out. The question of Mexican immigration has been a hot-button one for decades and somehow it’s perceived to be the fault of the immigrants themselves that American companies demand their cheap and undocumented labor. Of course companies want to keep their costs low and in many cases have no choice about it because the American people have such an insatiable demand for cheap goods. If you have a problem with immigration then you should start by making sure that none of the goods and services you buy are sourced with the labor of immigrants. That will mean that you’ll pay a lot more for them because the equivalent American worker won’t accept $20 a day in wages. But that’s OK, right? No price too high to make sure we don’t have to hear Spanish in the grocery store!
In the end, I’m not sure whether to be angry or sad at the situation. The camera shop salesman’s viewpoint, as loathsome as it is, seems to be a very popular one. And that’s the scary part. It’s thoughts such as these, spread person to person and quickly accepted as reality, that start atrocities such as the Jewish Holocaust. The simple and virulent idea that, “things are bad and it’s the fault of THOSE people,” spreads far too easily and once it permeates a society it lacks only a persuasive leader to turn from an underground movement to an all-out war. We cannot continue to think this way about the people around us. Like it or not, we’re all in this together so rather than spending your wrath hating the person next to you let’s embrace what we’ve got and try to make things better for all of us. Vote for parties that support responsible social programs that help bring people up from poverty and ignorance (if you can find one). Volunteer at literacy programs and give to organizations that help those in need. While the forgotten masses at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder may seem the least important, they also have the most potential. And when you see injustice or ignorance in your community then stand up and talk about it. Don’t let your quiet non-vote contribute to the growing river of hatred and blame that runs through our communities.
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