This is really, really dead-on.
[Via Flavorwire]
Archive for the 'Survival Guide' Category
Want to get promoted? Can’t while there’s another coworker standing in your way? I’d advise you to ignore advice from Neil Weiner. Weiner, a school handyman, wanted to get promoted to custodian. But he couldn’t as long as there was currently a custodian, Eddie Thompson, doing the job. So what was Weiner’s brilliant plan? To put a bunch of kiddie porn on Thompson’s computer and try to get him fired. Luckily, it didn’t work, but Thompson had to endure several weeks of suspicion and abuse from concerned citizens before his name was finally cleared.
In other news, I bet Gary Glitter is already figuring out how to use this defense in the future.
Although I really do like Lois Frankel’s book Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, the squicky way that Citibank has appropriated some of her advice and felt compelled to hand it out to their female employees kind of rubs me the wrong way.
Sure, you know what road rage is. As a New Yorker who doesn’t drive, I occasionally suffer from bursts of “subway rage.” (Dear woman across from me, your purse does not need its own seat!) However, my fellow disgruntled cubicle dwellers of the world should also be on the lookout for “desk rage.” As we spend more and more time at the office and those offices try to squeeze more people into less space, it’s only logical that people get more fed up with each other and become less patient. Via Psychology Today:
A U.S. News and World Report poll says that 89% of U.S. workers said incivility is a serious problem and 78% said it is getting worse. The cost of workplace violence to employers is estimated somewhere between $6 to $36 billion annually.
Ever said “Such and such coworker makes me so mad I could just kill her?” Odds are good you aren’t alone. So how can we curb this growing problem? I vote for things like flex time, more vacation, and, if possible, working with people who don’t finish off the last of the coffee and then refuse to refill. Seriously. I hate that guy.
Here’s a hint for erstwhile job applicants: if you’re going to submit a resume somewhere, try not to submit a resume to a store you regularly shoplift from. A woman in Barrie, Ontario, applied to work at a clothing store. However, when she came in to interview, employees recognized her as the woman they’d seen on a security video of a shoplifter. Because her resume contained her full name, address, and phone number, it was pretty easy to find her and arrest her.
[Cross-posted at TheGloss]
Today I fielded some reader questions over on Crushable.com, which is the sister site to the place where I work, TheGloss.com. Here’s some of what I had to say:
Q. I feel hopeless about finding a job, especially in this economy. Should I take whatever job I can get that pays the bills or wait until I find something emotionally satisfying (while living under my parents’ roof)?
A. I’d love to tell you that you should hold out for your dream job, but you know what? For many people, me included, that wasn’t an option. My suggestion would be to find a gig that pays the bills and in the meantime while your basic needs are being met start looking for a job that you find more fulfilling. One thing I really stress on my site and in the book is that there’s a huge difference between “job” and “career.” Just because you take a short-term job to pay the bills doesn’t mean you’re destined to be at that job forever. So, unless you’re planning to live off of your savings or have some other way of supporting yourself, you can’t be snobby about what kind of job you take when you’re broke. Just remember never to lose sight of what you really want to do, and don’t stop sending out resumes and checking job boards. It’s way easier to land your dream job when you already have a job somewhere else – that gives you the ability to play coy and negotiate a better salary for yourself.
You can check out the rest of the Q&A on Crushable.
Say there’s a place where you want to work. Say that you go and submit an application to work there. What should you do immediately afterward? Here’s a quiz:
a) Leave.
b) Politely say goodbye and thank the person to whom you gave your application.
c) Steal from the tip jar.
If you chose C, then you’re one of the two boys who applied to work at an ice cream shop in Indiana and then got arrested for stealing a dollar each from the tip jar. Hey guys, here’s a tip for next time: you would probably earn more than a dollar each if you got the job.
I have a search box set up for “personal assistant” on the Twitter application I use. Sometimes, that search box turns up good, usable stuff, like this post. But about 99 percent of the tweets can be divided up into one of two categories:
- People complaining that they have too much work to do and asking if anyone wants to be their unpaid personal assistant/driver/cook/nanny/some combination thereof; and
- People tweeting at a particular celebrity and volunteering to be his or her personal assistant.
This post concerns the latter category. I won’t get into the fact that being a celebrity personal assistant is not really a glamorous job the way that people seem to think it is, because that’s a topic for another post or five. This is a post about how completely stupid it is to think that a celebrity will hire you as their personal assistant because you asked them to via Twitter. So here’s why:
- You are not the first person who has ever thought of this. Some celebrities get dozens of tweets a day from people who seriously or half-seriously would like to be their PA.
- If a celebrity needs an assistant, they will probably obtain one via some more reasonable way than responding to random tweets. Most celebrity assistants are hired through private staffing agencies or by referral. If you actually want to be a celebrity assistant, you should probably move to New York or LA and reach out to one of these agencies. If you really think contacting someone via Twitter is a good idea, then maybe you should at least tweet about your credentials and experience.
- Many celebrities aren’t the ones updating their own Twitter accounts. There are definitely some celebrities, like Ashton Kutcher, who love Twitter and compose their own tweets. But there are plenty more who just use Twitter for publicity purposes or to promote whatever they’re working on, and often Twitter accounts for celebrities are run by publicists – or, wait for it – assistants. Here’s a hint: a celebrity’s assistant will probably not need to hire an assistant or appreciate your offer to replace them.
- The internet is unreliable. Even if someone decided they were going to hire a person who tweeted at them, who would know if said person really existed or wasn’t crazy? No celebrity with any sense would hire a personal assistant without meeting them in person or having them go through various rounds of interviews.
That said, Twitter is not the only way that people try to get jobs as celebrities’ assistants. Any time I do a post relating to a celebrity looking for an assistant, I get several emails or comments from people who seem to think that I am personally hiring for the position. Some people even send me resumes with their private phone number and home address on them. So far, I haven’t published any of them, because I feel sorry for people who can’t tell the difference between an actual job ad and a website that regularly snarks on celebrities who abuse their assistants. But let this serve as a warning – if, for some reason, you are desperate to be slave labor for a famous person, please just call an agency, and leave me – and Twitter – out of it.
In case you live in Antarctica and hadn’t heard, Mel Gibson is back in the news for leaving a series of expletive, threat, and racial slur-laden emails on the voicemail of his now ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. This week on The View, cohost Whoopi Goldberg rose to Gibson’s defense, saying that he isn’t racist and his real problem is that he is an alcoholic who says crazy things when he has been drinking. The comments raised so much fury that Goldberg reportedly got tons of phone calls and emails from angry viewers. On today’s show, she claimed that some people had called her home and yelled at her assistant, who was the one answering the phone.
I don’t know if this actually happened or if she’s exaggerating for effect, but let’s all take a moment to remember one of the rules of assistant karma: even if you are really mad, do not take it out on the assistant. Goldberg is the one who made the comments. Her assistant is probably overworked and underpaid, and in addition to dealing with all of his boss’ shit he now has to get yelled at by strangers because his boss said something on television and people are mad about it. I can’t tell you how many times I got yelled at by people my boss had offended, and you know what? It made me vow never to do it to someone else. Do not continue the cycle of assistant abuse. Just yell at Whoopi instead. Or stop caring about what celebrities say on TV.
