Danny McBride, aka Kenny Powers on Eastbound and Down (the show every dude in my life is obsessed with) talked to Nerve.com to give sex advice to some of their erstwhile readers. Among his deep thoughts:
I hooked up with my coworker while drunk at an office party, but I’m not interested in dating her. What should I do now?
Kind of too late. You already took a shit where you eat, homeboy. That’s not a good thing. Just ride out the awkwardness. See how weird it’ll get, and maybe she’ll quit. Make things weirder. Push it a little. Maybe send flowers to her from an anonymous person. Just start coming off like a stalker.
It’s nice to know that he and I agree on something.
If you don’t have a job, where do you spend your days? The only acceptable answers are “at home watching Judge Judy reruns and scouring online job ads” and “at the bar.” Now, you can make your bar time more productive. If you live in Germany, that is.
The Kindl Klause pub in southern Berlin noticed that many of their patrons were unemployed. So they started offering job advice to the bargoers. They have set up a desk, which is staffed by social workers between 2-5 PM every Friday. So you can get a little motivation with your beer. It’s an even better pairing than cheese.
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.
There is a really interesting interview with Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz over at Fast Company today. In it, she admits to having been a bad manager in the past and talks about some of the mistakes she’s made and what she learned from them. Here are a couple of choice quotes:
- “I think managing is a real job, something you should always work at and try to be better. I’m constantly questioning how people react to what I’m saying, if I should change something or if I should approach something differently. You have to take it as a craft.”
- “The first thing I did was just set up 45 min sessions with as many people as I could and just listened. I said, “Okay, what do you think needs to be changed here? What’s good? What’s bad? What would you do if you were sitting in my seat?” And then I’d always ask, “Who else should I talk to?” If you sit quiet long enough, you find out what people really think. I filled a whole notebook up in those first few weeks, just gently asking and listening.”
- “I didn’t have my first child until I was 40. I actually learned about motherhood from management. When you bring your first baby home you don’t know even how to pick it up. Jeez, is this thing going to break? I remember in the middle of the night right before I was going home from the hospital, I asked the nurse, ‘Would you give me a demo on how to change a diaper?’ She said, ‘What’s a demo?’”
- “I tell people all the time that you learn so much more from a bad boss than from a good boss. When things are going well, you don’t think that much or analyze why this person is a good manager. When you work for a bad boss, you say, “I am never going to treat people the way I was just treated. I’m never going to throw a hissy fit.” I’m sure a lot of my managers say, “I’m never going to swear.” That’s fine. That’s how you form yourself.”
As for the last quote, it’s the one I spent the most time thinking about. To be honest, I did learn a lot from having terrible bosses. And it wasn’t only examples of how I didn’t want to behave. My first assistant job was the best lesson I ever got in flexibility and how to think on my feet. When you work for someone who is super inconsistent and changes his mind every five seconds, you’ll have to be able to come up with solutions really quickly. I also learned how to stand up for myself. Even though I’m by nature a pretty nonconfrontational person, being accused of shit I didn’t do (seriously, the guy once accused me of having changed all the fonts on his computer) made me learn when it was important to defend myself. That is a skill that has come in handy not only at work but in my personal life.
That said, I’ve learned a lot from good bosses. When I was the assistant to the editor in chief of a website, he taught me a lot about reporting. I wouldn’t have learned that from a boss who was standoffish or preferred I only do admin work for him. He was compassionate, understanding, and cared about my life outside of work, and those are all things I aim for now that I’m a manager myself. Ultimately, the important thing is to view every workplace situation – good, bad, neutral, boring, or whatever – as a learning opportunity. I haven’t only learned from bosses. I had a coworker who taught me how to craft professional work emails that didn’t sound like they were written by a corporate robot. There was a client whose constant diva fits reminded me to only get into arguments about stuff that was really important instead of becoming a constant overstresser who got ignored. It’s all there for the taking, if you choose to take it. And learning from a good boss has the added benefit of making you not hate your life in the process.
The adorable book Careers for Your Cat by Ann Dziemianowicz is perfect for the recession. I mean, if you need extra money, tell that good-for-nothing pet of yours to stop lying around the house sunning himself all day and start contributing to the household finances. If you’re not sure what kind of job your cat would be best suited for, Dziemianowicz is here to help. Start with the “Meowers-Briggs” personality test to determine what kind of personality your cat has, and then choose a profession based on the results. Basically, I love everything about this book, including the illustrations by Ann Boyajian. As the success of lolcats has shown, cats in outfits making weird faces is always, always funny.
So what are some possible jobs for your lazy, do-nothing Garfield wannabe of a kitten?
- Does your cat like to chase and collect shiny things? Maybe he should open his own art gallery!
- Is she known for her sharp claws? Perhaps she’d make a good lobbyist.
- If he loves to sleep on books, that could be a sign he’s destined to become a librarian.
All in all, this really makes me want a cat.
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.
Trust falls? Nah. Singing “kumbaya”? Passe. Having a talking stick? Outdated.
One boss in Italy decided that the best way to build office camaraderie and get his employees to bond was to make them walk over hot coals. Alessandro Di Priamo, who is a “motivational trainer for companies” (that’s Italian for “guy who gets paid a bunch of money to make people do stupid bonding exercises and use buzzwords”) had employees at a large Italian real estate agency walk across fire, only to – surprise! – wind up in the hospital with burned feet.
Di Priamo claims he has done this exercise with other companies dozens of times and no one’s ever been hurt before. I would like to offer this up as evidence that forced corporate bonding retreats are, in fact, painful.
As the entire universe apparently now knows, NBC bungled it big time when it came to letting Jay Leno retire and hand the reins of The Tonight Show over to Conan O’Brien. In addition to the obvious lessons we can learn from this disaster, such as “Jay Leno sucks” and “Conan O’Brien is hilarious,” FedLine (aka the Federal Times’ blog) points out some management lessons that we can learn from the mishandling of the whole situation. Let’s hope some TV executives take these tips to heart.
Lesson #1: Career progression is crucial to retaining top talent.
In other words, if your most talented people know they’ll be stuck in their jobs a long time because there’s nowhere for them to go internally, they will leave. And it will be your fault for not providing enough incentives.
Lesson #3: If you’re going to fire someone, just do it already.
One of the most embarrassing parts of the whole late night fiasco was the way that it was handled so publicly and that it took seemingly forever to resolve. That worked out nicely for Conan’s audience, who got to enjoy weeks’ worth of him taking potshots at NBC and putting together hilarious skits about wasting the network’s money, but it only protracted the whole situation. Good for viewers, not so good for NBC.
And while we’re on the subject of the lovely Mr. O’Brien, let’s all take his incredibly classy goodbye speech advice to heart:
Continue reading ‘what we can learn from NBC’
