At my first assistant job, my boss used to do this thing that drove me crazy. He’d start with “Can you do me a favor..?” and then tell me to do something. It wasn’t a favor, something that I was doing out of the kindness of my heart because we were such good friends. I didn’t answer his phone as a favor; I answered it because it was my job. Well, the word “voluntold” is kind of like that. A combination of “volunteered” and “told,” this is a word that applies whenever an employee is given the false choice to do something. For example, you’d be happy to work Thanksgiving for the overtime pay, but you’re told that you have to take a personal day regardless. Or maybe you are ordered to switch shifts with a coworker, even though it isn’t advantageous for your schedule, because the coworker has kids and you don’t. Congratulations, you just got voluntold.
Tag Archive for 'trends'
Looking for a new job in 2010? Well, here’s some good news – one of the ten best professions for job prospects next year is Executive Assistant. In other words – you!
Here’s what Careerbuilder (via Robert Half International) has to say:
Companies with leaner teams are looking for employees to take on a wider range of duties. Executive assistants who can wear many hats, support multiple managers and adapt readily to change are in particular demand. These individuals are likely to see starting salaries of $35,000 to $47,000.
In case you didn’t catch that, it’s a fancy description for “Combo Job.” But hey, at least it’s a job. If you’re thinking of switching careers, this list seems to indicate that you should probably check out IT or financial services.
A high rate of unemployment and a low rate of new hires tends to result in people becoming increasingly competitive and desperate to find a new job. It’s one thing to become really proactive and apply for every job in sight, even if it isn’t in your field or might be a step down from what you were doing before, because you need to have a regular income. But it’s another thing to spend money in order to try and land a job. One “expert” believes that plastic surgery is on the rise, despite the challenging economic times, as people try to look better in order to stand out from the competition:
The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports that, among last year’s most prominent trends, about two thirds of its members reported seeing men and women who requested cosmetic surgery because they wanted to remain competitive in the workplace.
“In the corporate world, there’s a lot of emphasis on image, and image goes with self-confidence,” says Antonio Armani, a Beverly Hills, California, cosmetic surgeon who specializes in hair transplants. “I think a lot of people do invest money in improving their looks because they feel this is one way they can go up the corporate ladder.”
Such procedures included breast implants, tummy tucks, teeth whitening, and hair transplants (coincidentally, all the exact procedures that Jon and Kate Gosselin got!).
Maybe some people ascribe to the “you have to spend money to make money” philosophy, but I can’t get on board with this. Sure, ageism exists, but I wish we as a culture would spend more time combatting the origins of ageism than going along with it and mutilating our bodies in order to conform to some arbitrary standard of youth and attractiveness.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be on the other side of a firing or layoff? One of the downsides to being a boss is having to let people go, especially when it’s not because they deserve it. Well, now The Washington Post introduces you to “The Five O’Clock Club” – an “outplacement” firm. What, you may ask, is outplacement? It’s a corporate buzzword for laying people off. And companies like The Five O’Clock Club (which I’ll call T5OCC) come in to help companies figure out which people to lay off and how.
While the point of this article is probably to help people – especially ones who lost their jobs recently and are pissed about it – sympathize with what it’s like to be the layer-offer, it doesn’t do much to humanize the characters. Having employees of T5OCC spout off lists of names and numbers – six here, 20 there – doesn’t make me feel sorry for them. If anything, it makes them look like vultures, who are surviving by feeding off of the dying. Take paragraphs like this, for example:
The Five O’Clock Club has nearly doubled in size during the past two years, and Hall has guided more than 200 companies and 1,500 laid-off workers through downsizings in the past six months. The Club, as it is sometimes called, charges each company about $2,000 per fired employee in exchange for providing layoff victims with a year of career coaching. The more businesses that suffer, the better for business at the Club. When Hall joined the company in 2007, she read in the employee handbook that “from time to time, employees will receive small bonuses when the company is doing exceptionally well.” Now those bonuses come almost every month.
Maybe I should reward these people for their business acumen, but all I feel like doing is being mad that they exist in the first place.
It never ceases to make me laugh when newspapers or magazines ’suddenly’ catch on to the ‘trend’ of working remotely. Still, as the economy sucks and people are taking pay cuts or working multiple part time jobs, these trend pieces are not going anywhere. Now, the Washington Post has coined the term ‘digital nomad‘ to identify and describe people who – like yours truly! – can do their jobs from anyplace they want (provided it has wifi, of course). Here are some of the reasons/benefits the article gives:
- You can wear whatever you want.
- No one makes you get up at 7 AM.
- You can avoid traffic or crowded public transit.
- You are able to work flexible hours, which is particularly awesome if you have kids or are working multiple gigs.
- “Meetings” can be conducted from your living room, a Starbucks, a library, or basically anywhere else.
- Buying an iPhone is a “work expense.’
- You can meet other digital nomads at your coffee shop of choice.
- If you want to go on vacation, you don’t have to request time off – you just have to make sure your laptop will work from the beach or hotel or airport or wherever.
In other words, your company needs to get with the times and let you be a digital nomad already.
The economy going south has meant that the number of ads for virtual assistants has skyrocketed. All kinds of individuals and companies are touting the benefits of virtual assistants, and – of course – pointing out that you virtual assistants are cheaper than the real kind, since you don’t have to provide a living wage or health insurance. However, while a virtual assistant can plan meetings and send emails on your behalf, there are plenty of things he or she cannot do, including:
- Fetch coffee.
- Fetch drugs.
- Pick your kid up from school.
- Take your dog for a walk.
- Solicit a prostitute for you.
- Stand there while you throw a coffee mug at him/her.
- Grab you a sandwich while they’re on their lunch break.
- Wait in line all night to get you concert tickets.
I consider myself a bit of an expert when it comes to profanity – in fact, my roommate is not a native English speaker and he relies on me to teach him how to swear. This new study from Keele University in the UK has just confirmed for the world something I’ve known for ages – swearing is awesome and it makes you feel better.
Their study involved 64 volunteers who were each asked to put their hand in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice.
They then repeated the experiment using a more commonplace word that they would use to describe a table.
The researchers found the volunteers were able to keep their hands in the ice water for a longer when swearing, establishing a link between swearing and an increase in pain tolerance.
So, I thinks this means you’re now allowed to curse as much as you want at the office. Because it helps you relieve stress, obviously. Funny, perhaps your boss was onto this phenomenon some time ago.
Everywhere you go, there’s a story on TV or in a newspaper or online about how people are cutting back on luxuries during the difficult economy. More workers are bringing lunches to work instead of going out, carpooling or using public transit to save money on gas, and cutting back on entertainment like concerts and vacations. Now, a study from Rodale (which, coincidentally, publishes Men’s Health magazine) claims that health and wellness related expenses like gym memberships are among the last things to go when someone is trimming their budget. Reasons offered include:
- Working out helps relieve the stress of increased work demands, bad job interviews, and the like
- People want to get the most use they can out of their monthly dues
- Gyms are offering new programs like meditation and yoga classes or, for one gym, a “power nap” session
- It’s a great way to meet people when you can’t afford to go to bars
- If you’re in better shape you can improve your health and possibly cut down on health care costs
- If you’ve been laid off, you may find yourself with a lot of time on your hands
Has the recession made you a gym rat, or was your health club membership the first thing to go out the window?
“I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?”
“I think you can in Europe.”
- Ten Things I Hate About You
OK, I’ll stop with the quoting of awesome ’90s movies now. But that was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw an article in today’s NY Daily News about something called “undermanagement.” I have to admit, usually the thing people complain the most regarding bosses and the workplace is being micromanaged – having a boss who breathes down their neck all the time and hyperstresses about even the smallest and most irrelevant of tasks. Now, we’re also supposed to be worried that someone might be managing too little? This kind of reminds me of how tabloids freak out whenever a celebrity puts on a pound or two and immediately starts a round-the-clock “bumpwatch” but then castigate her when she loses any weight and accuses her of having an eating disorder. There’s no middle ground, and there’s no way to win.
Remember when the economy first started to tank and all these big companies were getting bailouts? There was a fun buzzword – buyout sex – for employees of companies that were about to go under and figured protocol didn’t matter anymore. Now, there’s the more broad recession sex, which is when people have lost their jobs and are thus poor and have a lot of free time, so they start boning more often.
AdAge, of all places, has an article about this trend. The news hook for them is that sales of personal lubricants and “sexual enhancement devices” are way up.
“When the economy goes down, sex goes up,” said a Johnson & Johnson [who makes K&Y Jelly] spokesman by way of explanation, but he and the brand team declined to elaborate on why their products seem to be booming when the economy isn’t.
“These seem to be products people are actually gravitating toward in a recession,” Mr. Daniels said. “I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know why that is. We are seeing people spending more time at home. We’re seeing people’s relationships being stressed. We’re seeing people looking for means to reconnect with their partner and invest in relationships. In some cases, people may have more time on their hands if they’re not working.”
Isn’t this the same reason why there’s always a mini baby boom nine months after a hurricane or blackout – people are stuck at home with no TV or internet and need something to keep them occupied? Regardless, if you can’t afford to go out and buy things, you might as well stay home and get it on.
