Double Take

As I was walking to the car this morning, I noticed what appeared to be a wash rag on my neighbor's windshield. I just had to go back and look, and not only was there a cloth on the end of her windshield wiper, there was no blade. When I got home after work, I inspected it more closely. It was zip-tied on! Here are some photos for your viewing pleasure

Yes, that is something isn't it? I asked her about it later. She said she was driving down the highway when the passenger blade flew off. If she used the wipers (necessary with the constant monsoons we've had of late), the bare wiper scratched her windshield. Thus, an invention was born.

What about a new wiper blade you might think? She said she went to Wal-mart, and they didn't have one for her car. Since then a family member has obtained one for her, but she hasn't made it over to have it installed.

This reminded me of a scary wiper incident in which I was a participant. I was riding with my friend, and it started to rain pretty hard. Did she turn on her wipers so she could see? No. I asked her why. She said her blades were so bad THEY SCRATCHED THE GLASS. She said she never thought about replacing them unless it was raining. This as we are driving probably 60 mph through town on the interstate with almost nil visibility. Yes, I was glad when that care ride was over.

Everything Old Is New Again

This weekend my grandma gave me a newsclipping she found while cleaning out her cedar chest. It was an article about natural childbirth that appeared in the local newspaper the year I was born . Two of the people in the class were... my mom and dad. Yes, I was newsworthy even before birth. My parents were in two of the pictures from the story. I had never seen this article before, and I thought it was really cool. I later read the article, and I was struck out how radical the idea of natural childbirth seemed to be. I asked my mom about it, and she said it was very rare at the time. Prior to this time was the "drug the mom totally out and deliver the baby" school of childbirth. It struck me as how funny it is that the shift was back to the way babies had been born for thousands of years (but thankfully with the availability of  medically indicated c-section).

This shift to the "old" way of doing things made me think about something my grandma had said before- when she had her 3 kids, women didn't breastfeed. She said they gave you a shot to dry up your milk after the baby was born, and the baby was fed formula. My mom said only the really poor people breastfed. It's funny, because there is so much research now that shows how good breastfeeding is for the baby (there are benefits for the mom too). So now the expert advice is back to the old way here too (formula is of course still the best/only option in some cases).

In a similar vein, I remembered something I'd read a long time ago about China. At one point in history the elite ate white rice. Only the poor ate whole grain. This led the elite to develop a nutritional deficiency while the poor did not (unfortunately I can't remember the name of the disease).

Morale of the story: Just because something is "new" does not necessarily mean that it's a true improvement. Sometimes the old ways are indeed the best ones.

9 Sure-Fire Ways to Get Fired

This article was linked from the Evil HR Lady Blog, one of my favorites. Hope you enjoy, and that you feel smarter by reading it.

Being a Namesake Isn't Always Good

Have you seen some of the stupid warning labels on products? Really, lotion is for external use only?

Ever wondered why your company has some of the rules it does? It's simple. It's called the so-and-so rule. Someone does something stupid, rude, or otherwise undesired, and BAM! a new rule is born. While your employee handbook probably doesn't say "The Bob Smith Rule" above "clothing must be worn at all times", that's really what is it. We have several rules and policy modifications at my work that we refer to amongst the HR team by the person who inspired them. In case you didn't guess, I can't think of ANY that are the result of fabulous employee achievement. It's like something I read once about the medical field- it's much more likely that the disease you discover will bear your name than the cure you find for it.

Some Valium Wouldn't Hurt

My coworker and I have joked for a while that we need to find a doctor who will write us a prescription for Valium in bulk that we can then inject into the company water system. We're just looking for a maintenance dose to take the edge off of people. After observing some of our other colleagues today, we're thinking we need to up it to a therapeutic dose and also get some in tranquilizer dart gun form so when people get really on the edge we can just shoot them in the rump with it.

So what made today so interesting? Well, here's some of the things from today:

- E-mail was down for 7 hours. Yes, almost the entire day. It didn't bother me much, it just meant people couldn't send me more work electronically. I don't think everyone else felt this way

- We have a leaking container on the railroad that we've been working for 2 days to get opened, cleaned up, and the rest of the direly needed materials to us.

- As someone in our purchasing team said, we can't get one of our primary packaging materials "to save our life"

- A customer called, apparently frantic, stating that they found what looks to me to be a hexnut in their oil. They wanted to know if this would contaminate their 6000 gallon load. Um, probably not! But we sent someone to their sight (about an hour away) to get a sample of the load and bring it back for testing.

- Several coworkers are just generally highly on edge, some literally running through the office, others one breath away from a full meltdown

If you happen to know where we can get a good deal on a railcar or tank truck of liquid Valium, please let me know.

It's All About Choice

Last summer I vacationed with my mom, sister, brother-in-law, and 14-month-old niece. My niece has a plastic booster seat that attaches to a dining room chair, then you strap her in so she can eat at the table with the rest of the family. When she was done eating there was nothing she wanted more than to be out of that seat. Someone would clean her up, unstrap her, put her down, then sit the booster seat on the floor. Since she wanted out of it so badly, you'd think she'd keep her distance right? On the contrary, on more than one occasion she would pick it up, carry it out to the balcony, sit in it, and try to strap herself in! Why would the same child that just wanted out of that same chair do that? Simple. It's a matter of choice. When the chair wasn't at the table, how long she sat in it was entirely in her control. She could get up at any time.

She's a baby you might say. What's that got to do with me? Adults really aren't that different. My boss was telling me Friday about a local company that's experiencing a slowdown and only working a few days a week. They are making anyone with available paid time off take it to get up to 40 hours. Those without are taking the hours at no pay. People were not happy about this. While I understand that the company is trying to reduce the amount of paid time on their books, I think they could probably achieve roughly the same result by giving people the OPTION of using paid leave. Most people like to have a predictable paycheck and would probably use the time. However, it's their CHOICE. There would likely  be a few people who would take the shutdown hours as unpaid and save it for later. We see this in our short term disability leave program at work. For noninjury leaves such as pregnancy or planned surgery, there is a 7 day elimination period. People can take vacation time for this or not. Do we see both cases? Yes. But it's their choice. Therefore less whining, meaning happier employees and HR people.

Giving people options can often be an easy way to make them feel more empowered, even if they'll likely choose what you would have dictated to them. It's all about choice.

If I Won the Lottery

Last week there was considerable talk at work about winning the lottery. The winning ticket for a $200 million+  drawing was sold locally. While the person has not yet come forward, my coworker's husband works with a relative of the winner. Even if the person takes the cash option and has taxes witheld, it is still an almost unfathomable amount of money. Thus there were several "If I won" stories told.

I don't play the lottery, so it's rather unlikely that I'd win. But if someone gave me a ticket as a gift and it turned out to be a winner, or if I came into a large sum of money in another way (at least $10 million after tax so I could live off the interest), here's what's on my immediate list:

1. Make phone calls

No, not to tell everyone I'd won. The first call would be one to tell my boss I immediately needed to take a week off from work due to personal issues. The person who won the big drawing here supposedly walked into work the next day thinking she could actually do her job, but she couldn't concentrate and quit. Dumb move in my opinion. No quitting until the money is in my account.

The next call would be changing my phone number and having the directory listing changed to something unhelpful like J. Smith. Even with all my good planning to stay off the radar, no sense taking chances.

I'd spend the rest of the week making calls to find a good lawyer, accountant, and financial planner. I'd need to meet with them to find out to claim the money anonymously (yes, it can be done), whether to take the cash option or payout, etc.


2. Immediate post-obtaining plans

Once the cash is in my hands, I'd request two weeks of vacation. The second it was approved, I'd give my two weeks notice. Yes, I'm still giving notice. I do work in HR remember? It's never advisable to burn bridges if you can avoid it. They would still pay me any time left owed me, etc. And yes, even though I now have buckets of money, I'd still care about this amount of unused time owed me.

At this point, it's time to tell a few select people. My mom would probably already know, because I'd want her opinion on finding the legal and financial pros I needed. Now I would tell my immediate family- sisters, brother, and brother-in-laws. They would course be sworn to secrecy. Would I give them lots of money? No. They'd all still have to work (sorry family if you didn't see that coming!), but I see a pretty nice vacation or two on me in their future.

I'd request a meeting with the pastor at my church to discuss the large chunk of money they are about to receive in the form of my tithe. I would want it used wisely, and I would want to keep the donation as quiet as possible.

CDARS would be getting a large deposit.

3. Go off the radar

It is time to get out of dodge. I'd take a vacation to the beach somewhere for at least a couple weeks. This would serve a couple of purposes. First, it would get me away from anyone who somehow found out about my new wealth status and was a long lost "friend" or "family" member. It was also let me think through a lot of other things- where do I want to live, how am I going to spend my time now that I'm retired, etc. I'd also just chill.

Those are my ideas. How about you?

"May Have Been Insensitive"- You Think?- UPDATE

I was just checking CNN and saw this headline "Execs donate bonuses to rig victims' kin". Of course, I had to read the story. Yes, as my teammate would say, "Someone pressed enter". Five people at the top of the Transocean food chain have decided to donate their dubious safety bonuses to the families of those killed in the Deepwater Horizon accident. The aggregate amount is over $250,000.

"The executive team made this decision because we believe it is the right thing to do," Chief Executive Officer Steven Newman said in a statement Tuesday. "Nothing is more important to Transocean than our people, and it was never our intent to diminish the effect the Macondo tragedy has had on those who lost loved ones," he said. "We offer our most sincere apologies and we regret the impact this matter has had on the entire Transocean family."

Translation: We're not smart enough not to do something stupid like say "safest year ever" when 9 of our employees died. But we do "get" that people are upset (our publicist told us), and this is what we agreed to do to try to cover our hides. But we still wish we got to keep the cash.

"May Have Been Insensitive"- You Think?

One of my coworkers printed off this article for me today. He did it for at least two reasons: 1. We have a safety incentive program that rewards our associates for turning in articles about safety. An even better reason I think is that 2. he knew I would appreciate it.

I mean, how dumb are you people at Transocean anyway? First, you are part of an utter catastrophe that kills 9 of your own employees, 2 other people, and causes environmental damage the true extent of which we will probably never know. Then you are glib enough to say

"Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate," the SEC statement reads. "As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company's history."

Oh sure, besides that fact that NINE of your employees died, it was a fantastic year for safety. Of course, if that is true, how many people do you kill in a normal year? Who had the nerve to write this? Did anyone else even read it before it went to the SEC? Proxy statements are a huge thing for companies. It seems to me as though they care as much about putting together a well thought out and well written proxy statement as they do the lives of their employees.

I Had to Laugh

When I read this quote last night-

"However slow the economy, or chaotic the markets, our checks will clear".

Sounds pretty cocky doesn't it? Well, it would since you probably don't who wrote it. It's Warren Buffett in the 2010 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report. Once you know that, you realize it's merely a statement of fact. That's serious cash.