work for a plonker crossed with a dipstick?

A little while back, I wrote a thank-you note to two former bosses. You see, I had what I fear are the best bosses of my life early in my career, when I was too green to know how lucky I was to have them as my managers. I thanked them for mentoring me, giving me autonomy with accountability, being flexible when needed, and treating me with genuine respect as a colleague.

I'd like to think that I'll find that again, but will admit to feeling a bit jaded as I watch my friends and colleagues endure odd situations with management that isn't really the kind of leadership to which I aspire. Over the years, I've learned to let it roll off my back and to focus on what's more important. I've also realized that I will probably be happiest (and do my best work) if I have the chutzpah to choose to work as a consultant or finally write that children's book I've been thinking about for the past few years.

For now, I'm staying put at my company, grateful for a paycheck in this economy and even more grateful for the other kindred spirits who brighten what could be just another soul-sucking corporate existence. Meanwhile, I'm doing good work, reminding my friends to focus on the fact that there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel, and counting my lucky stars that I don't work for the asstard described in the essay below.

Cubicle Wars: My Worst Boss (By Urban Cowgirl)
Monday, March 29, 2010
7:52PM

My job's sole redeeming feature is its salary. It's enough to live on, and I am grateful that in the Current Economic Climatetm I have a reason to commute two hours and hate the intervening eight hours with internal white-hot fury. The story of how I ended up here is lengthy and boring but suffice to say I had my dream job, that taxed the very limits of my intellect, and I gave it up to return to the UK because my mother was ill and I needed to be close.

I've been reaching for the gin bottle positivity-ing myself out of bed every morning, and last week I figured out that Anti-Bed leverage was enhanced by recalling that at least the people I work with are nice. Some of them are incompetent, but that's Dilbert's Third Law of Management. Nobody is actively nasty or intentionally destructive. No matter how much I hate my current job, it's not as bad as when I worked for My Worst Boss.

When I was a very young onion, I worked five years for a manager whose behaviour was so far over the line he couldn't have seen the line through the Hubble Telescope I imagined myself ramming up his backside.

When I'd been there a few months, on returning to my desk after lunch I found a copy of The Sun open at page 3 (the page The Sun dedicates to photos of topless women). Hilariously, that day's woman shared my first name. I threw the newspaper away and didn't report the sexual harassment, reasoning that my unimpressed glare had been sufficient to beat down any notions of future gender-abuse-related 'amusement'. I was right. But years later I wish I'd had the guts to march to the Director and threaten to take the organisation to court.

My Worst Boss had a drinking problem with a side of aggression. He would roll into the office at 10.30am with cadaver skin, groan at his desk until just after midday, and then proceed directly to a local drinking establishment. If I needed anything, that was my window, because after one of his special two or three hour lunchtime inhibition-busting sessions there was no point trying to interact. I attempted, once, to rescue reason from the jaws of Guinness at 3.30pm. I described a problem, and he suggested a solution so ridiculous that I queried his sanity. "Are you sure?" I said, "That might lead to the Earth being blown up and all its inhabitants dying a painful death." He told me that it would be 'fine'. It went pear-shaped the following week, whereupon I ended up back at his desk to be roared at. "Why did you do THAT?!"

Because you told me to.

"I never would have told you to do something so idiotic!"

I could only inwardly lament that during the conversation where he instructed me, only one of us was sober.

After lunches he would often come back bearing gifts of coffee and cake, because he knew he was doing wrong and he needed to feel better about leaving his staff to pick up the pieces of his shattered professionalism. When the telephone rang after lunch he would lean back and project his voice to the open plan office. Pity the poor fool on the line: they would be there hours later, listening to such effective relationship-management strategies as "Yes! It is under the enormous pile of incredibly URGENT million other things I have to do! WOULD YOU LIKE TO COME OVER AND LOOK AT MY DESK?". My colleagues and I would pretend we were deaf. I would get emails from people who had been trying to reach him for months, pleading with me to somehow have him respond to them.

Business was often transacted after work in the pub: if you didn't go, you would simply not find out things that were vital to the job. On one memorable occasion My Worst Boss had four too many drinks and got seriously bent out of shape because I'd arranged an external meeting with a client fully two weeks hence without yet mentioning it to him. It was in my calendar, which he could look at any time he could see straight, and he had previously told me to do whatever I felt was best. So I did, and now I was the recipient of a drunken rage in front of multiple colleagues. A senior colleague leapt to my defence, and I was so worried My Worst Boss would start throwing punches that I went home in tears.

The next day I explained to My Worst Boss's Boss that I didn't find it acceptable to be torn a new one in front of colleagues during a 'social' engagement outside the office. I didn't find it acceptable that My Worst Boss would tell me one thing one minute, deny it the next, and I could never be sure which way was up. I felt humiliated, hurt, and confused. I used the words drinking problem. I was told to go and see Human Resources Remains. Human Remains notified me that the only course of action was the dreaded formal complaint. I suggested that perhaps help (and a soft-skills course) for him could be productive as a first step. Could they instruct My Worst Boss's Boss to have a word with My Worst Boss? Why should this fall on my small, inexperienced shoulders? They might as well have washed their hands in front of me.

I returned to My Worst Boss's Boss, who gave me a book entitled 'How To Deal With Difficult People'. On my way home I realised that I was being asked to change my behaviour to accommodate someone who was an asshole and an alcoholic (probably the former because of the latter). This seemed neither sound logic for a long-term solution, nor fair. And the authors of the book had clearly never had to deal with My Worst Boss.

In ten years of working, for four months I was managed by someone whose integrity, intelligence, and professionalism I utterly respected. She made me want to leap out of bed every morning and hurtle to work. They are out there: but a rare breed.

Colonists, do you work for a plonker crossed with a dipstick? Please, share your tales from the trenches. Who was Your Worst Boss?

Urban Cowgirl is a Colony team member. You can read more about her here.

quotable

"They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price." -Kahlil Gibran, (1883-1931) Lebanese American artist, poet, and writer. Gibran is considered to be the third most widely read poet, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu, in history.

dude. seriously?

As photographed by my colleague, David, in the break room.

it's probably time

corporate myopia + employee naiveté = ?

Note to self:

1. Double-check employee handbook for anything related to writing, media outlets, and/or blogging at new gig.
2. Ask new boss about company policy regarding blogging. (Get answers in writing.)
3. Realize that doing all of the above may or may not matter if company policy changes in the future.

Deus Ex Malcontent: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career)
Maybe this was always the way it had to be.
When I was 19, I broke into the offices of WVUM -- the radio station at the University of Miami -- live, during an installment of my weekly radio show. I raided a file cabinet and my crew and I proceeded to read the minutes of that week's executive board meeting on the air, paying special attention to a recurring topic of conversation among my apparently exasperated supervisors -- a series of incidents which, collectively, were referred to as "The Chez Situation."

The board as a whole was less-than-pleased with, for example, my insistence on jokingly pointing out to my audience the fact that WVUM's faculty adviser seemed to be waging and winning a valiant war against sobriety, and as such deserved congratulations all-around. There was also my insinuation that one of the station's sponsors, a club which had just opened on South Beach, would likely be closed in two weeks then renamed and reopened two weeks later. (In fact, it took about a month to close.)

I regularly ignored the program director's God-awful musical "suggestions," choosing instead to play whatever I felt like hearing.

I ridiculed the University's decision to replace the garbage cans on campus with new, attractive, and extraordinarily expensive stone receptacles immediately after making an announcement that tuition for the coming year would be skyrocketing.

I poked fun at the frat boys.

I advocated mischievous insurrection.

I occasionally threw out a few low-level swear words on-air.

I was kind of a punk kid, and I admit it.

Yet, despite the all of this, I remained on the air simply because even though my superiors may have been irritated by the fallout from my juvenile antics, they usually found the antics themselves eminently entertaining. I was good at what I did; I had a voice and I wasn't the least bit afraid to use it, consequences be damned -- or not considered at all. Being exactly who I was, for whatever reason, seemed to be more important to me than any other consideration.

When I got into television, I did my best to bury my inner-revolutionary. For 16 years I've been a successful producer and manager of TV news, cranking out creative, occasionally daring content on good days and solid, no-frills material on the days in between. I've won several awards and for the most part can say that I'm proud of what I've done in the business, particularly since I never intended to get into it in the first place; by the time college was over, I was playing steadily in a band and fully believed sleeping on floors and subsisting on beer and Taco Bell to be an entirely noble endeavor. I wound up working at WSVN in Miami only after the band imploded, taking my dreams of rock n' roll glory with it. Since those earliest days, I've come to understand that the libertine, pirate ship mentality I found so seductive during my time in a rock band is pretty much a staple of most newsrooms, particularly at the local level. What's more, it's accompanied by a slightly better paycheck (although often only slightly).

Over the past several years though, something has changed. Drastically. And I'm not sure whether it's me, or television news, or both.

With the exception of the period immediately following 9/11, which saw the best characteristics of television journalism shocked back into focus and the passion of even the most jaded and cynical of its practitioners return like a shot of adrenaline to the heart, the profession I once loved and felt honored to be a part of has lost its way.

I say this with the knowledge of implied complicity: I continued to draw a salary from stations at the local level and national networks long after I had noticed an unsettling trend in which real news was being regularly abandoned in favor of, well, crap. I may not have drank the Kool-aid, but I did take the money. I may have been uncomfortable with a lot of what I was putting on the air, but I was comfortable in the life that it provided me. I just figured, screw it, most people don't like their jobs; shut up and do what you're told, or at least try to. Besides, I told myself, what the hell else do you know how to do?

That attitude began to change in April of 2006 -- when I found out that I had a tumor the size of a pinball inside my head.

I was working for CNN at the time, a job I had been proud to accept three years earlier as CNN was in my mind the gold-standard of television journalism. I readily admit that it was Time-Warner's medical plan that provided me the best care possible for the removal of the tumor and during my subsequent recovery, but following my operation, what had been clawing at my insides for years finally began to come to the surface. TV news wasn't the least bit fulfilling anymore, and I either needed to get out of it once and for all or find an outlet for my nascent iconoclastic tendencies.

So I started a blog.

I did it mostly to pass the time, hone my writing skills, resurrect my voice a little, and keep my mind sharp following the surgery. As is the case with many online journals, not a soul other than myself and a few close friends and family were even aware of what I was doing, much less read my stuff regularly. I thought nothing of returning to work at the end of my medical leave while continuing to write online. Really, who the hell knew who I was? Who cared what I had to say?

As it would turn out, over time, more than a few people.

My admittedly worthless opinions on pop culture, politics, the media and my personal past were quickly linked by sites like Fark, Gawker and Pajiba and I found my readership growing exponentially. During this time, I still didn't consider telling my superiors at CNN what I was doing on the side, simply because, having never been provided with an employee handbook, I hadn't seen a pertinent rule and never signed any agreement stipulating that I wouldn't write on my own time. I hadn't divulged my place of work and wasn't writing about what went on at the office. The views expressed on my blog, Deus Ex Malcontent, were mine and mine alone. I represented no one but myself, and I didn't make a dime doing it.

For 20 months after starting DXM, I continued to work as a producer on American Morning, one of many charged with putting together the show. During that time, I received consistently favorable reviews (while in Atlanta I was told that I was well on my way to becoming an executive producer) and, more importantly, neither my credibility nor objectivity was ever called into question. Like anyone who considers him or herself a respectable news professional, whatever my personal opinions were, they were checked at the door when I walked into work. Having grown up in a household in which the highest ideals of journalism were never more than a conversation away -- my father was an old-school investigative reporter -- I knew full well that you couldn't avoid having opinions and viewpoints, but you never let them get in the way of your journalistic responsibility

As far as CNN knew, I was a valued employee, albeit one with almost no say in the day-to-day editorial decisions on American Morning. This held true even as I began contributing columns to the Huffington Post, giving my writing more exposure than ever before.

Then, last Monday afternoon, I got a call from my boss, Ed Litvak.

Ed, seeming to channel Bill Lumburgh from Office Space, informed me of that which I was already very well aware: that my name was "attached to some, uh, 'opinionated' blog posts" circulating around the internet. I casually admitted as much and was then informed of something I didn't know: that I could be fired outright for this offense. 24 hours later, I was. During my final conversation with Ed Litvak and a representative from HR, they hammered home a single line in the CNN employee handbook which states that any writing done for a "non-CNN outlet" must be run through the network's standards and practices department. They asked if I had seen this decree. As a matter of fact I had, but only about a month previously, when I stumbled across a copy of that handbook on someone's desk and thumbed through it. I let them know exactly what I had thought when I read the rule, namely that it was staggeringly vague and couldn't possibly apply to something as innocuous as a blog. (I didn't realize until later that CNN had canned a 29-year-old intern for having the temerity to write about her work experiences -- her positive work experiences -- in a password-protected online journal a year earlier.) I told both my boss and HR representative that a network which prides itself on being so internet savvy -- or promotes itself as such, ad nauseam -- should probably specify blogging and online networking restrictions in its handbook. I said that they can't possibly expect CNN employees, en masse, to not engage in something as popular and timely as blogging if they don't make themselves perfectly clear.

My HR rep's response: "Well, as far as we know, you're the only CNN employee who's blogging under his own name."

It took self-control I didn't know I had to keep from laughing, considering that I could name five people off the top of my head who blogged without hiding their identities.

Uh-huh, as far as you know.

When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, "We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees."

Jesus, we have a Gestapo?

A few minutes later, I was off the phone and out of a job. No severance. No warning (which would've been a much smarter proposition for CNN as it would've put the ball effectively in my court and forced me to decide between my job or the blog). No nothing. Just, go away.

Right before I hung up, I asked for the "official grounds" for my dismissal, figuring the information might be important later. At first they repeated the line about not writing anything outside of CNN without permission, but HR then made a surprising comment: "It's also, you know, the nature of what you've been writing."

And right there I knew that CNN's concern wasn't so much that I had been writing as what I'd been writing. Whether a respected and loyal CNN producer of four years, like myself, could've gotten off with a warning had I chosen to write about, say, my favorite pasta sauce recipes, who knows. I'm dead sure though that my superiors never concerned themselves with my ability or inability to remain objective at work, given my strong opinions; they worried only about an appearance of bias (specifically, a liberal bias), and apparently they worried about it more than any potential fallout from firing a popular blogger with an audience that was already large and was sure to grow much larger when news of his firing put him in the national spotlight.

It's probably right about now that I should make something perfectly clear: I'm not naive -- I always understood that CNN, like any big company, might be apt to fire whoever it damn well pleases so long as the law remains intact at the end of the day.

Should they have fired me though?

Probably not, and only arrogant myopia would make them think otherwise.

As soon as the official word came down, I picked up the phone and called a friend of mine named Jacki Schechner. CNN junkies will recognize her as a former internet reporter for the network, one who pulled double-duty on American Morning and The Situation Room -- that is until the day she was taken out into the figurative woods without any warning and given the Old Yeller treatment. CNN's willingness to fire someone like Jacki tells you everything you need to know about how backward the network's thinking is when it comes to new media. It pays more lip-service to bloggers and their internet realm than any other mainstream media outlet, but in the end that's really all it is -- lip-service. Jacki was not only popular in internet circles, she had forged personal relationships with most of the big names in the blogosphere and knew her stuff inside and out. Inevitably though, CNN -- particularly American Morning -- chose to wear down and ultimately piss away this asset in favor of an on-air acquisition that fell right in line with the tried-and-true "TV" sententia: Veronica De La Cruz. The network never considered for a minute that new media might behave differently than television -- that the regular rules might not apply.

And that's the problem.

As far as CNN (and to be fair, the mainstream TV press in general) believes, it still sits comfortably at the top of the food chain, unthreatened by any possibility of a major paradigm shift being brought to bear by a horde of little people with laptops and opinions. Although the big networks recognize the need to appeal to bloggers, they don't fear them -- and that means that they don't respect them. Corporate-think dictates that the mainstream television press as a monstrous multi-headed hydra is the ultimate news authority and therefore is in possession of the one and only hotline to the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid. Sure those bloggers are entertaining, but in the end they're really just insects who either feed off the carcasses of news items vetted through various networks or, when they do break stories, want nothing more than to see themselves granted an audience by the kingmakers on television.

This, of course, is horseshit.

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

I mentioned calling Jacki Schechner -- so what did she tell me?

"Think about how frustrated and disillusioned most of the American Morning staff is."

Not simply frustrated and disillusioned, but outright miserable.

And then she reminded me that in the past year-and-a-half, nearly 20 mid to high-level people have left American Morning; many of them quit with no other job to go to -- they just wanted out of the business. That speaks goddamned volumes, not simply about the show but about the state of the entire profession.

CNN fired me, and did it without even a thought to the power that I might wield as an average person with a brain, a computer, and an audience. The mainstream media doesn't believe that new media can embarrass them, hurt them or generally hold them accountable in any way, and they've never been more wrong.

I'm suddenly in a position to do all three, and I know now that this is what I've been working toward the last few years of my career.

Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: "All it takes is one person to stand up and say 'fuck this.'"

I truly hope so, because I'm finally doing just that.

And I should've done it a long time ago.
Via DDTB

have passport, will travel

I gave my boss three week's notice last Tuesday. My last day with my current company is March 11.

After that, I have a speaking gig and want to get outta dodge for a bit.

Leo and I are up for suggestions. We like history, good ethnic food, beautiful sights, and drinks that come with umbrellas in them. We're considering Tulum and Chichén Itzá. Let me know if you've got other ideas.

poor kermie

Via Jane

longing for the days of readers

I love the lede on this article and how 19th century cigar rollers made their lives less mindnumbing. But those are all tactics to make work more palatable. Nowadays, I listen to music while coding or writing when possible. I also have NPR, music, or an audio book on whenever I'm exercising or in the car for more than a few minutes. Each is a way to pass the time and focus less on the distasteful task at hand.

Technology Can Be a Blessing for Bored Workers
By NOAM COHEN
Published: February 18, 2008
OF all the repetitive, mind-numbing jobs in the late 19th century, cigar-rolling was special.

Unlike sewing clothes, mining coal or forging steel, it was blessedly quiet. And thus cigar workers, whether in Chicago or Havana, were the first ones in their time who managed to introduce that vital commodity — distraction — onto the work floor.

Using their own wages, and backed by a powerful union, they paid for a “reader” who sat in an elevated chair and began the morning with the news and political commentary. By the afternoon, he would usually have switched to a popular novel. The 100 or so rollers on the floor were his captive audience, listening as they worked.

Today, the outside world has managed to sneak into the workplace through personal music players and cellphones, not always with official consent. But discussion of the effects of technology on our working lives is almost always restricted to office workers, who often see cellphones and BlackBerrys as emblems of their busy lives.

For blue-collar workers in many occupations, however, cellphones and music players have also had profound effects — including escape from the tedium or the physical isolation of their jobs. Unlike white-collar workers, many of these workers face restrictions from employers or objections from customers.

New Yorkers like to complain about cabbies talking on cellphones, but they rarely ask themselves why someone driving a cab late at night far from home needs the phone in the first place.

Music helps many postal workers stay sharp during what is often repetitive work. Giselle E. Ambursley, part of a group of five or six who work on a mail-sorting machine at the Postal Service’s Morgan Processing and Distribution Center in Manhattan, said that on a typical day, “four out of five” listen to music. “It helps most of us get through the day.”

“I remember when I first got a Walkman,” she said. “I was excited, especially about using it at work. I bought tapes galore. I have thousands of dollars worth of tapes.” Ms. Ambursley, a shop steward in the American Postal Workers Union, now uses a Microsoft Zune and says she intends to convert those tapes into digital files for her player.

Cellphones are another matter. Cellphone conversations are not tolerated while working because supervisors see them as a distraction, Ms. Ambursley said, and when a call comes in, it can be returned only when off the floor. It is a shame, she said, because for night workers, the calls are often short — wishing a good night or helping with homework — and some people can easily use a hands-free cellphone while working. The time spent leaving the work floor is a waste, she said. “They keep bringing up safety, but I bring up productivity.”

David White, a freelance truck driver from Amherst, Mass., said his Treo 700 — a phone with an Internet connection — made the many days he spends away from home more comfortable. While he recognizes that truckers are not the stereotypical users of a Treo, he thinks they are ideal users. “Getting my Hotmail — now Yahoo mail — on my P.D.A., that made a world of difference,” he said. “It didn’t matter if I was living in a truck.”

His iPod is another critical gadget. He says he downloads audio books from Audible.com and listens to them through an adapter in the tape deck in his truck.

His job does have advantages, he says. “You’ve got no boss, no one bothering you. You just have to show up,” he said, but even so, “if I didn’t have the books, I couldn’t do it.”

Last Christmas season, however, he worked as a temporary employee for United Parcel Service, moving packages — but not making deliveries — and he found that the trucks had no tape decks. There were speakers, he said, and he saw that some full-time employees had rigged CD players and radios to connect to the speakers. He was leery, however, of using them without permission. He was left, he said, to listen to the G.P.S. road directions. “It was a little British voice,” he said. “Even that much was enough.”

Truckers and mail sorters have an advantage, however, that other workers do not: they largely do not deal with the public. Cab drivers, for example, are the most widely vilified users of cellphones in the workplace because they use them in front of customers. In New York, cabbies are not permitted to use cellphones while driving. The city has been sending undercover inspectors to ticket them.

Likewise, U.P.S. delivery drivers are not permitted to listen to music. Nor are trainees at the Ready, Willing and Able program in New York who clean the streets. The program’s spokesman said they “are learning how to be responsible workers, which includes balancing work and personal life.” He said they are highly visible, so “New Yorkers can see them on their cellphones or listening to music, as opposed to interacting with each other and the public.”

Biju Mathew, a professor of technology at Rider College who has been an advocate for taxi drivers, said cellphones have replaced the citizens’ band radio system. CB was “completely communal,” he said. With the arrival of cellphones, “it was broken down to a series of individual conversations,” he said. But with newer technology, he said, the drivers frequently speak in groups of 6 to 10 drivers in conference calls.

“They found that a single conversation is isolating, and they are back to communal discussions. They have readapted the technology.”

The cigar makers faced restrictions of their own. After a strike in 1931 in Tampa, Fla., failed, said Nancy Hewitt, a Rutgers history professor, the workers returned, but the factory owners had dismantled the readers’ chairs. “They replaced the readers with radios,” she said.

Over the next decade, industrial production came to the cigar factory and the radios were gone, too — no one could hear them over the noise.

ouch

I've made friends at work and I've lost friends at work. I don't agree with everything in this article in terms of how to handle the issues, but it did amuse me and remind me of a friend's workplace.

Life’s Work: It’s Not the Job I Despise, It’s You
By LISA BELKIN
Published: February 7, 2008

THIS is the time of year for talk of love. When you write about the workplace, that tends to mean articles about love at work. Should you date a co-worker? Openly or clandestinely? How are you supposed to meet anyone who isn’t a colleague when you spend all your time at work?

This will not be one of those articles. Because judging by my mail, the people mixing love and work are a fairly happy lot. It’s a picnic to work with someone you love.

The real challenge is working with someone you hate.

“Hate is a strong word,” one female reader, a few years out of school and working as an executive assistant at a big consumer products company, said of a co-worker whom “I strongly, strongly, strongly dislike.”

Time was when the pair were work friends. They had lunch together regularly and made Starbucks runs for each other. They even joined forces when the work piled up. But then, about a year ago, there was a tussle over vacation dates, and the colleague, who had a tad less seniority, lost.

Since then there have been no shared lattes. Instead, the colleague “leaves her trash from lunch in my trash can, smelly things like blue cheese or cauliflower or tuna,” said the reader, who prefers not to use her name for fear she will escalate hostilities. “She blows her nose and just misses my trash, so that my choice is to pick up her used tissue or leave it lying on my floor.”

The reader fantasizes about retaliation, even watching old episodes of “The Office” to see what pranks Jim pulls on the clueless Dwight. Putting the stapler in a tub of Jell-O? Sending fake classified e-mail messages, supposedly from the C.I.A.?

“So far I haven’t had the guts,” she said. “But I’m working up to it.”

Susan Storey describes a working relationship that is more “Scrubs” than “The Office.” Remember when Dr. Elliot Reid broke off her engagement to the intern Keith Dudemeister, and he responded by calling her progressively nastier names in the hospital hallways? Ms. Storey’s workplace was a small consumer magazine, not a hospital, and she and her partner were never engaged. But when she (the associate editor) ended things with him (the editor in chief) after a two-year relationship, he responded loudly.

Their desks were 10 feet apart, she said, and he spent a lot of time on the phone “sweet-talking other women” after the split. In the middle of this monologue, Ms. Storey was called by the president of the company, who told her “he was glad we had broken up because he had been wanting to fire my ex.”

Ms. Storey took the high road; she used her contacts to help find a new job for him. “In another state,” she said slyly.

There are more dueling Elliots and Keiths and Jims and Dwights in offices than you might guess. An online survey in 2006, by VitalSmarts, a company in Provo, Utah, that teaches communications skills to employees, found that 93 percent of the 967 respondents say they work with “nasty, unreliable or eccentric employees.” And only one in four confront the hated one, the survey found.

That really isn’t surprising, particularly since the offender is so often the boss.

“He’s like Michael Scott, but stripped of any endearing qualities,” an employee at a Boston ad agency said of her boss, comparing him to the incompetent, bumbling middle manager on “The Office.” Her real-life supervisor, she said, “thinks he’s funny but his jokes are terrible, he swears like a sailor, he’s rude and sarcastic, and his job seems to be to suck up to the C.E.O.”

“All I have learned from him is how to work with someone you hate,” she added.

She has thought about quitting but thinks she needs to stay longer so that she does not have the résumé of a job jumper. Meanwhile, she is handling the situation by getting in her digs where she can. Before a recent meeting with her boss and the company’s chief executive, she sent her boss an update of the accounts to be discussed, assuming he would not get around to reading it. As she had guessed, he turned to her at the meeting, and she sweetly said: “Oh, we haven’t moved forward on that in a week because we were waiting for your comments on my e-mail.”

Quitting is one way to deal with office hatred, and sabotage is another. But there are better ways, suggests Marsha Petrie Sue, the author of “Toxic People: Decontaminate Difficult People at Work Without Using Weapons or Duct Tape” (Wiley, 2007).

Ms. Sue divides hateful co-workers into categories, including the Steamroller (a bully who is not necessarily right but is determined), the Whine and Cheeser (who finds the dark side to everything, as in: “Cheez, I got a raise. I’ll have to pay more taxes”), and the Backstabber (enough said). Ms. Sue knows so much about all these toxic types, she said, because “I used to be one of them.”

As a manager on Wall Street, Ms. Sue was on the losing end of two wrongful-termination suits. Both times she had fired subordinates in a way that was, in her words, “totally wrong on so many levels.” The first suit was brought because she criticized an employee’s frequent absences saying: “Are you sure you’re really sick? Come in here and we’ll decide how sick you are and whether you should go home.” The second was a result of her critique of another employee with child care problems: “You should have thought about that before you took this job.”

What turned her around, Ms. Sue said, was an intervention. Her bosses insisted that she attend “charm school.” But if management isn’t willing to step forward at your workplace, Ms. Sue said, the trick is to “call out the behavior in a public way, don’t just take it.”

So the worker with the smelly trash might pick it up and carry it into her tormentor’s cubicle when others are watching. And the manager who fails to answer e-mail messages should be asked in front of the chief executive, “Shall I leave a note on your desk whenever I send you an urgent e-mail since I know you get so many messages every day?”

If all these working relationships sound beyond repair, consider the case of Anne DeMarzo and Howard Greenberg, who met at work selling real estate in 1985, were engaged in 1987, and broke things off in 1989.

She accused him of loving the dog more than her. He worried that she would get old and let herself go. She threw her engagement ring at him one night and stormed out.

A few years later they became partners in DeMarzo Realty, a Manhattan brokerage specializing in parking garages.

“Just because we weren’t meant for each other doesn’t mean we don’t work great together,” Mr. Greenberg said.

Time helped them get past their acrimony, Ms. DeMarzo said, as did her realization that the problem with their relationship was, she said: “I was just too smart for him. He’s shallow and needs his women dumb.”

(“I guess she still has a little anger,” Mr. Greenberg said.)

Clients are sometimes puzzled at how the two can share a one-room office and not kill each other.

“We’re like every other married couple I know,” Mr. Greenberg said. “We see each other every day. We split our income. And we no longer have sex.”

the feminine critique

Damned if you, doomed if you don't. How inspiring.

Life’s Work: The Feminine Critique
By LISA BELKIN
Published: November 1, 2007

DON’T get angry. But do take charge. Be nice. But not too nice. Speak up. But don’t seem like you talk too much. Never, ever dress sexy. Make sure to inspire your colleagues — unless you work in Norway, in which case, focus on delegating instead.

Writing about life and work means receiving a steady stream of research on how women in the workplace are viewed differently from men. These are academic and professional studies, not whimsical online polls, and each time I read one I feel deflated. What are women supposed to do with this information? Transform overnight? And if so, into what? How are we supposed to be assertive, but not, at the same time?

“It’s enough to make you dizzy,” said Ilene H. Lang, the president of Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace. “Women are dizzy, men are dizzy, and we still don’t have a simple straightforward answer as to why there just aren’t enough women in positions of leadership.”

Catalyst’s research is often an exploration of why, 30 years after women entered the work force in large numbers, the default mental image of a leader is still male. Most recent is the report titled “Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t,” which surveyed 1,231 senior executives from the United States and Europe. It found that women who act in ways that are consistent with gender stereotypes — defined as focusing “on work relationships” and expressing “concern for other people’s perspectives” — are considered less competent. But if they act in ways that are seen as more “male” — like “act assertively, focus on work task, display ambition” — they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”

Women can’t win.

In 2006, Catalyst looked at stereotypes across cultures (surveying 935 alumni of the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland) and found that while the view of an ideal leader varied from place to place — in some regions the ideal leader was a team builder, in others the most valued skill was problem-solving. But whatever was most valued, women were seen as lacking it.

Respondents in the United States and England, for instance, listed “inspiring others” as a most important leadership quality, and then rated women as less adept at this than men. In Nordic countries, women were seen as perfectly inspirational, but it was “delegating” that was of higher value there, and women were not seen as good delegators.

Other researchers have reached similar conclusions. Joan Williams runs the Center for WorkLife Law, part of the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. She wrote the book “Unbending Gender” and she, too, has found that women are held to a different standard at work.

They are expected to be nurturing, but seen as ineffective if they are too feminine, she said in a speech last week at Cornell. They are expected to be strong, but tend to be labeled as strident or abrasive when acting as leaders. “Women have to choose between being liked but not respected, or respected but not liked,” she said.

While some researchers, like those at Catalyst and WorkLife Law, tend to paint the sweeping global picture — women don’t advance as much as men because they don’t act like men — other researchers narrow their focus.

Victoria Brescoll, a researcher at Yale, made headlines this August with her findings that while men gain stature and clout by expressing anger, women who express it are seen as being out of control, and lose stature. Study participants were shown videos of a job interview, after which they were asked to rate the applicant and choose their salary. The videos were identical but for two variables — in some the applicants were male and others female, and the applicant expressed either anger or sadness about having lost an account after a colleague arrived late to an important meeting.

The participants were most impressed with the angry man, followed by the sad woman, then the sad man, and finally, at the bottom of the list, the angry woman. The average salary assigned to the angry man was nearly $38,000 while the angry woman received an average of only $23,000.

When the scenario was tweaked and the applicant went on to expand upon his or her anger — explaining that the co-worker had lied and said he had directions to the meeting — participants were somewhat forgiving, giving women who explained their anger more money than those who had no excuse (but still less money than comparative men).

Also this summer, Linda C. Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, looked at gender and salary in a novel way. She recruited volunteers to play Boggle and told them beforehand that they would receive $2 to $10 for their time. When it came time for payment, each participant was given $3 and asked if that was enough.

Men asked for more money at eight times the rate of women. In a second round of testing, where participants were told directly that the sum was negotiable, 50 percent of women asked for more money, but that still did not compare with 83 percent of men. It would follow, Professor Babcock concluded, that women are equally poor at negotiating their salaries and raises.

There are practical nuggets of advice in all this data. Don’t be shy about negotiating. If you blow your stack, explain (or try). “Some of what we are learning is directly helpful, and tells women that they are acting in ways they might not even be aware of, and that is harming them and they can change,” said Peter Glick, a psychology professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.

He is the author of one such study, in which he showed respondents a video of a woman wearing a sexy low-cut blouse with a tight skirt or a skirt and blouse that were conservatively cut. The woman recited the same lines in both, and the viewer was either told she was a secretary or an executive. Being more provocatively dressed had no effect on the perceived competence of the secretary, but it lowered the perceived competence of the executive dramatically. (Sexy men don’t have that disconnect, Professor Glick said. While they might lose respect for wearing tight pants and unbuttoned shirts to the office, the attributes considered most sexy in men — power, status, salary — are in keeping with an executive image at work.)

But Professor Glick also concedes that much of this data — like his 2000 study showing that women were penalized more than men when not perceived as being nice or having social skills — gives women absolutely no way to “fight back.” “Most of what we learn shows that the problem is with the perception, not with the woman,” he said, “and that it is not the problem of an individual, it’s a problem of a corporation.”

Ms. Lang, at Catalyst, agreed. This accumulation of data will be of value only when companies act on it, she said, noting that some are already making changes. At Goldman Sachs, she said, the policy on performance reviews now tries to eliminate bias. A red flag is expected to go up if a woman is described as “having sharp elbows or being brusque,” she said. “The statement should not just stand,” she said. “Examples should be asked for, the context should be considered, would the same actions be cause for comment if it was a man?”

In fact, Catalyst’s next large project is to advise companies on ways they can combat stereotypical bias. And Professor Glick has some upcoming projects, too. One looks at whether women do better in sales if they show more cleavage. A second will look at the flip side of gender stereotypes at work: hostility toward men.

fired for being gay

Take Action: End Workplace Discrimination
Do you know that in 31 states it's perfectly legal to fire someone for being gay? Or that in 39 states it's legal to fire someone for being transgender?

That's ridiculous. It's the 21st century, in a country that prides itself on equal opportunity, and millions of Americans can be denied a job or fired — not for poor performance, but for simply being themselves.

I just took action with the Human Rights Campaign to end this appalling injustice. I hope you'll join me today, by sending a message to your lawmakers in Congress urging them to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which will make this kind of discrimination illegal once and for all.

It's easy. To take action, go to: http://www.passENDAnow.org

ode to global warming

You know it's gonna be a bad day when:

• 7:24 a.m. You wake up for the 13th time, coughing and cursing your summer cold and the heatwave that means you're sleeping in a pool of your own sweat.
• 7:50 a.m. A magnitude 4.0 earthquake hits just as you are stepping out of the shower.
• 7:52 a.m. You decide to wear a long-sleeve shirt to work because your Spanish classroom is always *freezing.*
• 7:56 a.m. It's so hot that you can't get your dog to go downstairs to pee without bribing him with a piece of chicken breast.
• 8:26 a.m. You get a call on your way into work from your boss' assistant, saying an emergency notice needs to go out to the campus.
• 8:36 a.m. You get to campus and your beautiful window-laden office is a sauna.
• 8:42 a.m. The urgent message is that the campus air conditioning system is down for the next 36 hours.

embracing my inner überbeeyotch

I have a habit of taking one for the team.

Just yesterday, I was on my way to an afternoon's worth of meetings when my assistant asked for more information to finish a task I'd asked her to do. I instinctively offered to do the legwork to research the answer. Then, my colleague Allison piped up and said to my assistant: "just call x."

Delegating was the right thing to do. It meant my assistant could get answers far more quickly than I would and that the job would be done sooner. It also meant one less thing to fall off my already-full plate.

That's not to say that I think you should just say "figure it out" when someone asks a question. But there's a difference between knowing whom to call and making the call myself. And I think it's more helpful to my assistant if she learns whom to call.

Note to self: it's time to be less helpful and to encourage others to help themselves. It's good for me. And good for them.

Stop Being So Nice to Your Co-workers
By Kate Lorenz, CareerBuilder.com Editor

Do nice guys finish last at work, too?

A study published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology says yes. Dr. Nikos Bozionelos of the University of Sheffield in England researched personality and career success and found that white-collar workers who were the most agreeable, conscientious and sensitive to the needs of others were less likely to be promoted.

Bozionelos believes it's because they don't put their own needs first: "Agreeable people tend to self-sacrifice and compromise their own interests to make others happy." And because "nice" people do things just to please others, they often are given low-profile tasks no one else wants and wind up doing activities that don't enhance their careers. Because American culture celebrates forcefulness -- even aggression -- researcher and author Gary Namie says the altruistic have it just as rough here in the United States, where, "Nice gets you in trouble. Nice gets you exploited."

Author and executive coach Dr. Lois Frankel says there are a number of ways nice people undermine themselves. Here are five of the most common, along with tips for (pleasantly) breaking the cycle:

1. You Let Others' Mistakes Inconvenience You
Before rearranging your life to correct someone else's mistake, assess the risk versus the reward of meeting unreasonable expectations. At times you'll have no choice but to jump in to put out the fire. But there will also be times when you have the latitude to push back and say, "This isn't what we originally discussed and agreed to. Since I'll have to rethink the plan and put more time into it than anticipated, I won't be able to have it completed by the initially proposed deadline." Let the person know you want to provide the best service possible -- and ask for the time and resources needed.

2. You Let Others Take Credit For Your Ideas
Ever suggest an idea that seemed to fall flat, only to find out later it was implemented and someone else got the credit? To avoid having others steal your ideas, make sure you state them loudly and confidently or put them in writing. If you're at a meeting and someone proposes the same thing you've previously suggested, call attention to it by saying, "Sounds like you're building on my original suggestion, and I would certainly support that."

3. You Apologize Unnecessarily
Save your apologies for big-time bloopers. When you do make a mistake worth apologizing for, apologize only once, then move into problem-solving mode. Objectively assess what went wrong and ways to fix it. Always begin from a place of equality, for example: "Based on the information initially provided to me, I had no idea that was your expectation. Tell me more about what you had in mind and I'll make the necessary revisions."

4. You Work Without Breaks
Use your vacation days; take your lunch. Working non-stop can make you appear flustered, inefficient and incompetent. It also makes you less productive. To maintain maximum levels of concentration and accuracy, experts suggest you take a break every 90 minutes.

5. You Do Others' Work For Them
Recognize when people delegate inappropriately to you and avoid the inclination to solve everyone's problems for them. Practice saying unapologetically, "I'd love to help you out with this, but I'm swamped." Then stop talking. Of course being nice is not all bad. Dr. Bozionelos points out that it can be of great advantage as long as you are aware of and able to adjust your natural tendencies to undervalue yourself and compromise your personal interests. As Dr. Frankel puts it, "When all is said and done, do you really want written on your tombstone: "She Always Put the Needs of the Company Ahead of Her Own?"

Kate Lorenz is the article and advice editor for CareerBuilder.com. She researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues. Other writers contributed to this article.

karoshi, anyone?

A friend of mine works for a Japanese firm. He works more hours than anyone I know and is routinely summoned to conference calls and face-to-face meetings where he is berated for his performance from his Japanese overlords.

I suspect that he's also a prime candidate for karoshi (death from overwork).

Japanese Cop Stabs Self to Avoid Work
By CARL FREIRE 06.04.07, 1:24 AM ET
A Japanese policeman distraught by working long hours and weekends for two months stabbed himself in the stomach with a knife to get some time off, police said Monday.

The 44-year-old officer knifed himself at his home in northwestern Japan on May 23, but told police he had been attacked, prompting an attempted murder investigation, Ishikawa prefecture police said in a statement.

Investigators became suspicious of his story after they could not find evidence of anyone who matched the description the officer had given of the supposed attacker, a police spokesman said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.

Suspicions also were raised because the officer had waited about an hour before reporting the alleged attack, the spokesman said. His wounds were not life-threatening.

The officer, whose name was not released by police, had been in charge of a disaster relief detail following a March 25 earthquake in the area that killed one person, injured more than 300 and damaged or destroyed more than 14,800 homes.

"He became very busy, he felt like he couldn't handle the work he had to do, and he felt the work was weighing him down," said the police spokesman.

The officer acknowledged he had stabbed himself following his May 31 release from the hospital, the spokesman said. The case is now being investigated as filing a false report, a misdemeanor.

Japanese workers often face long overtime hours and weekends with little or no compensation and frequently must make long commutes to work. Death from overwork, known as "karoshi," has steadily increased since the Health Ministry first recognized the phenomenon in 1987.

have a heart

We've all had crappy job situations. A few of my close friends are currently dealing with particularly awful ones right now. You know who you are ... hang in there. And let me know if I can help you find a new jobby job.