I Love Cats

This is the exact kind of thing I’d be doing with my friends Ricardo and Mikey had we all been born twenty-five years later …

Working 101

Some random thoughts from my employment odyssey over the five months at two different establishments …


* Work for a boss who has children.

Especially if you have children. When emergencies or other normal family events come up where you may be forced to take some time off – even a few minutes one day – you’ll be met with understanding. Who needs stoney steely glances and glares when you’re ten minutes late ’cuz the daycare you dropped your child off to was slightly backed up?


* Work for a business that drug tests its employees.

It’s one of the best ways, I’ve discovered, not to work with jackasses.


* Work for a place that formally trains its employees (managers at the very least).

It’s another great way not to work with jackasses.


* Work for a company with reasonable rules and regulations.

Example: pay plans. One place I worked for had every manager pay plan three or four pages long in triplicate. Employee, Manager, and Owner signature required on the bottom of each page. Another place had pay plans scrawled on the back of memo notes. Like so many things in life, the truth lies somewhere in the ’tween.


* Work for a business that is NOT owned by a Screamer or hires Screamers.

Screamers are those type-A jerks that have to have it their way yesterday or else they’ll start hollering like the immature imbeciles they’re really showing themselves to be. If the company owner is a Screamer, don’t even bother with the place. If managers are Screamers, well, all right if you can maneuver around them. But I still say, avoid them. These idiots automatically double the stress level just by being in the same room with you.


* If you’re not happy where you are, by all means, start looking elsewhere!

Look online, mail out letters and resumes. Don’t feel guilty. If it was in the company’s interest, they’d let you go with little or no warning. If you work for a Bad Place, fire them, but do it smartly.

Hush'd

Hush’d be the camps to-day,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander’s death.


No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat – no more time’s dark evenets,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.


But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him – because you – dweller in camps, know it truly.


As they invault the coffin there,
Sing – as they close the doors of earth upon him – one verse,
For the heavy hearts of soldiers.

- Walt Whitman, 1865

***


Finished Keegan’s military analysis of the Civil War today. That, plus the books by O’Reilly and Swanson, the fiction of Crane, and Burns’s documentary … read this and it brought a lump to my throat.