Category: don’t want!

Can Of Corn*

Every once in a while, one falls in your lap.

This week’s Theme Thursday is: beds

For some, that may end up being a challenge.

For me, not so much.

Because all week, I’ve had this topic on my mind.

On Monday as I checked into my hotel in a small town in England (population 28,339) I was tired, jet lagged, and a little sweaty from tugging my heavy suitcase through the muggy British morning.

The clerk at my hotel said “oh let’s see, yet I don’t quite have the room you requested, but I’ll just upgrade you to this other room.”

Upgrade, she says. Um hmm.

Imagine my wondering eyes when I opened the door to my home for the next five days and saw this waiting for me:





Twin beds? I haven’t slept in a twin bed since college!

Who sleeps in twin beds these days? Other than kids, I suppose. And visitors to Britain.

I damn near fell out of bed every night.

I’ve moved to a different town because of work meetings, and this evening I check into a new hotel.

I’m rubbing my hands together and hoping….

C’moooon double bed!



*Can of Corn = a baseball colloquialism meaning an easy-to-catch ball hit to the outfield.

Photo Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth and subject to the Creative Commons license in the right column of this page. Taken with an iPhone4s and the Camera+ app.



Back In The Swing of Things

So, I’m back in the office after a week in Costa Rica. UK Boss is in country. The pace is back to normal. Whatever that means.

Today I sat down with the boss for a much needed, long over due one-to-one session.

It was about halfway through our hour chat that Boss Man said the words that chilled my soul.

“Right, so I just got the schedule for annual reviews. You’ll need to communicate dates to your staff. Self assessments are due by mid-June.”

Just like that. That’s all he said. Easy, breezy and calm.

Meanwhile, the sound of screeching demons and terror howls echoed in my mind.

Yes, it’s that time of year: Performance reviews.

I’ve been doing this manager gig for most of a decade, and still, performance reviews are the hardest thing I have to do every year.

Mainly because I don’t just blow them off and write canned phrases. I actually put in a lot of work on my performance reviews for my team.

I give performance reviews the way I wish they were done for me.

But never are.

That said, just because I care about them. Just because I put in effort. Just because they matter does not mean I actually enjoy writing them.

It’s hard work. Add to that, since I am a middle of the pack manager and not the big boss, I don’t get the set the raises and bonuses. I give input on my team but someone else makes the budget.

So I get to convey raises and bonuses that someone else has decided.

And they so rarely match what my employees deserve.

So I have to write a performance review to match the budget and not the actual performance of the employee.

Often, this can be the least gratifying thing I do all year.

That said, performance reviews are one of the things that separate the wheat from the chaff, the men from the mice, the mangers from the dilettantes.

Writing and delivering a meaningful performance review is what makes me a better manager. I think.

Oh, and in other news, my boss attended some up with people type of training class last week. I said to him “Hey boss, I’m having a problem with this risk assessment.”

“No Karen, as I just learned in my training, there are no problems, only opportunities.”

The fact that I didn’t take that opportunity to kick him in the shins shows the power of my personal and professional growth over the last year.

I’m sure that will show up as a positive on my performance review this year.

Opportunities my ass…….





Misspelled, in Any Language

Ok, I gotta vent out a beef I have with the internet.

While it’s a wild and wonderful place, it’s also hell on the English language.

Ok, let me step back, I do enjoy a good LOL Speak as much as the next guy.

But that’s all in jest, right? I like to torture the English language once in a while myself. I love words and putting them together in different ways and seeing what happens.

I can make fun of the language because I respect it so much.

Here’s the cranky part…over the past week, I’ve seen five, yes honestly five different misapplications of the word voilà.

Now, someone might quibble with me that the word voilà is French and not English so what’s the big deal? Who cares if it gets misued?

I do.

Like avant-guarde, bon voyage, cul-de-sac, critique, and faux pas before it, the word voilà has been adopted into the English language.

And so when I see it spelled wah la, walla, wall ah, waalaa, whala and other variations, I end up grinding my back molars into dust.*

I don’t know why, of all the poor grammar and misspellings out there in the wild web, this one bothers me so much. But it does.

So for those who wish to use the word voilà but can’t seem to sort the spelling and that little accent thing over the a, might I suggest the following internet meme words for your use:

Bam
Badabing!
Blammo
Bazinga
(ok, moving out of b expressions….)
Shazam
Ta-da
Zoiks

And many others. Or hell, make something up. I respect something made up so much more than a gross misspelling of an innocent word.

Suffer the little letters, come unto correctly spelled words.






*A phrase liberally borrowed from my rock star cousin and used without his permission



Old Technology Gets a New Boost

Somewhere back in the early 2000’s, right around the time that Apple came out with video chat, the use of desktop video conferencing took off. Or, I should say, tried to take off.

I was commanded by my leadership at the time to procure a camera (laptops didn’t come equipped with cameras like they do now) and to begin having meetings in video form.

And I did. For a while.

It was a new toy and we all played with it and then, we got bored. Suddenly no one was logged in. Cameras were quietly disconnected and stowed in a drawer. And we went back to the usual phone call, chat or email way of communicating.

Fast forward to this week. My new leadership has commanded that I procure a camera (because our company security demands that the one on my laptop be disabled) and sign up for a brand spanking new desktop video conferencing service.

Per the long winded training I was required to complete, using this “new” technology will promote productivity (oh really? When we’re wasting precious minutes in meetings fiddling with cameras and asking “can you see me ok?”), enhances cost savings (because I just spent $100 of the company’s money to buy the “approved” camera) and reduces carbon emissions (except when I’m taking antibiotics).

The Good Man and I have been debating why video conferencing doesn’t catch on. While it’s nice to see the other person in a conversation, it’s not natural. Everyone just feels a little awkward.

Last evening, I was watching an edition of BBC World News and as they went to field reporters in many far flung countries, it became quite clear that they were using Skype or something similar to do these televised reports. No more camera and a camera operator.

As I watched these reporters, I began to realize why video conferencing is awkward. No one knows what to do with their eyes. Instead of face to face, eye to eye conversations, you get a lot of shifty eyes, and shifty eyes make for uncomfortable conversations.

The most natural fix for this is to look the camera square in the eye.





However, that’s natural for the people on the other end, for the speaker, it feels weird to speak to a lens. You are inclined to look at the screen to see the person you are talking to. That’s how humans communicate.

So you get this instead:





And then, of course, there are the multitaskers. Not only are they not looking in the eye of the camera, but they are also not looking at the screen where the other image is located.

It’s something like this:





And this:





And this:





*sigh*

Well, whether I think this is a good idea or not, I’ve been commanded to video conference, both in my one to one sessions with my boss and in our staff meetings.

And so I will.

This, however, severely limits my ability to wake up fifteen minutes before my 8am staff meetings, shamble down the hall, fire up my home machine and take the meeting on the phone with frazzled hair, still in my nightgown, while eating breakfast.

Damn you UK-based Boss Man! : shakes fists toward London :

(I’m reminded of an episode of the Jetsons where Judy had a videophone mask for those very bad hair days. I need that.)





Image is a screen grab from a YouTube clip of the Jetsons




https://www.draexlmaier-apotheken.de/cialis-20-mg

Whaaaa-choooo!

This little photo, folks, is an actual, not retouched, not enhanced in any way (only cropped) photo of a section of the hood of my black Jeep (taken with an iPhone4s).





At the end of my workday, I found my automobile cowering under a pile of the yellow sticky stuff. Driving fast doesn’t even come close to knocking that stuff off of there.

It’s in the air, on my car, covering the sidewalks and whaaaa-choooo! I’m officially one of the seven dwarves.

Um. Happy Spring?





Image from Neurotic Physiology.