If your boss is an S.O.B tell him to S.H.O.V.E the J.O.B - new job thrad

[Em]

That is awesome! Congrats!

On my end, I am now officially turning off the push notifications for my work e-mail account on my phone and finally going to bed. I feel that perhaps I should set some boundaries and choose a firm time at which I will turn off said notifications every night. 10:30 pm sounds a little more reasonable than midnight. I know some people I need to work with are in other (earlier) time zones, and I know we happen to be in a bit of a time crunch right now, and I also know I don't HAVE to answer, but if it makes that sound I WILL look, and if I have an answer I WILL answer, because I am compulsive like that.

Edit: This wouldn't be a problem at all if it wasn't still making that sound, like, every 5-10 minutes. After midnight.

[milesofsparks]

Yeah, totally set boundaries now even if it's a busy time — setting boundaries later on is much harder than when you're new in my experience.  And I've found people are generally surprisingly respectful of people who set reasonable boundaries (10:30 is MORE than reasonable).

Regardless, congrats on the good new job!

[justinh]

One of the most terrifying aspects of the 21st century work world is the prospect of being available all your non-sleeping hours.  Personally, it sounds a little dystopian. 

[elpollodiablo]

Guess who got sent home with as many bottles of product samples as he could fit in his bag

[Em]

Actually got home from work kind of early-ish today because most of the rest of the gang went to a baseball game together (I started too late to get in on the tickets, which, eh, I don't really go in for baseball, but on the other hand, I should probably engage in some form of group bonding soon). So I went on a nice long walk with my dogs in the park and now I am at home about to do a few last new apartment chores. BUT. Then I will have to make up for it by working for quite some time. I am still adjusting to this more demanding schedule.

We use this website called Asana. Perhaps some of you are familiar with it. I actually kind of like it; it does, in fact, help me stay on track. However, the people who are following me on it can see what has been assigned to me and what I have assigned to myself and when those things are due, and if certain tasks have due dates that are today--even if said due dates are kind of arbitrary--it's expected that I accomplish them, like, before tomorrow. The nerve! 

[RavingLunatic]

One of the most terrifying aspects of the 21st century work world is the prospect of being available all your non-sleeping hours.  Personally, it sounds a little dystopian. 

Yeah. Thomas Friedman, the Wanker of the Decade, can never stop raving about how awesome the Chinese are because their factory workers can get up in the middle of the night when an order for Apple iWidgets comes in. This is told as a cautionary tale to the coddled American worker, who, in this age of globalization, insists on sleeping throughout the night, a surefire recipe for capital flight and national economic doom.

[milly balgeary]

I'm back to work after being on vacation for 9 days... it's so horrrrrrrrr. Verdict. Never take that much time off again.

[fishjim]

One of the most terrifying aspects of the 21st century work world is the prospect of being available all your non-sleeping hours.  Personally, it sounds a little dystopian. 

Yeah. Thomas Friedman, the Wanker of the Decade, can never stop raving about how awesome the Chinese are because their factory workers can get up in the middle of the night when an order for Apple iWidgets comes in. This is told as a cautionary tale to the coddled American worker, who, in this age of globalization, insists on sleeping throughout the night, a surefire recipe for capital flight and national economic doom.

Preach it, RL.

[fishjim]

I think the low point of my last job in IT, as a tech support rep at Salesforce, was getting a call on my cell phone at 11pm on a Friday night, coming home from a friend's birthday party. One of their big clients, Cisco, was having some trivial meltdown and had called a dickbag conference call I had to sit through and get reamed on till 3am. Give a dick an inch and they take a foot.

But I'm always bitching about this. When I worked at Salon I wrote a bitch piece about doing tech support at Salon, under an alias for the zine Processed World. Can't remember if I've shared it here before - fun to write.

Note to Knuckles: the dick near the end, who wakes me up at 7am on a Sunday with a dead Powerbook and a dickish attitude, is our mutual friend Jake Tapper.

Link to PDF
The Filing Cabinet Is On Fire - Processed World (2001)

[DCDave]

My consulting business is running and I got a gig at Ann Arbor where I'm redesigning the University of Michigan system for researchers to identify potential collaborators. Which is why I'm going to go eat at Zingerman's tonight!

P.S., isn't this related to alex's thesis topic or am I totally wrong (i.e., investigator behavior and norms.)

[Em]

Hey, can one of you Midwesterners hop on over to St. Paul and politely inform the first education reform advocate you run across that if it is past bedtime in Minnesota it is most definitely past bedtime in New York? I just feel like it would come across better in person and I know any one of you would be a great proxy for me. This request comes with a special bonus opportunity to have it out with someone who probably considers him/herself a lefty overall but leans pretty far right on education issues. Fun!

I totally get it if you can't make the trip; I can probably find a way to expense my coffee consumption in any case (that stuff that comes out of the Keurig is so not cutting it).

Speaking of expensing stuff, there's probably another thread for this, but I was told to upgrade to Mountain Lion ASAP today and was provided with a memo--which I have not had time to read--regarding changes to the operating system. I am kind of tempted to surreptitiously continue to run Lion and make sure everybody else's life doesn't collapse before I switch myself. I guess if everybody did that we'd all be stuck with Lion forever, huh.

Am very tired. Have just never been in this environment before (this environment being: "Have many tasks. Work briefly on tasks. Go to meeting. Get assigned 10 more tasks. Work briefly on tasks. Go to another meeting. Get assigned .... etc."). I'm 29 years old and have managed to avoid having such a job until this point.

I do like it very much, I just hope I can cut it. Yes, we get all the fancy tech stuff and are treated very well overall, but in true nonprofit fashion we are understaffed and overworked. I do not much care for having to put my friends, family phone calls, and basic household chores on my calendar, thank you though.

Suppose this should go in ungoogleable, but am too exhausted/lazy to move it. (Damn it Minnesota! Twice while I was writing this post. Really?) Not complaining, really, more just ... venting. But not necessarily in a bad way. Except I hate Minnesota right now for real.

[RavingLunatic]

someone who probably considers him/herself a lefty overall but leans pretty far right on education issues.

This sounds like every nationally prominent Democratic politician in the country. The politics of education, particularly in Indiana, is utterly disheartening. The national teachers' unions are about as depressing; no matter how many times Obama throws them under the bus, they endorse and support him unconditionally.

The only encouraging thing is that in the area I live in (maybe elsewhere too), the hot new (old) thing is project-based learning, or PBL. I'm sure it's far from perfect, but I think it's basically a good thing and a step in the right direction, a welcome relief from the behaviorist, punish-by-rewards, standardized test-worshiping crew. I really don't know where the impetus for PBL is coming from since virtually all politicians everywhere are pushing drill-n-kill standardized testing, "accountability," and test-score-based merit pay. 

Is your non-profit primarily involved in educational issues, Em? I can't remember if you described the issues you work on before or not.

[Em]

FAIR WARNING: job thread and politics thread intersect hereabouts.

Yes, we are solely involved in education reform advocacy, and probably best not get me started because despite my far-left stance on many, many issues, I am pretty much squarely aligned with the ed reform agenda we advocate (which is, to be fair, a good deal more nuanced than what you described) and while I LOVE to argue on behalf of it to funders, I don't really love to squabble about it on the internet/with friends and family, many of whom are teachers, etc.

But yeah. We're the kind of group that has and would continue to work closely with, say, Democrats for Education Reform (and I'm the kind of person that would, say, give them a small amount of money for their lobbying efforts on a regular basis). If that gives you a better picture. We also have a very strong platform component in re: giving teachers and principals MORE flexibility with respect to a pretty wide range of issues, so there is some balance.

Teachers' unions. That was hard for me as I considered this position. But then I thought about it and decided that I think they're a very, very important tool for protecting the interests of teachers, so it's good that they're strong on many issues. However, the unfortunate reality is that the interests of teachers and the interests of children do not always (and in fact often do not) fully align. So I guess on one view I'm the bad guy in this situation, and on the other view not so much.
 

[RavingLunatic]

Have you ever read anything by Seymour Sarason? I don't agree with him on everything, but when it comes to the process of changing schools' practices, I think he was dead on. The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change is essential reading.

I love this part of this Wikipedia entry:

Dr. Sarason was world renowned as an expert in school reform. In 1965 he predicted that all attempts to reform schools would fail. His prediction still has an accuracy of 100%. He believed that schooling needed fundamental changes. Further, he often stated that it was inconceivable to think that an ingrained human social system such as public schooling was easily reformed.

I tend to find about 95% of what secondary schools academically do to be either intellectually harmful or a complete waste, but the typical reform agenda seems to me to attempt to intensify everything that's wrong rather than change anything for the better. It's as if they're trying as hard as they can to turn kids off to learning and reading and to ensure that they never again read anything of substance once they've earned their credential. It makes me sick to listen to Obama say anything about education. The only reason for schools to exist seems to be so that we can be more "economically competitive" and fend off the yellow menace of China and East Asia in general, the education of whose children, rather than something to celebrate and applaud, is pointed to as a mortal threat to America. You'd think that China was constructing intercontinental ballistic missiles, not teaching their children how to do calculus.

Also implicit in every Obama education speech: poverty and economic inequality is so high here because poor people don't have enough education, not because of the decline of unions or the passage of "free trade" deals explicitly designed to decimate the wages of low-wage workers or our broken health care system or the corporate capture of all levels of government, etc. Nope, poor people were just too stupid to get college degrees. If we can just get everyone to go to college, we'll all be rich, even though only 30% of the jobs projected to be created in the coming years will require a college degree.

It's like no one has ever heard of the fallacy of composition or the existence of positional goods. Oh, Veblen, where art thou?!

[Em]

I respectfully disagree on a number of key points and think we have some common ground in some other areas.

[Em]

And yeah, to answer your initial question, I have read that one.

Congratulations on your new gig by the way! (Read with deep sincerity!) Did you always plan to become a teacher?

[Em]

I would also like to note, for the record, that while I don't particularly feel the need to go on the defensive here--I really believe in what I'm doing and yeah, you can paint it a certain way, but it's really not at all what you're describing--I did have to take a step back and really think about it after my first interview with this place. We're new on the scene, and I had heard rumblings but ... I mean, my having a history of contributing to DFER and me being DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for making sure my org has the financial capacity to go into new states and royally piss off a bunch of people who would otherwise be my natural allies are two completely different things. So yes, teacher's unions in states that some of y'all live in are mad at things I'm raising money for. Sorry.

That said, I do professionally talk/write the super-rich out of their money. Which is fun.

[elpollodiablo]

Man, I worked my fucking *ass* off this week. And it's unclear whether or not I'm going to be able to keep this job in the long term.

[jebreject]

Man, I worked my fucking *ass* off this week. And it's unclear whether or not I'm going to be able to keep this job in the long term.

Oh no, why?

[heather marie]

I work with really stupid, mean people who are kind of the worst ever and I hate that the assholes I work for and with are the reasons I hate my job.

I also just got done working a straight week of overnights and I am so sleep deprived and miserable because my daytime co-workers found it necessary to call me during the day to ask me questions they should know. Also, I ain't getting paid for that shit so leave me alone. Reason #500 why I demoted myself from a salaried position.

[Nick Ink]

So I've just spent 10 hours over Friday evening and Saturday writing materials for upcoming teacher training sessions. I'm about halfway through what I need to prepare for two sessions and I think I'll get about £100 before tax for the whole lot. I'm quite satisfied with the quality of work I've done, but a bit disheartened when I work out how crap the remuneration works out. The silver lining is that if (when?) we run this course again in future terms/years, I'll have all the material ready to go, and still get paid the same for 3 hours work. Which will be better.

[Nick Ink]

epd and hm, this page is suddenly full of glumness :-(

[elpollodiablo]

Man, I worked my fucking *ass* off this week. And it's unclear whether or not I'm going to be able to keep this job in the long term.

Oh no, why?

Money.

[heather marie]

epd and hm, this page is suddenly full of glumness :-(

sorry! I'll talk about something awesome!

one of my bosses is really passionate about her job and gives me hope. she's our HR director and no part of her job description states she should have client interaction, but every day she spends a good chunk of her day talking with clients and being all around awesome. she got me a congrats card for getting accepted into grad school, always asks how I am doing with self-care and suggests taking vacation days, and warms my heart that is slowly become blackened by the evil boss. so, uh, yay awesome boss.

[G.C.R]

Teaching this week was really fun. My new students were engaged and interested and smart, laughing and seeming to enjoy themselves. This job sucks a bit quite a lot of the time, but man, I like actual class time.