Massive climate change report: probably no surprise at all that this was released a month early, on Black Friday, when it would garner the least attention
As a parent who manages kid-free unattached staff and covers for them days nights, weekends and holidays as they need to care for their family or personal needs, as a person with chronic pain who never calls out unless it’s dire crippling pain and even then I don’t want to ask them to cover, I find these parent-coworkers enraging. What terrible selfish people!
Nnedi wanted to give Fwadausi Bello of this terrible story an alternative ending of triumph.
Thank goodness for this federal judge: A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a Mississippi state law that sought to forbid most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, writing a sharply worded opinion with implications for states weighing similar measures. Furthermore, he called the Legislature’s professed interest in women’s health “pure gaslighting,” pointing to evidence of the state’s high infant and maternal mortality rates. “Its leaders are proud to challenge Roe but choose not to lift a finger to address the tragedies lurking on the other side of the delivery room, such as high infant and maternal mortality rates,” he wrote in a footnote.
I didn’t know any of this about Billie Holiday’s life and death.
A. I don’t like giving feedback, it feels confrontational.
B. I shouldn’t have to give you feedback or tell you what I’m thinking. You’re my right hand, you should already know.
C. Why are you doing [what you thought was your job], you’re not responsible for that! You need to be doing [some other thing you were never informed of]!
These are just a few of the gems delivered by Past Terrible Managers in my Past Work Life.
Bad managers drive me more than a little bit ’round the bend. Not all managers became managers because they were actually good at managing people, they were usually promoted for doing their own job well. When that happens, either they learn how to do it well, or you get a dingleberry of a supervisor and that’s just bad times.
As a manager, past and present, giving feedback to staff, or really anybody, without either feeling or being confrontational is such a necessary skill. If you need someone to change, they need to KNOW that you need them to change! Relying on strategy C above is such nonsense.
I understand that delivering criticism feels fraught, it’s not always comfortable, and empathetic people who have had bad experiences on the receiving end of feedback don’t want to perpetuate that cycle. That does not relieve you of a key aspect of your duty as a manager.
When a manager tells me they just don’t want to give feedback, I often ask if they enjoy being irritated, resented and subpar. Because that’s the situation they’re setting up: their employee will continue to do things wrong, this will reflect badly on the employee and reflect badly on you. Also, it’s likely that the tolerance of poor performance by that employee will have a sinking effect on morale for the rest of the team.
And conversely, what would it be like to be the hapless employee who doesn’t know they’re doing things wrong or inefficiently, and catching flak for something they don’t even realize is a problem? Don’t be that jerk boss who sows confusion, induces anxiety, and breeds resentment!
As I said, this is a learned skill. I didn’t come by it naturally, especially since I’m both introverted and at least a little anti-social.
So, how do I give constructive feedback?
1. I treat feedback sessions as conversations.
This isn’t intended as a confrontation but girding yourself for a battle almost certainly turns it into one. Be prepared, just don’t assume it has to be that difficult.
First time offenses? I ask them to explain to me how and why they’re doing X so that I understand where they’re coming from. It’s possible that they’ll identify a weakness in the existing protocol, or the training documentation. In other words, this could be a learning opportunity for me too.
After I solicit some perspective from them, if it doesn’t change my mind, then I explain what we need them to do and why.
Repeat offenses, if the thing is non-negotiable? I remind them of previous conversations, and ask what, if anything, is preventing them from performing their duties as asked. This is not permission to stand their ground, this is checking whether I need to be doing another aspect of my job: removing barriers to their performance. Reiterate that I need them to do it this way, and follow up as needed.
2. Understand that your goal is improvement, not chastisement.
Even if they’re on a PIP, the end goal is improvement of the work situation, whether that’s ultimately a firing or a mediocre employee understanding what’s really needed from them and turning a corner.
When frustrated by an undesirable outcome, I’ve seen managers rage and rant at their staff. What’s the point? That intimidates some, irritates others, but rarely ever produces results. Besides, it’s rude and disrespectful. Respect goes both ways and is more easily lost than earned.
3. Take the emotion out of it.
This is about the job, remain professional. It’s not your feelings or their feelings or likes or dislikes or any of that other stuff. It’s not personal. That doesn’t mean be a robot! It just means don’t derail the conversation. Focus on the thing you want improved and find a way to fix it. If someone is causing a problem, then figure out a way to fix that but don’t make it personal.
No one benefits from going several rounds in the blame game.
There’s no magic bullet, and I’m not the perfect manager, but I try to address my weaknesses. The least we can do is help people do the same. After all, it’s your job.
:: What ridiculous things have you heard from management? :: What did you love in a good manager?
A few weeks back I finally tried out Bloglines and as a reader, I love it for the convenience of knowing when someone has updated. As a blogger, though, I wonder if the convenience of Bloglines or any other blog aggregator has any negative effect on the responses from the readers? I’ve a small handful of subscribers (yay!) but I don’t know how long you’ve been subscribers and if that encourages you to drop by more often or speak up less? Do you find that you comment more or less when you use a feed aggregator? Have you experienced a drop or increase in dialogue on your blogs?
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $ in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
Year 5, Day 337: I chopped off another 3-4 inches of hair. It’s been down to my waist for over a year and now it’s only halfway down my back. It’s very nearly at a length that I don’t find inconvenient for washing and drying! Naturally, after the second chop, I dreamed about waking to hair going down to my knees. Clearly this too long hair thing has been haunting my psyche. Or the hair has become representative of the unmanageable nature of life now. That’s also true.
Dinner prep! I usually hate executing other people’s ideas but today PiC suggested soba noodles with tofu and tempura shrimp (Costco, frozen) and I had no brain left to come up with my own idea so I threw that together. That was easy. I also boiled the dry udon noodles from the local Korean market to try. They’re not as thick as I’d like but they were a decent noodle. I’d really like the thick Vietnamese rice noodles but I can’t find them anywhere. Granted, I hadn’t looked that hard yet.
It was a really nice day, warm and sunny, and I tried to bask in it as much as I could in the short school run. Trying to soak it all in to store up the energy for the rest of the week.
Year 5, Day 338: So many meetings, so much energy depleted 😭 2 of them were worthwhile, the third definitely was not.
Of the worthwhile chats, I got some traction in my to do list. Not everything I wanted for my team but a start and a commitment to more later in the year. Don’t love it but I can work with that.
I’m behind the 8-ball on my workouts, this is a heavier workout week but I’m a sloth. A slug. The crumpled tissue shoved in a back pocket. I’m so tired! I’m still forcing myself to do exercises every day but they don’t feel anything like good right now.
Year 5, Day 339: We were promised two nice days this week and that’s exactly what we got: no more, no less. I’m grateful. Usually we hear predictions of good weather, or hot weather, I get excited about it, and we are cheated with some low 70s temps. That’s not basking weather at all. But we had a couple nice hot days and our towels and dishes dried really quickly and then it’s back to the gloom and fog before we could get tired of living in the tropics.
We’re living in a kleptocracy now, aren’t we? Thank goodness increasing my depression meds helped because this is such a terrible timeline. I thought the weight of the world was heavy a few years back, this is so much worse. But thanks to the meds, I’m not carrying all the misery in my bones anymore.
Year 5, Day 340: It’s a sad thing when I run out of brain power before I run out of laptop battery power. I’ve been taking advantage of the relatively light meetings schedule this part of the week to cut down my work backlogs and while I made serious inroads in the many many emails piled up, my brain felt like it was withering under all the processing.
I had to cut short one of my powering through work sessions and just watch the kids for a while.
Dinner was unexpectedly fun. We broke out the four year old musubi and onigiri molds, we’ve never actually used them, and made quick spam musubi (no sauce because that would take way too long) and spam onigiri. Spam with a slice of Japanese ginger is excellent. They also made a curry onigiri. We should try it with the sushi rice next time to see if it works better but these were fine with our usual leftover jasmine rice.
Year 5, Day 341: I encountered a crow friend on my walk today, and left it some treats. It hopped over to pick them up pretty quickly after I walked away.
The first poppy bloomed today! The plants have been mostly greenery so this was a happy surprise.
It finally occurred to me to chop off a couple of the 18 inch tall onion-like growths off the garlic plants. We used them to top our tofu.
Also last week me was a genius: I asked PiC to pick up hot dogs from Costco and we had chili dogs for dinner tonight.
It hasn’t been an easy week, nor was it quiet, but I finally finally managed to end the week with a comfortable amount of work done so that Monday won’t be automatically horrible starting with today’s leftover work. We’re going to take a couple days off next week to force some R&R, I’m not going to cook or worry about how to feed people for those days.
Catching up after next week’s fun will be rough, so I really needed to end this week on a decent note before going off.
Year 5, Day 323: Sunday was terrible, I had vasovagal syncope from 10 am to 5 pm, no idea why. I feel owed a weekend day, I got nothing done yesterday other than trying to not pass out. But today! Today I feel like a nearly functioning human! As much of one as I can ever feel.
So while I didn’t manage to hit my notes to self to-do list, which is separate from my other two to-do lists, I did:
Make full use of a largely uninterrupted workday, gouging a huge dent in my piled up work. Felt annoyed the whole way through because I’m on hold for so many semi-related things but this is good. This helps me start tomorrow a little less behind the 8-ball than usual.
Finally get to work out again for the first time in more than a week! It freaks me out when I have to go more than a day or two without exercising because I lost conditioning so fast after the December holidays. But today I figured out how to manage longer planks – read three pages of a book. That gets me through the first 40 seconds pretty smoothly. My new range is 47-57 seconds, and I’m shaky on the back half, so this feels like a big win when I needed one on this front.
Tomorrow is going to be much more fractured with early school release and needing to make calls, so Tomorrow me will appreciate Monday me’s efforts.
Year 5, Day 324: Demotivation: 100% today. Might be because I woke up from a dream about losing a key software we use at work and I wasn’t able to come up with an adequate workaround for my anxiety dream brain. Everything I did today came from a deep well of “don’t WANNA”. I still did it, just with poor grace. It comes from being too dog-deprived, I’m pretty sure. My neighborhood dog encounter tally is 0 for the past two weeks and that’s just too long. As a poor attempt at a cure, I ogled some adoption listings and this beautiful girl is up for adoption. She’s 3 years old, good with humans and dogs, and appears to be very good natured. She’s also 120 lbs.
She’s well over my lifting limit of 65 pounds, if 120 lbs is accurate, but her adorable face had me wondering … could I learn/build up to deadlifting 120 pounds? No, the answer is most definitely no. Still. One can sigh.
But like an answer to my prayers, some folks brought their dogs to the kids’ afterschool activity and the dogs hung out with me for half an hour. Darn if that didn’t heal my psychic wounds and bring my spirits right back to fighting form. There’s nothing better than having a dog sprawled out next to you while you’re working, letting you pet them at your leisure.
We came back to a chili and cornbread dinner that took me over a month to prep, 1-2 ingredients at a time. I prepped the peppers and froze them several weeks ago. I made the extra cornbread a few weeks ago and froze that. I gathered the rest of the ingredients over the past two weeks and cooked it yesterday. On a night when we’re usually late and tired and rushed, we ended the night with happy and full bellies. Even if SmolAc WAS a party pooper and claimed not to like it. They probably didn’t, they are not a pleasure to feed.
Year 5, Day 325: You know I’ve been simmering about financial changes needed with the threats to the FDIC and our banking system. Now, on the one hand, I don’t see these billionaires, whose net worths are tied up in the stock market, trying to tank the US stock market. However I DO see them deliberately destroying our banking institutions to push their crypto agenda or to destroy the middle class while they continue to loot the government. So far, everything they’ve done is geared toward destruction. It makes sense to assume their move on the FDIC is just a matter of time. Though if they threaten the livelihoods of the wealthy (not the uber wealthy) by destroying banking, I wonder how those people would respond. Even if they don’t try to tank the stock market, the global community boycotting American products will eventually have an impact, I know my Canadian friends are doing everything they can not to buy American: The Entire World Is Pissed at Trump—and It May Cost the U.S. Big Time.
Anyway, I’m looking to mitigate our risk. I’d opened a brokerage account during the years I didn’t have a 401K. In it, we are heavily invested in domestic stock (Vanguard’s VTSAX) which served us very well for years. I’m changing future contributions to buy VTIAX instead or also. My Roth IRA is also VTSAX, and I may sell VTSAX to buy VTIAX instead in there, it’s such a small amount it seems negligible. In normal times, I’d just stay entirely aggressively in domestic stocks but it’s no longer precedented times. These are relatively mild moves to balance our exposure between domestic and international stocks.
I’m still eking out time to research international bank options as a safe place to lodge a good portion of our cash in case there IS a bank failure. I’m not even sure how this new imaginary risk-mitigated landscape looks, I’m just trying my best to deal.
What, if anything, are y’all doing?
Year 5, Day 326: You’ll be proud, I’m sure, to know that I have learned how to conquer my “I sat in a bean bag too long, am stuck” problem. It only took 3 months of flailing like an upside down turtle to figure out that instead of trying to stand up, the better way to go is to roll to the side onto my knee, and then voila! Freedom! I’ve always said I’m a bit slow on the uptake.
This is my first full week of working out since the whole ER thing and I’m still struggling more than I like but being able to do something every day, even just a little, is a huge relief.
Speaking of flailing like an upside down turtle, metaphorically this time, I’ve been so annoyed at myself for perpetually losing count when I’m doing my reps. Around 4-6 reps, my brain wanders off and I finally snap to attention having done way more than I meant to. It’s not because it feels good, it’s because I literally forgot to stop. It only just occurred to me that the solution is to count DOWN from the target, instead of counting up! Surely I will notice when I run out of numbers. We’ll see if this works.
Year 5, Day 327: There’s a storm rolling through California. Even without looking outside, my bones are telling me it’s dark and stormy. It’s been a long day in a long week in a long … well. I’m really feeling it today.
One money question answered! we did both get bonuses this year. Now I can sit down this weekend to figure some things. I’m hoping to stretch them to cover that cashflow hole I caused with so many donations, and fill in some planned spending buckets for the year. This needs a couple hours of wrangling to figure out all the moving parts.
And another money question answered! We’re due a federal refund and owe CA state taxes; they just about cancel each other out. We come out a little bit ahead. I feel ok about this – I’d have felt very gross paying any more federal tax than we’ve already paid in. Fundamentally I want to pay taxes to fund a better society, that’s our civic duty and it makes sense. But this is so very much not the year that our tax dollars get that result, and it’s hard to see when it will again.
Year 5, Day 302: This is the first day I’ve had to mostly myself (while still being responsible for JB) for so long I actually can’t remember when last I had this luxury. The morning was dedicated to setting up the back-up laptop (3 hours in and about 60% done). I planned to pop out for a spot of gardening (hauling soil) afterwards but my hips said absolutely not so instead the plan became trying to get a better rate from Comcast (also no dice, I have to wait til my promotional period is almost over because their offers right now stink).
For some time off my butt, I discarded the ideas to make pretzels, or mozzarella cheese, from kits. Both too time consuming and apparently you cannot make cheese from ultra pasteurized milk so we didn’t have the right ingredients. I mixed up a marinade for seared tuna steaks and baked a load of mini muffins from scratch using an easy recipe a PF buddy shared (turned out great but that zapped all my energy). The recipe WAS simple but the physical demands were too much and sent me to bed for two hours. Unfortunately, amid all the attempts at decompression, my plan from last week to hack off a foot of my hair was entirely forgotten. Drat!
This was the first homecooked meal I’ve made in at least that long, or longer and it’s no coincidence that it lands on my single day off but it was also fortuitous that I defrosted the fish two days earlier. We had seared tuna in a soy honey sesame marinade with rice and roasted broccoli. Mini muffins for dessert!
Year 5, Day 303: Double Mondays are the pits. I front loaded the day with three dog encounters and agreeing to dogsit for our elderly neighbor who has a family emergency to tend to soon. That will be weird, we haven’t had a dog around for ten months now. I felt like jumping out of my skin half the day, not sure why but speculated it was being too keyed up with stress and being full to the brim with emotions about the work and the world.
Still, I managed to avoid any meetings today so I was able to power through so much work, my personal backlog was as close to tamed as it ever gets.
The kids moved up in their self defense class to a more intense class. I was dreading this change because of the time of the new class, but I’ve tested a few ways to deal with it and might be making it work well enough to reduce my stress over the change.
I’m easing my way back into training this week. It’s both frustrating to have broken my streak and to feel so weak again after a couple bad weeks. It’s taken six months to feel a little stronger and so little time to feel like I’m back at the beginning. I know I’m not, but the first pushups and planks back are
Year 5, Day 304: What a frustrating day. I could feel the virus getting the better of me so I had to work from bed. Increasing chaos with several upcoming transitions at work means more of my attention is spent on answering questions (ohhhhh I hate questions!) than working. An hour of calls, and an hour and a half at the orthodontist, and no lunch. I was at the end of my tether by 530 pm by which point I had to figure out what to feed people. I didn’t try very hard. It was quick cheese pasta from Costco, pasta sauce, and mini corn dogs alongside bell peppers and carrots.
What is it with kids? I hollered for JB while I was trying to get dinner on the table and they just yelled “YES??” back. Get your young behind out here where I can actually talk to you. By the time they dragged their tardy butt out to the kitchen my patience had snapped. Is it too much to ask them to use their legs, blessed with the energy of healthy youth, to travel the less than 50 feet to the room where I am doing three things at once to hear me out? ARGH. I have told them both that I had better hear the running of feet when I call their names from now on, do not make me call you twice. The “or else” is unspoken but very loud nonetheless.
Bedtime was another six rounds of nonsense. PiC is as overworked as I am so he keeps falling asleep in the middle of reading to Smol Acrobat (I don’t blame him, I’d be falling asleep everywhere too, I just suffer from insomnia/painsomnia so I can’t. Almost wish I could). Smol Acrobat then escapes containment to come find me and reports “Daddy fell asweep”. Last night, JB was enabling the escapee by cuddling and offering to read to them, tonight they offered a session of calming stretches. NGH. GO TO BED. I chivvied two into bed and one out of bed (he said he had too much work tonight to sleep early) and set myself back up in my bed desk.
Year 5, Day 305: It’s a takeout sort of day, crammed with meetings and running around, but I’m drawing a total blank on what to get. Also, my throat is killing me. I was optimistic and worked at my desk today for the first time all week but that was a bad call. It ate up too much energy. Or maybe falling sick was using up all the energy and it wouldn’t have mattered? Hard to say! Back to bed for me tomorrow. Tonight all I can do is try to get as much work done as possible before dinner and not work late again.
Instead I ruminate on hypernormalization and the feeling that our democracy, flawed and broken as it was, is completely going away. We have to keep taking the kids to school, to their activities, feeding and caring for them as normal. We have to keep up the house, put gas in the car, menu plan or get food on the table one way or another. We can’t just stop.
And from a money perspective, I’m worried because I have no idea what to do. I am working my tail off to keep my job and keep my income for however long that can last – we need the income to pay our bills, my staff needs their income to pay their bills. Even as things are falling to a shambles, we need to pay the rent and put food on the table.
But it also feels like I should prepare for disasters that I’ve never contemplated before – like the FDIC being dismantled and US banking systems failing. I’m contemplating moving some emergency money to an overseas bank (TBD) so that we’re not completely destitute if this attack on our entire country and every institution wrecks our finances.
Thing is, I am also under no illusions about there being any easy escape from this country if things go that deeply wrong. There is no safe haven. Canada doesn’t want us. Mexico doesn’t either, I’m sure. We’ve been awful. There is no country that isn’t racist, sexist, that isn’t prone to right wing hardliners and Nazis. We stand and we fight, we help others who are less fortunate – that’s our first response. We yell at our representatives to do something and we take care of our communities and the most vulnerable.
But I am not me if I don’t plan for multiple contingencies. It’s just never been less clear what roadmap or hierarchy of contingencies begin to make sense in all of this.
Year 5, Day 306: I’m deep in the hiring slog and was struck by a memory. When I was new to one of my first four year jobs, the office manager called me into the office. She told me that my brother had applied, could I work with him? She wouldn’t consider him if I said no. I was taken aback and felt the NO! well up from practically my toes. I could NOT work with him. I knew what he was like – flaky, bombastic, thought he knew better than everyone. It shamed me to my core to think of being associated with him at my workplace, where I was earning the money that paid our rent and for my school, and the idea of that livelihood being threatened near about choked me.
She didn’t call him back and we averted what seemed in the moment to be a potential crisis. I worked so many hours there that I paid for my entire college education and continued to pay the rent and all our bills. I agonized over that decision here, even. And it hit me all over again today: Was I wrong? Could that have been the stabilizing influence, the chance that he needed, to get himself on a path that would have led him through his dark moments? Or would he have done what he always did and screw it up somehow, only to take me down with him?
I don’t know. I don’t know why it bit at me today.
On a lighter note, PiC did the Costco run so we have provisions again and we have survived the week that kept kicking me in the shins. I’ve been getting sicker all week and will need the whole weekend to try to not get worse. Getting better is a whole other ask and may require the symbolic sacrifice of something.
