Racial Situations in the Workplace

An interesting take on how one can use racist attitudes to one’s advantage – they hit some things dead on, some they missed, entertaining nonetheless.

The Pagers

Still has a use after the cellphone

A pager (sometimes called a page, beeper or bleep) is a simple personal telecommunications device for short messages. A one-way numeric pager can only receive a message consisting of a few digits, typically a phone number that the user is then expected to call. Alphanumeric pagers are available, as well as two-way pagers that have the ability to send and receive email, numeric pages, and SMS messages.

Until the popular adoption of mobile phones in the 1990s, pagers fulfilled the role of common personal and mobile communications. Today, pagers mainly support the “critical messaging” markets. They are the ideal solution for very quick, very reliable personal or group messaging. Unlike many other mobile communications networks, they continue to work in times of emergency or disaster as they do not suffer from network overload as has been proven many times (September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina). For this reason, they are still very popular with emergency service personnel, medical personnel, and information technology support staff.

If you still have a pager now, hopefully you are in some medical profession because it will be very hard to find a payphone.

.:: LiBM :::

Rewarding Incompetence

The Peter Principle – explains a lot

When I first heard about the Peter Principle I felt a couple of things; first, this explains a lot – that’s it. Sorry for saying a ‘couple of things’; as I guess the first explanation explains so much situations and scenarios that we all can relate to. The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. This is “The Generalized Peter Principle.” It was observed by Dr. William R. Corcoran and he found that in an organizational structure, the Peter Principle’s practical application allows assessment of the potential of an employee for a promotion based on performance in the current job; i.e., members of a hierarchical organization eventually are promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to incompetence. That level is the employee’s “level of incompetence” where the employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching his or her career’s ceiling in an organization.

The employee’s incompetence is not necessarily exposed as a result of the higher-ranking position being more difficult — simply, that job is different from the job in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different work skills, which the employee may not possess. For example, a factory worker’s excellence in his job can earn him promotion to manager, at which point the skills that earned him his promotion no longer apply to his job.

How to resolve the Peter Principle:
- employees who are dedicated to their current jobs should not be promoted for their efforts for which they might, instead, receive a pay increase.
- employees might be promoted only after being sufficiently trained to the new position. This places the burden of discovering individuals with poor managerial capabilities before (as opposed to after) they are promoted.

I don’t know about you, but this explains a lot and allows me to understand the chaos, dumb, asinine logic that exists in the corporate/government world.

Some Key Examples of the Peter Principle (Fiction & Non-Fiction):

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown

Former FEMA director Michael Brown was called to testify before Congress for the botched relief operation in New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina 2005).

George W. Bush

Self-explanatory for most

Michael Scott

- The Office star, and lovable incompetent boss that represents so many of our bosses

.:: LiBM ::.
Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peter_Principle

Cheap E-Way

Ways to save and cut back

Most of this is logical (hopefully), but in a tight economy, there are many ways that people can save their money and cut back.

Write-Off

Register a small business. Do it. Regardless if you have no idea of what product you plan to sell or what service you want to offer. Then, any activity/purchase you do for your business, can be a write-off – transit fare to meet clients, food purchases, clothing, wireless/internet expenses … the possibilities are endless.

Shop at a Dollar Store

- they have the everyday household items for $1, body spray deodorant, binders, lotions, drinks – and all the name brands; no ‘Acme’ or generic never-heard of brands

Bring your own beverages to work

- let’s do the math; let’s say you bought a Coca-cola beverage everyday at your work cafeteria for $1, 5 times a week. Over a month period, that equates to $20. If you went to the grocery store, and picked up a 12 pack of coca-cola for $5.99, you would save around $.50 per day rather than buying it at the cafeteria.

Cloud Computing

- This is working and storing information into the cloud (essentially a server) where you can access the data from any machine; no longer being restricted to a specific computer. Google offers many free cloud services like ‘Google Docs’ (wordprocessing, spreadsheet, powerpoint) and if you need a desktop software suite, Sun Office has a bunch of applications that are compatible with Microsoft and the best thing is that it is FREE.

.:: LiBM ::.

Part 4 in the Expression of foolery:

A logical Mess, Road Closures, Paypal fees

A Logical Mess
Its always the worst when your away from work for a couple of days and your work peer comes over to your desk to do your work and completely reorganizes your things. They say that they were just trying to ‘clean up’ your things, but b**ch, the perceived chaos/mess is subjective – and usually items are strategically placed in certain areas for a reason. Its really rude and abrasive to come into another person’s work area and go through their stuff; business and/or personal – usually they do it to snoop, lames. These types of people need to be dealt with; severely and swiftly (you know what I mean).

Road Closures
Driving on the highway especially in the summer is an interesting time as construction narrows lanes, roads are unpaved, and they always have signs indicating that a certain part of the highway will be closed during a certain time between certain intersections. This is a gross logical error, because if you are traveling eastbound, the signs will tell you the closures that affect eastbound traffic only; but, the driver most likely will need to know of any construction occurring on the westbound lanes (as it will be rare that the driver will travel eastbound again after returning westbound). Am I the only one that has noticed this? Does it not make sense to give notice to the most likely course of actions of drivers?

Paypalery
This will be quick and sweet, but isn’t it odd that Paypal is quick to charge you fees for your transactions whether you are buying or selling, but when you need to withdraw some money from paypal it takes 5-8 business days … Just saying …

.:: LiBM ::.