Entries Tagged 'Work' ↓

“Biggest error since [Michael] Jordan tried to play baseball.”

Chewie-stretchie-rubbery-licious….

That’s how my web strategist, Lena West of xynoMedia, qualifies her decision, late one night hanging out and drinking with friends, to get pizza from Domino’s:

10:43pm: We ordered online.

12:20am: Our order is delivered. Yes, the 30 minute pizza people delivered a pizza almost 2 hours later. The pizza was cold and the delivery guy, Luis, arrived sans Rebecca’s CinnaStix (they tell you your delivery person’s name with the Pizza Tracker online interface). Luis apologized and said he would return in about 15 minutes with the CinnaStix. We also saw through the online interface that our order was made by Vanessa as soon as we placed it, but it sat in a “HeatWave” bag for almost 2 hours after it was made.

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Time for a Career Change?

Too late!

Like a lot of people working in the corporatesphere, Pamela Skillings hated the work she did. As she says in a piece for The New York Times this past June, she had even begun to adopt a cruel piece of hamster-wheel logic in order to keep herself going into the office every day:

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Uh, You’re Probably Gonna Want To Re-Think That Job Offer in Moscow. No, Seriously. I Mean It. Don’t Go. Run.

“I think I found the folder I asked you to get.”
A post-Soviet “survival” technique, according to the courts

As many know from the viral video of a Russian newspaper office worker gone bonkers and attacking co-workers and cubicles, doing the daily grind in one of that country’s corporations seems pretty doggone rough. But just how terrible it can be for women is something we’re only now finding out: According to the Huffington Post,

A woman seeking to become only the third woman ever to successfully bring a sexual harassment case in Russia was dealt a shocking rebuke when the judge threw out her case, ruling that sexual harassment is actually necessary for the survival of the human race:

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What Bloggers Taught a Reporter, or What NBC’s David Gregory, Meet the Press Heir-Apparent, Seemingly Hasn’t Learned Yet.

“This big.”
“I give you my journalistic integrity.”: David Gregory, NBC News

Salon.com‘s Glenn Greenwald recently covered a confession by Oregon sports columnist Dwight Jaynes, who writes for The Portland Tribune.

In the piece, Greenwald talks about a June 5th column by Jaynes, in which he revealed the way

bloggers “led [him] to alter [his] approach to the way [he] do[es] [his] job as a columnist, pushing [him] away from a philosophy [he] held dear for decades in this business.”

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Wanted: Advanced Japanese Technology That Will Keep Japanese Engineers from Disappearing

“Are we the only ones here?”
Last ones out the lab, turn off the lights: Japanese engineers

You know the way Americans always talk about Japan as the epitome of engineering? Apparently, that illustration is about to be permanently outdated.

According to The New York Times, “Japan is running out of engineers”: Fewer and fewer young people are entering the field.

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Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death.

Niko Bellic lets loose
I missile you much: GTA IV‘s Niko Bellic sends his regards

The worst job I ever had was working in the car loans department of the now defunct Chemical Bank, at the Huntington Quadrangle in Melville L.I. It was a small office of about ten to twelve mutually limited, small-minded people, held under the managerial thumb of a doughy, mouse-faced, unsmiling, bespectacled woman with yellow smoker’s fingertips and a bad perm.

Our task was taking in loan requests by fax or phone from GMAC finance dealers, processing them, and passing them up the chain for approval. What I remember most was how tense this office was, as this woman kept us under the grind to turn out precious loan apps. My solace was ducking into my ’75 Impala at lunch time, loudly playing Grandmixer DXT and Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock album, and sleeping.

But pristinely nested on the other end of my employment karmic balance is the job I loved the most: The 2 1/2 years I spent, from 2004 – 2006, working in public affairs at Rockstar Games, maker of the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series of video games.

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Redefining “Paid.”

Paulson is paidAccording to Forbes.com’s 2007 list of top TV personalities, in the year between June 2006 and June 2007, talk show host Oprah Winfrey earned over a quarter of a billion dollars, $260 million, precisely, or over $1 million a day.

Pauper.

In a report cited by The New York Times yesterday, Institutional Investor’s Alpha (IIA) magazine ranked the 50 top hedge fund earners of last year. (The incomes on this list are so outrageous that you need to have made at least $210 million to get on it. Were Oprah a fund manager, she’d have ranked 38th.)

At #1, John Paulson, right, 52, of Paulson & Company, utterly nuked his competition by taking home compensation of…hold your breath, people…$3.7 billion.

That’s not his net worth. That’s three billion, seven hundred million dollars in salary.

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Every Day, She Breaks So Much More Than the Sound Barrier…

Black female, comin’ out fightin’

To quote rapper Craig G, from “The Symphony,” mm mm mm, ain’t that somethin’: Maj. Shawna Rochelle Kimbrell is the first African-American female fighter pilot ever in the United States Air Force. (Thanks to Black Spin for the tip.)

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Work NSFW: A List of Obsolete Skills

Changing the ribbon on a typewriter. Operating an overhead projector.Typesetter PASCAL-TurboPASCAL. Looking up a business in the Yellow Pages. Mounting photographic slides in slide mounts. Specializing in the distribution, marketing, sales, and repair of HD-DVD players.

If you’re reading my blog at work, and your job is doing any of these, you might wanna just keep reading my blog.