Archive of things to do with 'work'

• 04.07.08 Temporary:

  The new temp didn’t seem very bright. Just something about him. He’d taught English in Korea and now he was home: he would always talk about that, or anime. The two ran together in the minds of the permanent staff.

  He said the culture was different, it wasn’t easy to live that way. He would just get tired. At the first he loved being strange. He could say what he wanted. But now he would rather be home where things made sense, and relax.

  
  Tags: work, travel, writing, temp, fiction, home.
• 04.05.08 Depression, stalemate, and gridlock:

  A friend of mine was wondering about the Great Depression. The problem they saw goes something like this. Before the stock market crash, you had people doing needed work and receiving needed wages. There was a positive economic cycle: money changes hands between lenders, employers, workers, and consumers, each of them, so far as he remains in that cycle, becoming richer and getting more needs met. But then - boom! - a problem in New York, on a particular fall day…* and suddenly no one around the country is working any longer.

  Now, what sense does that make? The work is still there to be done. The people are still there to do it. The tools are available, there is time in which to do the work, there is time and nothing but time, there is too much time and nothing to do to fill it, and yet there is no work getting done. Everybody wants the work to get done, they can do the work, and they have the tools and the time; but nobody works. How can that be?

  
  Tags: psychology, work, thinking, money, value, habit, trust, love, traffic, depression, questions.
• 03.26.08 Work and the otherworkly world:

  There was a sudden rain, and the view of the north-west warehouses from the fifth-floor window was sunk in the kind of blue that I usually see only in lowlit photographs from digital cameras. Other people weren’t surprised, it was predicted. But I didn’t know about it, and didn’t pack a lunch. I went stood underneath the canvas cover of the burrito cart outside my building. The rain wasn’t the usual Portland rain, but sharp and swift and it came in at an angle. The cart was empty, the surface of the salsa was getting filmy, the cheese was starting to drown, and the wind was knocking the tinfoil around.

  
  Tags: reading, work, taste, thinking, water, weather, plato.
• 03.25.08 Emergent ignorance:

  Most people at work spend most of their time avoiding the work, or trying to slough it off or reduce it. Little attention is spent on their duties or the overall performance of the work. They chat, they space out, they steal office supplies, or spend time on their personal business or recreation, there’s a general tendency to avoid resopnsibility. Many people don’t know some of the basic procedures, aren’t interested to know, want to keep employed and get occasional praise but not much beyond that. And then there’s this as well, there are others who are struggling for power, or trying to shame others or to take work away or spending time attempting to appear better to those in power, and to keep others from that same attention. But it’s the mystery of emergence. Somehow out of all the chaos and competition and contradiction and difficulty and waste, inefficiency, and couterproduction, the overall work done by the department is good, is reliable, is fast; it’s expanding its scope and doing better by all measures all the time.

  
  Tags: work, management, ambition, structure, emergence, ignorance.
• 04.10.07 Stray thoughts:

  I used to think: faces are like characters, or they match them. It might seem that people don’t look like who they are, but you think that because you haven’t understood yet what they look like. I also used to think (and I’ll still say it, if I’m feeling pressured) that people aren’t who they are:

  
  Tags: personality, work, management, turkey, philosophy, simile, money, idle, perception, character, arrogance, politics, history, comics, illustration.
• 03.28.07 Idle thoughts:

  Idle thoughts while at work. (This means: not enough material for a post in any of them alone. So I put them together on a tray and serve while other posts stew in the kitchen. How bloggy.)

  1. Have you ever actually heard anyone say that two plus two equals four in “the tone in which one says that two plus two equals four”? When I was taught it, it was an important fact to be studied and learned (so I heard it in tones of incantation, tones of authority, and tones of confusion).

  
  Tags: blog, reading, personality, work, boredom, thinking, research, music, throat-singing, overtones, mood, time, ambition, idle.
• 01.23.07 Piling up:

  I’m not being productive unless I’m feeling overwhelmed. Usually I don’t do much. Then I’ll have a burst of activity. Then the energy will run out, and I’ll find myself overcommitted. & then I retract from my commitments, rest, then feel ashamed of how little I do, and start the cycle over.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, setback, writing, project, composition, thinking, water, drained, simile, failure, rhythm.
• 01.04.07 Admonitory premonitory:

  There’s a guy I see around town from time to time, and I never like seeing him. Oh, he’s harmless, pretty nice guy, we’ve talked a few times. He always says hello when he sees me. But there’s always a sense I get, whenever we meet, that there’s something shameful between us, and we both know it.

  
  Tags: reading, psychology, work, shame, writing, dialogue, boredom, thinking, fear, research, temp, library, george gissing, failure, future, ghost.
• 01.02.07 Off on the right foot:

  Today I feel like my life is a series of setbacks and I pass the time in between them struggling to make up for lost ground. I took off from work today to fight a cold I felt approaching. Result: I feel worse, I spent an hour and a half walking outside in the rain, and I feel like if I see my office again I might have to scream. (I whimpered a couple times today thinking about it, but that was purely optional.)

  Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but I don’t feel like drawing the full-detail picture that would indicate its place in the larger pattern I seem to see. Partially because I’m sure I would be ashamed of the inadequate result. In any case, I would never finish it. The cruelest hit I took today was logging into google documents, I saw that I had nothing showing in my active documents: I haven’t touched a single one of my projects for a whole month. Hoping to shame myself into getting back to work, I had the idiotic idea of talking about one of them in a public place.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, shame, change, setback, travel, writing, project, siberia, turkey.
• 12.28.06 Personality test:

  I don’t know anything about psychology, and I’m not interested enough to learn more than a casual browse on the internet will tell me about the Myers-Briggs personality test. But I never can resist a Cosmo quiz or a horoscope.

  
  Tags: self, personality, psychology, jung, work, management, shame, change, cuba, regression.