SuperBoB

Apparently workers at Carlsberg could drink beer throughout the day at work previously. The company has tightened up though by removing company provided beer coolers and limiting beer drinking to breaks and lunch. Although I understand that it would be super cool to be able to drink all day, they were working in what you could call a light manufacturing environment. You don’t necessarily want tipsy forklift drivers or machine operators. I would be pretty excited to go on break and have the company provide me with a beer. I guess it’s all in setting expectations. Apparently, if you had previously been able to drink all day, then now only being able to drink three or four times during the workday is so bad that you have to strike. Oh well.

What about a PETA group killing 97% of the animals it took in? I’m not saying it’s good or bad, just ironic.

I read this article today about having a positive attitude. I have been talking with people a lot lately about good attitudes, and I think many people don’t believe that attitude helps. I’ve also gone through a period of depression and understand that sometimes you don’t want to feel better, but overall a good attitude is a good thing.

The LA Times has an interesting article on car financing. It seems like CDO’s part two, but obviously has been going on long enough that it preceded what we have learned about ARM loans, namely don’t give someone a loan that they can’t afford. What I will be curious to see is if the securities industry and the financial offices tied to the auto makers do the same deny, deny, throw themselves at the mercy of the government dance that went on/is going on in the housing market. In any event, this seems likely that it will suck for all of those in underwater loans, and probably the tax payers. Even if it sucks for the banks, it won’t be in proportion to their share of the responsibility.

I don’t think I have seen a manager who could handle the concept of an efficient worker. This isn’t an anomaly, it’s the way the world works. If we are to treat everybody equally, than it’s obvious that someone cannot work half as much. If a company actually wanted results, they would be looking to hire someone like Albert for 25 to 30 hours a week, but most companies today (unless they are under 50 employees) could not understand the concept of “don’t waste my time”. Too bad.

I ran across an interesting article today from The Huffington Post titled “I’m Plotting to blow up LAX”. The content is OK, I guess, but what struck me as odd was my own reaction. Just going by the title, I wasn’t going to click on the link to read the article, because I didn’t want to be associated with any such idea. It occurs to me that this is how the brainwashing of normal people starts. “Someone” wants you to start thinking a certain way, and manipulates or manages your environment until you start thinking that way. I don’t know who that someone is, or even if they exist, but I do think it’s a shame that I would be afraid to click on a link on the Internet because of what it said. There are cases where I would be better off not clicking on a link, but certainly one mouse-click does not prove my ringing endorsement of any content that it points to. It’s important to remember this sometimes.

I love almost all the people I work with, so I have to question what went wrong. When I started with my current employer, I was young and eager, but lately work is best summed up by this post. It’s not so much that my job sucks, but that the overall atmosphere is mediocre. I could be mediocre anywhere, but I would rather excel at a job that I like. I want to challenge and be challenged, not flattened out into some compromised shapeless mass of a “resource”. I want to work at the equivalent of a hometown grocer and cater to the customer, not become a faceless chain, which it feels like my employer is becoming.