Abused Workers Fight Back by Slacking Off

Can't say that I am surprised by any of this. That last line kills me.

Employees toiling under an abusive supervisor often rebel quietly and indirectly by slacking off on the job and handing in sloppy work.

Researchers at Florida State University surveyed more than 180 employees from a wide variety of professions, asking whether they had endured a history of abuse from their bosses, then asking a slew of workplace performance questions.

Employees with difficult bosses checked out in the following ways:

• 30 percent slowed down or purposely made errors, compared with 6 percent of those not reporting abuse.
• 27 percent purposely hid from the boss, compared with 4 percent of those not abused.
• 33 percent confessed to not putting in maximum effort, compared with 9 percent of those not abused.
• 29 percent took sick time off even when not ill, compared with 4 percent of those not abused.
• 25 percent took more or longer breaks, compared with 7 percent of those not abused.

Whether the abusive boss causes apathetic employees or vice versa is not known.

Where Babies Come From

One of the joys of being a parent is fielding the many different questions that our children throw at us. It is probably fair to say that there are a few standards such as what happens when you die and where do babies come from.

Until recently the big kid and I hadn't spent any time discussing babies other than the moments when he told me that he no longer liked certain shows/toys because they are for babies. That changed this weekend as he decided that he really wanted to know. To quote him, "tell me the real story."

I paused for a moment and considered the best way to explain it. I wasn't embarrassed or afraid of the discussion, but to be honest hadn't really thought about how to answer it. So here is approximately what I said.

"To make a baby you need a man and a woman. Men make something called sperm. Women have eggs. When you combine the sperm and the egg a baby is made."

Of course he asked how do you combine the two.

"A man sticks his penis inside a woman's vagina and shoots the sperm inside her."

There was a momentary look of horror on his face.

"Dad, that is disgusting!"

"You might feel differently about that one day. In fact you might even want to do it," I replied.

Now here is a crucial piece of information that you need to appreciate the story. I told my son about sperm and where it goes while standing alongside him at a urinal. Little did I know that this activity was going to influence his opinion about the whole topic.

As we washed our hands he started to laugh and told me that he had changed his mind. He wanted to have sex. I looked at him and asked him why he had suddenly changed his mind. He laughed and said that he wanted to pee on girl's crotches.

I tried to explain that they were two different activities, but he was laughing too hard. Later on I got to witness his telling his grandfather that "dad peed on mom's crotch." I have to admit that for a moment I was tempted not to explain to my father how his grandson had come up with this idea as the look my father's face was priceless.

Later this evening he and I are going to revisit the topic so that I can clear up any misconceptions. I think that I'd like to try and stave off the possibility that he'll run around school/public telling people that his dad pees on mom. It might have a detrimental affect upon his ability to get a play date.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Haveil Havalim #135

It is at Soccer Dad's field.

Two Old Posts

As I worked on the meme below I stumbled onto the following two posts. Reading them gave me a wistful smile.

Give Me An Example of A Rant
You Just Aren't that Funny

The Evolution Meme

The Baconator tagged me with The Evolution Meme. The idea is that I list five old posts that I think are reflective of the evolution of this blog.

This is a hard meme, at least it feels difficult. I mulled over which post to start with. After all there almost 5,100 to choose from. But the real reason this is so hard is that I cringe when I see some of the crap I posted. I am tempted to nuke the old stuff.

In the end I opted to go for the default answer and choose my first post.

I started this blog on a lark. It was a whim, an impulsive move. I hadn't any plan or intention to do this for very long at all. The opening is pretty plain, just a few words about myself and not much else.

It is a little after midnight on the day 22nd anniversary of my Bar-Mitzvah. At 35 I have a house, have been married for 8.5 years, have a 3.5 year-old son and another child on the way.

No word yet as to the sex, other than it is a healthy baby. And so begins the start of my blog adventure. I cannot say where this journey will take me, or whether I'll enjoy it, but for tonight I am willing to venture out into the wild and woolly web.

2) As my second choice in the evolution of the blog I have to pick Life Is Challenging. This is the post in which I discovered that this could be a place in which to air my inner feelings about anything. It is still hard to look back and read the old material, but this was different.

3) I have really struggled with trying to decide what post to pick for number three. For now I'll select A Moment In Time- Perspective for the coming Shabbos. It was an early introspective moment that didn't make me cringe. The writing wasn't great, but it has elements of the voice and style I currently use.

4) Somewhere between the end of 2005 and 2006 I began to really hit my stride. My posts got more comments and my readership increased exponentially. There were a number of posts about blogging that got quite a bit of attention and still drive traffic. One of my favorites is the Shola Rhodes Nigerian scammer series.

The series and the attention it generated within the j-blogosphere made me realize that I really had become part of a community. It also made me laugh because I received a ton of email from new bloggers asking for my assistance in getting established. I hadn't been blogging for all that long and found it kind of funny that anyone thought that I was an authority on it.

5) This post has taken hours to write, although they were not spent consecutively. It is not easy to try and sift through so many posts and come up with some substance. There are many posts that deserve attention. These days I think that some of the best are those that deal with family matters as well as life events. A recent example is The Final Goodbye.

I think that posts like that one work because I found a common theme that we can all relate to and managed to portray it in an easy to follow manner.

One more comment. I also think that part of the reason that this meme was so hard is that it feels exceptionally self-indulgent. It just feels awkward and uncomfortable, or maybe that is just because I am wearing a pair of jeans that are 6 sizes too small. Hmmm..

Another Funeral- My Best Friend Is Gone Forever

I'll remember September of 2007 as being a hard month. Two family friends died unexpectedly. One day they were here and the next they were gone. Their loss has weighed upon me. It is a reminder of just how tenuous our grip on life is. It is just one more sign that in a moment it can all be taken away.

Two years ago I came very close to being an example of what can happen. In one of those links you can see some of my thoughts about that day. Now when I think about I really feel lucky. If things would have transpired a bit differently I would have been seriously injured, if not killed. For a while afterwards I carried physical reminders of the accident. One of my knees hit the dashboard. They said it was just a bad bruise, but it seemed to take an awfully long time to heal. There are some other aches and pains that made their appearance that day and have yet to leave me. But enough about me.

This last funeral was heartbreaking. Some deaths are more tragic than others. In this case a parent, a sibling, and a spouse was taken far too early. On the off chance that someone stumbles onto this I am intentionally being vague about the identity of the deceased.

I have been to more funerals than I care to think about. I have seen parents bury children. I have seen children say goodbye to their parents, but I don't think that I have ever witnessed a more heart wrenching goodbye from one spouse to another. The anguish of the surviving spouse was a terrible thing to see. We're not supposed to be exposed to such raw emotion, the intimacy was not meant for us. The sobbing and wails of pain were not for our eyes, but the pain of the loss was so great that they didn't care.

They collapsed at the graveside and clawed at the earth. If you didn't know the couple you might think that this was a show, that it was ridiculous, a hysterical over reaction. But I did know them and I am here to say that they had that kind of love. They were best friends. They were lovers. They were something more than husband and wife.

Jewish mourning ritual includes shoveling some dirt on the grave of the deceased. For the third time in my life I was part of a funeral in which a group of us took care of filling in the grave in its entirety.

It was hot and it was hard work. It was hard because I could feel the eyes of the spouse and children upon me. I could feel them begging for mercy, that they should wake up from a bad dream. And with every shovelful we proved that it wasn't a dream.

But we shoveled on. We couldn't bring about a miracle. We couldn't remove their pain, but we hoped that that our presence would help them begin to heal. And it was one more way to show our love and respect for the departed.

It was a hard day. September was a hard month. But I learned from it. Some of those lessons I keep to myself, but here is something that I'll share with you. When I die I hope that I merit having people fill in my grave. I hope that I have made enough of a difference in the world around me that they give my family that one last gift.

Baruch Dayan Emet.