A Swedish political video recently went viral. It features the grandson of Nazi Rudolf Höss. The grandson, Rainer Höss, whom I have seen in documentaries about the descendants of Third Reich leadership, has been trying to work through the burden of his own history all his life. He declares in this hard-hitting ad: “My history taught me that democracy and equality and human rights never can be taken for granted.”
“Never forget. To vote.”
If we look at it the way an agency or law firm with a retainer and hourly billings – would we want or need to invite all the layers of people to meetings that we do internally within corporations?? No. We would be more careful with our time. And we should be. The people working at a company are also expensive – some functions are kept track of this way because they are billed to a client. But salaried employees spending their work lives in meetings or doing a wasteful or superfluous job (the article here argues that the traditional account manager – the hand-holder, schmoozer, coordinator and other such activities – is a waste when duplicated again and again within a company or agency). Agreed.
Being a good schmoozer or networker, though, is a great skill. I know a woman whose entire career is built on being a schmoozer and networker. I assume she has more skills than that – schmoozing, networking and then asskicking – so it’s like the coordinator mentioned above but on steroids. She calls herself a “vigilante” – and in many ways that is what is so valuable about her. She will ruffle feathers and circumvent bureaucracy and the chain of command to get things done. Many organizations could use a vigilante of this caliber. And a real professional at it will be able to ruffle feathers and upend the status quo while smiling and without creating internecine strife.
Speaking of vigilantes, I think of Mexico – which has legalized and armed civilian vigilantes to fight violent Knights Templar drug cartel. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. The frontier is a new front line.
Jon Stewart takes Boko Haram and Rush Limbaugh to task on Monday’s episode of The Daily Show. No wonder I love Jon Stewart and his team of writers.
all people shopping in sweden have been brainwashed to be careful about making sure that the bar code on their groceries is facing toward them/away from the checker because it speeds up the checkout process. this might be true if a person with a lot of groceries is in front of them but it’s kind of a common sense thing … if you have a lot of groceries, a long line behind you and the checker is not doing anything but swiping your items, it might make better sense just to set your items on the counter faster without worrying about the bar code positioning.
but because of the brainwashing and because of swedes/norwegians preferring to follow rules obliviously without regard to common sense, sometimes people are carefully (read slowly) unloading groceries, lining up the bar codes while the checker is sort of sitting there waiting for one item after another… twiddling her thumbs between items because the customer is so stupid they can’t see it would at that point be faster not to worry about the fucking bar code – he is holding up the entire line.
It has been hard to find the motivation to write even though I keep collecting topics I want to write about.
One of these days…
There are no guarantees. Usually, though, there is wildlife that will run into the road when you least expect it and let your guard down.
I feel caught in a net and am being dragged down under the water.
When it comes to emotion and love, it is terribly hard to trust. And then when someone messes with that, especially after you trusted and felt like you were “all-in”, recapturing the trust doesn’t happen easily, if at all. When indecision has crept in once (on the other side – not MY indecision) then everything is in question and in doubt. Is there a way back from that?
“It’s Getting Light Outside” – Clearlake
“It’s good to notice all the ways we’ve changed, and even better, how we’ve stayed the same. I’d love to know – tell me everything – I want to know exactly how you’ve been before you know, we’ll forget the time and turn around and find we’ve talked all night – it’s getting light outside.”
Poetry was brought up in a team meeting when new colleagues had to introduce themselves. One said she has, as the Robert Frost poem describes, preferred to take the road less traveled by (“The Road Not Taken”) and mentioned Robert Frost (my favorites of his are less known but no less rich – see below)… while another colleague (the unique, snus-enthusiast character who is urging me to get chickens, has proffered chicken eggs to prod this process along) announced quite proudly that she is “weird”. (This reminded me that I stated in my own interview for this particular job that I am “weird but in a good way” – my manager must like to hire unusual but competent people.)
Perhaps I have thus become a poetry-spouting, budding but incremental farmer of sorts – contemplating the chickens my colleague is so fond of while actually liking the look of ducks, which are apparently also an option, albeit a less popular one. I am still in doubt – without a house husband or some similar figure who cares for these creatures and nurtures them (which hired help would not do) – as one friend said today, he would talk to them a great deal – I can’t take even such a small step toward “farming”. Farming is, after all, a “labor of love” that very few people take on because it will provide them a living. Rather it brings joy and purpose into daily life as well as a kind of routine, as evidenced by the popularity of raising chickens in one’s backyard and the rise of a magazine like Modern Farmer in an era when publishing is actually declining.
(An unrelated story except for chicken involvement – but one which put a smile on my face – here’s a headline and article about someone’s apparent “cocking around”: “Guilty of “cocking around””.)
Meanwhile, other Frost favorites – absolutely beautiful.
“Forgive O Lord” by Robert Frost