Chin Up, Working Girls

As I have mentioned numerous times before, I really enjoy reading Working Girl’s blog. I’m not exactly in their target demographic but they really have a good thing going and I read as much to try and duplicate their success as I do out of interest in their topics. I’ll admit it, I shake my head at some of their posts but there is a generational gap between us. When they discuss the drama from the most recent episode of The Hills or the quality of Britney Spears’ new album I want to vomit. They are still the best bloggers on the net though, in my humble opinion.
But the Working Girls are sad this week. Working Girl Two has relocated and Working Girl One’s spirits are down. Separation anxiety sucks. While I know that WG1 is happy for her colleague, she still will miss having her near. While I can offer her no solace, I can give her a little reminder of her friend.
A couple of months ago I was brainstorming for ideas to increase my readership and the best idea I came up with was having a weekly guest blogger. The Working Girls were my first target. If I could get them to write an entry for me discussing the successes, failures, and aspirations for their blog, it would be a major accomplishment. So I emailed them and, for a couple of weeks, got no response. Just when I had given up hope that they would do me the honor of writing a blog for me, WG2 contacted me and said she would do it.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I said.
We traded emails discussing topics and deadlines and then one day, there it was: my own personalized WG2 blog entry. Problem was, aside from WG2, only one of my other guest bloggers had responded. I put the feelers out to campus clubs and other bloggers and only Working Girl and Two Minutes for Blogging had replied.
So I stashed the entries away. I honestly figured I would never have the opportunity to use either. Then I read WG1’s post yesterday. She’s got the blues over WG2’s relocation and can only find comfort in her boyfriend’s “nook.” I don’t want to know. So I thought that maybe a trip down memory lane would help. A little reminder of WG2. Kind of like a lost episode of The Hills or Cashmere Mafia.
So here you are WG1, chin up! And WG2, out there in the Windy City, congratulations and thanks again………

I have to first point out that when the Invisible Student asked WG1 and I to guest post on his blog that we were ecstatic. I mean, this is our very first guest blog post (how exciting is that!). And then he asked us to write about our success with Working Girl. Which is still weird for me to say. We are successful. We have a successful blog. When we started the blog, I thought we could get our friends and family to read it for sure. But beyond that, I don't know if I had that many expectations. For you to fully understand, I think we need to start at the beginning.

Working Girl One and I met in college. And I don't think if you had met either one of us when we were little, wide-eyed freshman that either of us could have guessed where we would be 5 years from then. That we would have a blog about women in the workplace. In fact, I think if you had met us on our first day of classes back in 2003 that you would have been surprised if we would be able to graduate much less had been able to pull this blog together.

As fate would have it, WG1 and I had two classes together first semester of freshman year – religion and French. I remember seeing WG1 on our first day of classes and thinking that she must have been one of those girls in high school that was so popular and cool (little did I know that she was a huge nerd bomb). Being the bold little freshman I was, I asked WG1 to sit with me in religion class one day. Unfortunately, I had sat in the front row. And forevermore we had to sit in the front row of that class. I'm not lying when I say we both fell asleep in it (since it was at 9 AM and really, really, really boring).
From that day on, we became best "class friends". So much so that in French class, our professor could barely tell us apart. But we thankfully snagged back row seats in that class (because after many beer bongs, my brain capacity had shrunk to that of a pea and the only words I knew were 'oui' and 'vrai'). WG1 and I hung out with different groups of friends, but we always managed to connect somehow. Since we had different majors, we didn't have many classes together anymore, but we did like dorky activities like being tour guides, campus activities like going to see the Knicks, and eventually we ended up being editors at our university's newspaper.

The idea for Working Girl actually stemmed out of an idea we had for a magazine for young women between the ages of 18 and 25 – a market we thought hadn't really been tapped into. See girls in their teens and tweens have Seventeen. And girls in their 20's and 30's have Cosmopolitan. But there is really no in-between magazine. Something that caters to girls who need guidance with college, their career, finding internships, etc. But since we are only in our early 20's, we didn't really have the resources (or experience) to start our own print magazine and voila Working Girl was born.

In its early stages, Working Girl was really just the two of us writing and our dads reading it. But I think what I really attribute our success to getting the word out. Being two girls in the marketing world, we both know how important word of mouth is! When we started the blog, we sent around an e-mail to all our friends and family asking them to read it on a daily basis. We started a Facebook group dedicated to our blog. We started a MySpace page (which is embarrassing sparse).

As more and more people began to read our blog, which we tracked by using Google Analytics, we decided we needed a professional designer to take on our website. WG1 worked closely with Delicious Design Studio and really, I don't think we would be as successful as we are today without Jess's design. Because without her design, I doubt that we would have been chosen as a Blog of Note. Or been featured in a South African magazine Chew, or gotten any of our blogger appointed awards!

Putting on a professional face while promoting our blog is what I really attribute to our success – that and our commitment to really wanting to reach out to an audience we think gets overlooked – the girls who are about to graduate from college and the twenty-something's out there in the trenches working the daily grind.

Our goal with Working Girl has been the same since the beginning. Of course we want to moan and groan about work, but we also want to help others. We like answering questions that our readers have about work and co-workers and horrible bosses. We like being able to bring knowledge and tidbits of information that you might not be able to find anywhere else.

When the Invisible Student asked us to write this post, he also asked us as if we saw ourselves as role models. Do I think of myself as a role model? Not yet. But it is something I would love to add to my resume.

Time is of the Essence

One of the major differences I have noticed between my generation and the younger generation of the students that surround me not only at school but in jobs I’ve had in the past is a lack of respect for rules and/or authority. Accompanying this lack of respect is also a lack of personal accountability. There is a tendency among a portion of today’s youth to point fingers and deflect blame. It is similar to today’s athletes. They can’t wait to pound their chests and dance when they do the simplest of things but when they mess up, it’s because of a referee or a blown assignment by a teammate, etc..
I don’t need to continue to rehash my work experience but just to remind you, my previous college degree is in Marketing Management and my work experience lies primarily in various levels of retail, from a mere sales associate up to low level management. It is because of my experiences in retail that I have decided to drop everything and return to school. Because of the night and weekend hours, retail jobs are perfect for a college student needing extra cash flow and over the years I’ve worked with hundreds of them. Some of them have been hardworking and punctual. Most though, were lazy and unreliable.
I bring this topic up because my beloved Working Girls( http://www.work-girl.blogspot.com/ )had a post on their blog last week in which one of their bosses had decided to suddenly start enforcing attendance and punctuality policies and went about it by standing at the elevator with a stopwatch greeting employees. Although I applaud the decision to enforce punctuality, after all, if they can’t trust you to do something as simple as look at a clock and be on time, how can they trust you with difficult tasks, their methods leave a lot to be desired. You can’t be lax on policy day after day, week after week and month after month then suddenly crack the whip overnight. Especially by doing something as childish as waiting by the door with a watch.
Some of the responses that Working Girl received were shocking to me, especially considering that they were coming from adults in the professional world. A few people stated that, as long as you are doing your job, no one should care if you arrive late or leave early. To those people I offer this response, getting to work on time and completing your work day IS part of your job. If you are not doing so, guess what? You are not doing your job. Another responder asked why they should have to be on their boss’ schedule. Why? Because they are THE BOSS! That’s why. You do what they say, not the other way around.
There just seems to be this sense of entitlement with today’s youth. The same people that can’t be on time, leave early or call in sick are the same ones who threaten to quit when they are reviewed and don’t get a raise. I used to work with a kid working his way through college who would do a very minimal amount of work and when he was prodded to do more he would say something to the effect that he only got paid $8 per hour so he only did what he felt was $8 worth of work per hour. If the company wanted more work out of him, they should give him a raise. That was the mentality that many of his peers shared. They were waiting for the company to give them raises rather than earning them. I’m sure you are familiar with the saying, dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Well, that could easily be changed to, work for the wage you want, not the wage you have.
To that same effect, many of the working students that could never be on time or called in sick for every home football game or college night at the club were the same ones asking for more hours during school breaks. It just made me shake my head. A few more of my personal favorites were the people who were already late that would enter the building with breakfast, lunch or dinner, clock in and then proceed to the break room and eat while on the clock. I’m also rather fond of the women who arrive at work late and get to their desks and begin putting on their makeup. Makeup is as much a part of getting dressed as putting on socks and shoes: it should be done at home, on your time, not on our dime.
The biggest frustration was that, for many of these companies, the cost of hiring and training employees is too high to justify the termination of slackers like this. As easy as it is to find another student willing to work for low wages, consistently turning them over and training a new crop isn't cost effective so the companies put up with it and delegate the work to other, more reliable workers which, in a sense, punishes those people for being good workers. That is what drove me way. From the perspective of a sales associate, it was frustrating to have to pick up the slack of these people. I came to work on time and did my job well, why should I have had to do their jobs too? From the view of a manager it was an ongoing battle to try and have a reliable staff yet have to fight tooth and nail with Human Resources to terminate worthless individuals. Surely the negative impact they have on productivity offsets the cost of training replacements.
I don’t know where the blame lies. Whether it’s a parenting thing or because of the fact that everything is an excuse nowadays. There is a disorder and subsequent narcotic for every damn thing in the world today. If a kid daydreams he’s ADD and if he fidgets while he daydreams he’s ADHD and written a scrip for mind numbing drugs and given a free pass the rest of his life. In my day the kid was just a daydreamer who drank too much Kool-Aid and needed to come down from his sugar high.
What scares me the most about this trend is that I always thought that kids grew out of it once they entered the professional world. College kids are supposed to be flaky and uninterested, it’s part of the whole experience. But when I saw the responses over at Working Girl I realized that it may not just be a college thing, its quite possibly an epidemic.

Back on Topic

I started this blog as kind of a school social experiment. It was going to be titled A Day in the Life of a 36-year old Married College Student but that was too wordy. But after a couple of days of posting I decided that I didn't want to only appeal to my fellow Golden Panthers. I mean, the best I could possibly hope for would be that 10% of the student body would read it, which would limit me to 3800-3900 readers. So I decided to spin off and just do more of a random, play it by ear style of blog. Granted, I am new to the blogging world and have yet to perfect the art of writing an interesting, grab the reader by the seat of the pants blog, if such a thing exists.
I spend plenty of time researching other blogs to find what works and what doesn't and as I've mentioned before, Working Girl (work-girl.blogspot.com) is the best thing going. She's topical, current, funny and interesting. The blogs that I absolutely hate are the photo blogs. Type something, PLEASE! Tell me what I am looking at. These people that just take pictures of their kids or vacation spots and post them on a blog without any narrative are just God awful boring, in my humble opinion (IMHO, the H could also stand for honest, honestly).
But Tuesdays and Thursdays are school days for me so I figure that those would be the best days to go back on topic. Once football season starts, Mondays will be reserved for my reviews of the weekend's action. Annoying People will continue to be a weekly feature and perhaps a beer review will pop up here and there. I've got a stat counter tracking the daily traffic and each day the number of people stopping by has increased a bit and so has the number of returning visitors so I guess a few of you might find my musings tolerable.
So without further adieu, today's school topic is......you just read it. See you tomorrow.

A New Weekly Feature: Annoying People!

In my ongoing effort to expand my reader base and increase the amount of feedback I am receiving--thank you to the 2 people who have left comments, you know who you are--I am going to try and start a new weekly column titled: Annoying People.

  As those of you reading continue to get to know me you'll come to learn one thing, I'm not much of a people person.  Maybe that's why I sit here on my couch using the internet to communicate rather than being out cavorting with real people.  But I do not think that you necessarily have to be a people person to still be annoyed by stupid people.

This week's annoyance; the lady in front of you at the checkout line that for some reason must empty everything out of her purse in order to pay for her groceries and then hold you up while she, rather than move out of the line, stands at the counter and rearranges everything as she puts it back into her purse.

Tina and I encountered one of these a few weeks ago at Target.  The funny thing was that Tina ended up having a spat with the cashier because of the woman in front of us.  You see, it was one of those trips T and I made where we only needed a couple of items so it didn't take very long for the cashier to ring our things up.  The problem was that I couldn't get to the little card swiper thing because the woman in front of us, and her cart, were still right there.  She had apparently needed to empty the contents of her purse completely in order to pay for her purchases and was now putting them back into her purse in painstakingly slow fashion.

This is when the cashier said to me (I'm paraphrasing here), "Sir, you need to move up to pay for your things." 

That didn't make Tina too happy and she snaps back something like, "Its kind of hard for him to do that with that lady still there."

Now the lady hears this and suddenly feels bad.  "Oh, I'm sorry." She says as she suddenly discovers how to put the stuff into her purse quickly and moves along.

Now the cashier starts apologizing to Tina, who is in no mood to hear it.  She thought the cashier should have been directing her comments to the slowpoke, not me.  I was pissed at the slowpoke for being so clueless and self involved.  So now everyone is pissed except for the lady who caused everything in the first place.  She just moved her self involved person right along.

Therein lies the problem.  We've become a self involved society.  Over at Working Girl's blog--one of the best blogs going, IMO--she had a post earlier in the week in which she questions whether chivalry is dead.  She makes some good points and in some cases I think she may be right.  But I do not think that every jerk that doesn't open a door or hold an elevator for a woman is unchivalrous.  What has happened is that all of the Blackberries, Bluetooth gadgets, Wifi hotspots and other tools that make us accessible 24/7, no matter where we are at, have over inflated our sense of self importance to the point that we make ourselves oblivious to our surroundings and the needs of others.  The result, in a nutshell, is the loss of common courtesy.

WOW!  What a diatribe.  I guess I am so self involved that I think that you guys have nothing to do other than peruse my ramblings.  I hope they were entertaining.