Open For Business 25/8

I don’t know about you but I just love it when a client calls at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday to “run some ideas past you.” After all, freelancers don’t need no stinking “sleeping in” on a romantic, rainy Sunday. Sleeping in only results in spontaneous sex. Better to lie beside your spouse and listen to a conversation about distribution quotas while you quietly seethe. That will bring the population growth down.

I also love it when clients call in the evening, during a movie. Do you answer? Yeah, so did the guy in front of me in the multiplex last night. First he tried whispering. Then he got “stink eye” from his neighbors. When someone beaned him with a wadded up napkin, he left the theater talking all the way. You could hear the conversation. It was about a deadline that had been moved up. (Why are deadlines always moved up? Why are they never moved back to give you some breathing room? Why is that?)

I suppose he could have ignored the call but my experience tells me that if you don’t answer, they will just text you. Over and over again.

Why are we allowing ourselves to become on-call slaves? Because we live in the age of instant gratification. Early morning; late at night; weekends; holidays. BTW, what are holidays? I haven’t seen a holiday since 1972. And I live in Hawai‘i, the state that has more official holidays than any other state in the union. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, New Year’s Day, Prince Kuhio Day, King Kamehameha Day, Independence Day, Statehood Day (which is celebrated by native Hawaiians by displaying the flag of the nation of Hawai‘i upside down – the international distress signal) and all the rest. Oops, did I accidentally say “rest?” Ha, ha! That was a joke. The only people who get to rest on most holidays are state workers. For everyone else, it’s just a day in which the busses don’t run as often (for our convenience).

And it’s not just clients who are guilty of this behavior. Suppliers also call whenever the muse is upon them. Because we’ve all become accustomed to being available not just 24/7 but beyond 24/7. I once wrote about the appalling statistics of American workers in comparison to those of other developed nations. We suffer twice the rate of clinical depression as our European counterparts. And we’re literally killing ourselves – in 1980, we ranked 11th in the world in life expectancy; we now rank 42nd.

I have a plan. (You knew I would.) This is a shocker, so you may want to be seated for this – freelancers and entrepreneurs could declare their business hours and then stick to them. Out there in the real world of non-freelance (aka “paid”) work, businesses actually post their hours right on the door. They do. Then when the end of the day comes around, they lock the door and they leave.

I realize that this is a far fetched concept. But think about it:

• · When you call your bank after hours, does the President of the bank interrupt his dinner to answer your call?
• · Would you expect your hairdresser to meet you at Starbucks on Sunday morning to review some pictures of hairstyles that might look cute on you?
• · Do you wake your butcher up at 11:30 at night to tell him about your upcoming dinner party and get his “feedback” on entrée choices?

Let’s try, shall we? Let’s tell our clients right up front, in writing, the hours that we are available for meetings and phone conversations and then (gasp!) turn off the phone. Unless you are a trauma surgeon, let’s pretend that no one will actually die if we don’t take this call. What’s the worst thing that could happen? Some unexpected sex? I don’t know about you but I could live with that.

Are we having fun yet?

Clean Underwear for Everyone!

Have you ever turned your underwear inside out and worn it a second time? I mean, have you done it since college? (Or in the case of unmarried males, since you turned 50?)

Well, I’m not quite there yet, but it’s getting embarrassingly close. You’d think that being out of work would leave me a lot of free time to get caught up around the house, although those of you who have read my previous confession of procrastination ("How to Avoid Doing Anything") already know better.

The thing is, being unemployed is exhausting. For one thing, people expect you to do extra stuff that they would never otherwise ask of you. After all, “You’re not doing anything.” So chores that might usually fall to the man of the house have become my duties – things like getting the tax information together, paying the bills, taking the car in for repair, doing the yard work, snaking the bathtub drain, etc. Sure, my husband will point out that I always did those things even when I had a job. (Let’s not go there, shall we? I want to keep this marriage intact.) But nowadays, I feel extra guilty about not doing them because after all, I’m unemployed, bringing in no money and I’m not doing anything. So I’m not blaming him. Not today, anyway.

For one thing, I’ve applied for law school. While the chances for my getting in this year are slim to none, I’m optimistic about next year and I’m taking classes at the university, finishing my undergraduate degree, and studying to boost my LSAT score. So that takes a lot of time.

Then there is the community action volunteer work. As a business person, I was active in a number of organizations and I still hold office in some. Just because you are temporarily out of work, doesn’t mean you should remove yourself from your peers in the business community. Some would even advise that those contacts and visibility are more important than ever for future employment. After all, the tooth fairy isn’t going to pay for law school. And there’s my volunteer work with homeless shelters, which has been a part of my life for so many years I can’t even imagine a world without it.

And then there is social media. Social media is like heroin. The more you get “connected” the more relationships you form. And relationships, like marriage, require constant work to stay viable. My drug of choice is LinkedIn. And within LinkedIn, my “family” is Career Insider Network. But two weeks ago, I started seeing another group on the side.

It began innocently enough. Bloggers Helping Bloggers seemed like a good way to connect with other frustrated writers such as myself. But part of being involved with this group required that I read a lot of blogs. They were fascinating and I have learned a bunch of stuff. And because I find it rude to visit a blog and not contribute to the conversation even modestly, I always leave a comment as a footprint to show that I was there. Frankly, it’s gotten out of control. I have been known to wake up in the middle of the night and check my groups to see what’s going on. (Don’t tell my husband. He thinks I’ve developed a bladder problem.)

So now, the house has gone to hell in a handbasket. The laundry is piling up. I still haven’t finished my homework for tomorrow’s class. And while I’m making confessions, it’s after 4:00 and I haven’t eaten yet today. I’ve just been on the computer endlessly. Enough! It’s time to throw down my mouse and go cold turkey. I’m going to get dressed (yes, you heard that right), go downstairs and wash a load of clothes while I make myself a grilled cheese sandwich.

Free. Free at last! Clean underwear for everyone!!!.
(Are we having fun yet?)

Dreading the Mailbox

The mailbox is a foreboding place these days. Like a 4:00 a.m. phone call, you know it’s not going to be good news. There was a time when I might look forward to a letter from a distant friend. Now friends just email me the latest YouTube link. Is it just me, or are you beginning to wonder if Susan Boyle knows a song other than “I Dream a Dream?”

Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes could be informing me that “I may already be a winner!” But I doubt it. Ed McMahon died and my hopes of an oversized check with my name on it died with him.

Nonetheless, I reluctantly trudged out to the mailbox this morning and here’s what I found:
3 magazines (I actually subscribe to one of them)
3 catalogs
2 ads
1 Christmas Card (from my insurance agent)
15 pleas for donations from nonprofits

‘Tis the season.

So I go through the stack. I pull out the “mailing labels enclosed” because I can always use more return address labels. OK, actually I can’t use more. I already have so many that I don’t know what to do with them. But I feel guilty throwing them out. Of course, that’s exactly what the nonprofit is hoping. That I’ll feel guilty about their having made up these lovely personalized labels.

The thing is: Lots of times they don’t get the name correct. Kay Lorraine. Sometimes they decide that my name must really be Lorraine Kay. Like I wouldn’t know my own name just because I’m blonde. And how do they know that I’m blonde? Worrisome.

Furthermore, my husband’s name is Brad Bate. Mostly, I don’t use his name. I use my husband a lot but his name, not so much. So I get Lorraine Bate, Kay Bate, Mrs. Kay Bate, Mr. Kay Bate, and – my own personal favorite – Mr. Brad Lorraine.

Anyway, I have too many labels. But my packrat mind keeps them all – just in case! Even the Christmas labels which, as a practicing Jew, are probably inappropriate for me, but the gas company doesn’t know that I’m Jewish so I use them to pay bills. I think of it as “Festive.” The Christmas Cards with the snow scenes are another story. As a Jew in Hawai‘i, they just don’t say “Happy Holidays” for me. But I keep the envelopes to pay bills with.

The only labels I don’t feel bad about tossing are the Jerry Lewis MD labels. Not because of Jerry or his kids. I give money every year to Jerry. But those are hands-down the most ugly labels known to man. Year after year, they never get any better. Horsy bold typeface set too close together. Yuk! Doesn’t the MD marketing department have an art director? Or someone with some esthetic sensitivity that can look at those suckers and say, “Guys, this is just crap.” It costs the same amount of money to print a nice serif typeface with decent kerning and leading as it does to print crap. Hello! So I throw those directly into the trash with no remorse.

But then there are the groups who send you a nickel. Do you peel off the nickels? Me, too. I just do it so that the metal doesn’t screw up the shreader at the city dump. That’s the only reason – I’m not really greedy; It’s an ecology thing. Sure.

At least it’s not as bad as the Indian Reservation that sends me blankets made from toilet paper byproducts.

Who knows better than I do how desperate nonprofits are these days? Each time I pass the empty building where the Hawai‘i Women’s Business Center stood, a pain shoots through my heart. They closed the doors over a year ago. I was the Executive Director. My husband says, “You have to move on.” Of course, he’s right.

In this economy, nobody has any money. So the nonprofits are glutting the mail. Can this possibly be profitable? I now own eleven free calendars for next year, filled with lovely pictures of polar bears and homeless children and whales-worth-saving. If those nonprofits took all of the money they spend on mailing labels, calendars, Christmas cards, Tibetan peace flags, and Indian blankets and did good instead, wouldn’t we all be better off? Or does no one give money to any charity anymore unless they get something or are guilted into it? Maybe that’s what we did wrong at the Business Center. Too much free counseling – not enough mailing labels. Sure.

Everyone is scrambling for every nickel these days. Not me, of course. I’m just trying to do my part to save the shreader.

Clean Up Your Own Mess!

Note: Is this a business story? You bet it is. Dog poop and business practices have more in common than any of us want to admit.

Let me tell you about my dog poop story. When I was a kid I had a Cocker Spaniel named Skippy. OK, actually I had three dogs in succession – all Cocker Spaniels, all named Skippy. Perhaps it was through my various “Skippys*” that I learned that husbands are much like dogs – if one runs away or is hit by a car you can always get another. Just keep giving them the same name and move on with your life. But I digress…..

I loved those dogs. My parents were trying to teach me responsibility (they were always trying to teach me something – the key word there was “trying”). Anyway, we had a fenced-in yard and we would let Skippy-du-jour out the back door to do his business. It was my job to pick up the poop in the yard because, supposedly, Skippy was my dog. Never mind the fact that my father chose the dogs and purposely picked a duck-hunting breed as my own personal pet-of-choice. Nonetheless, my dog – my responsibility.

One year I got a bit lax about the dog poop and I learned a valuable lesson that has served as a personal parable for life. Here’s what I learned:

If you, or in this case – your dog(s), make a boo-boo in the yard, it helps to clean it up right away. You can try to ignore it but chances are somebody will step in it and track it through the house and there will be BIG TROUBLE. Or if you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) you will be able to continue to pretend it never happened and it will just lie there endlessly with the sun's rays pouring down, heating things up until the whole backyard smells to the high heaven. Keep ignoring it and eventually winter frost will come and the snow will cover it up. By then you will have conveniently forgotten that it ever existed in the first place. Happy, blissful snowy winter!

Alas, Spring inevitably arrives and with it, the thaw. The dog poop has, regrettably, not disappeared during the winter as you had hoped; it was just covered up. But now it reappears with the crocus and, guess what? You still have to clean it up. Only now it’s all soggy and mushy and it falls apart when you try to lift it. Now it’s twenty times harder to get rid of and more likely to leave behind residue. BTW, if you think that dog poop loses its odor by being frozen you are sadly mistaken. I am saying this from experience. You can Fabreze the crap out of it (little pun there!) but it will take a long time before the vague scent of eau du dogie leaves the air.

I have never forgotten the dog poop story of my youth. We all have messes that we have to clean up in life. Some of them are of our own making, some are accidents and some are messes that others made but become our responsibility to handle. No matter how the mess started or with whom, it’s always better to go right out and clean it up immediately. It may be an unpleasant task, but the longer it lies festering in the hot sun, the more unpleasant it will be to get rid of in the end.

Even when we are trying to do the right thing all of the time, it sometimes seems as though cleaning up our own messes is a full time job. How can someone with such good intentions unintentionally step on so many people’s toes? I am not perfect, but I try to do my best. My attitude is:

1. Recognize your mistakes and own up to them;

2. Clean up your own messes without being asked; and

3. Don’t go away mad. But do go away.

Are we having fun yet?

*Is the plural of Skippy, Skippys? Or Skippies? I struggled with this.

Social Networking – Sometimes You CAN Pick Your Family

I have a dirty little secret. I have a second family stashed away in cyberspace. I didn’t choose them on purpose – at least not at first. But when I became unemployed, my friend Kathy Kamauu pushed me to use LinkedIn for business networking. So I joined a couple of professional Groups. This is as close to a sorority as I’ll ever get. I had to “apply” and I got positively giddy when I was accepted. Let’s face it, I’m not getting that much positive reinforcement these days.

In one of the groups, I was seduced by a subgroup – Professions and Industries. Now this is hard-core – sort of like joining a gang except you’re not required to wear your pants below your underwear which, I think you’ll agree, is a blessing for all of us.

There are lots of things that you can do in a LinkedIn group. You can go to the Job Board to see what’s available; you can check out the Promotions for free webinars and upcoming events; you can search other members’ blogs; or you can join a discussion group on a specific topic. I gleefully started discussions of my own and participated in others. I made some interesting on-line acquaintances. And then one day I stumbled into the greatest LinkedIn Group of all time: The CAREER INSIDER NETWORK.

And I was home.

There’s no explaining it. This is a group unlike any other. Some discussion “threads” have strict rules. This one has no rules at all. We give each other advice (some of it actually worthwhile). We uncover recruiting scams and gleefully name names to warn others. We cheer each other’s victories – be it a full job offer or merely a 2nd interview. We dispense sympathy when an offer falls through. We are a support group! We welcome newcomers with open arms, but woe to the newbie who wanders into “The Thread” and attacks someone personally, because we are fiercely protective of our family unit.

Serious friendships have developed. People have met face-to-face as a direct result of this group. Members pass along confidential information privately when they hear of an opening that might be right for someone. We bitch. We cheer each other up. We occasionally tell “Knock Knock” jokes. OK, that’s not totally true. Sharn in Thailand occasionally tells KK jokes. The rest of us groan. Professional recruiters and employment consultants such as Rick in Los Angeles and Kim in North Carolina regularly dispense advice both publicly and privately to members, generously giving away what others pay good money to get.

Swifty in the UK tells us that outsourcing is such a problem over there, he fully expects the government to outsource the Queen to China. Mark Dennis in the Philippines is our resident wisecracker and pun enthusiast. Marissa in San Antonio shares great Tex-Mex recipies and George “Stud Muffin” Gurney tells terrible jokes but since he owns the discussion, there’s not really much that we can do to stop him.

This, folks, is social networking at its finest. It is different from “social media” where people use blogs and discussion groups to try to sell their products or drive traffic to their websites. And it certainly isn’t FaceBook, which I have always considered to be a strictly “social” kind of networking between friends.

This is one of those rare instances when lightning strikes; when all of the windows turn and line up perfectly. An unusual occurrence when a business group turns into a family while remaining within the context of conducting business. We in this dysfunctional little family are virtually all in the same boat. We are all formerly middle or upper-middle management types who have, as a direct result of the economic collapse, inexplicably found themselves unemployed, often for the first time in our lives. From that misery has arisen a support group unlike any other. With people from at least 20 different countries, we have forged a bond and discovered that frustration and disillusionment is the same the world over.

This is pure social networking on a business level. It’s not for everyone. But to quote Lynn, one of our newest members, as she said this morning, “I don't know what I would do without you all. I love this board :)”

The Land Beyond O’Hare

Before I moved to Paradise (i.e. high cost of living, lousy wages, no jobs, but absolutely fantastic weather), I used to live in Chicago. Not the “greater Chicago tri-state area,” but CHICAGO. Right downtown. Across the street from Water Tower Place.

I make this distinction because in Chicago, as in many places, people get very defensive about their territory. In truth, it’s not really about geography but about the mindset that accompanies the geography. Rather like the famous 1976 New Yorker magazine cover that depicts a typical New Yorker’s point of view of the U.S., with everything west of the Hudson River lumped into one small barren blob.

In Kansas City it’s important to know if you are from the Kansas-side or the Missouri-side of town, because the Missouri side is chic but the Kansas side is not. Although my cousin Courtney claims to live in Cincinnati, she really lives across the river in Covington, Kentucky; but she would be as horrified if you referred to her as a Kentuckian as she would be if you had suggested that she marry her brother.

In Chicago, there are the city-folk, i.e. Chicagoans, and the suburbanites, whose suburb-names are not even differentiated in the city as anything other than “The Land Beyond O’Hare.” (O’Hare Airport sits just inside the city limits.) Chicagoans don’t like to go to the suburbs. They get lost. There are these vast expanses of nothingness, called “fields.” Very disconcerting. Then there is Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, whose 278 sq. mile parking lot has it’s own “Woodfield Mall Parking Lot, I Hate You” Facebook page with 3,887 members. Really.

In return, my Uncle Donn and Aunt Char lived in The Land Beyond O’Hare (OK, technically it was the suburb of Northbrook). They avoided the city like the plague. When Uncle Donn was forced to attend a dental convention at the Palmer House in Chicago, he hated every minute of it. Driving in the city made him nervous. Parking was always a problem. The prices drove him crazy. When they spoke of going to the “theater” they meant Drury Lane Dinner Theater in Evergreen Park to see the 156th revival of “Guys and Dolls.”

See, it’s a mindset. In business and in life, we don’t like that with which we are unfamiliar. We tend to do business with folks we know, which is why networking is so important these days. We want to see multiple references on your job application, hopeful that we will recognize one of them because we don’t like to deal with strangers. I am currently job-hunting and I keep avoiding “straight” for-profit postings, even though I was once President and CEO of a large Midwestern corporation with offices on both coasts. But that was years ago and now I feel more comfortable in the nonprofit world where I know where all the bodies are buried (one of them may be mine).

I don’t eat food that Norman Rockwell didn’t paint. My mother always read Roger Ebert’s review before deciding whether to join us at the movie (that way she would guarantee avoiding something that wasn’t upbeat). My son no longer dates, because he knows that eventually whomever-she-is will dump him. My husband has projects in the house that he has promised to fix for three years but has never even attempted, because he is worried that he won’t know how and he would rather be seen as a lazy bum than a failure.

Think of all of the things that we are depriving ourselves of because they are unfamiliar or uncomfortable or might make us appear to be less than competent or question our preconceived values. In defense, we mock the unknown as beneath us, uninteresting or tasteless. (My West End Avenue Manhattan friends, upon hearing that I had a ticket to see “The Addams Family” could not have been more appalled or horrified if I had intentionally smeared excrement across their white designer sofa.)

No matter the cost, we stay in our little boxes where it might be damn uncomfortable but at least it’s familiar. It defines us; who we are and what we do. It is our neighborhood, even if the geography is actually located squarely between our ears. Because, let’s face it, it’s pretty scary in our own neighborhood but it’s really scary out there in The Land Beyond O’Hare.