Driving and Cell Phones

You!, Yeah, you with the cell phone plastered against your ear telling your girlfriend what you are wearing to your date, pay attention where you're driving you dumb twit.

I find myself having these conversations as I drive around town more and more all the time. It used to be that you had to be a Defensive Driver, now it seems you need to be a Defensive Driver who has the reflexes of a prowling cat and a Hummer, to protect yourself from the babbling lunatics that are running amok on our city streets.

There is no reason to be squacking on a cell phone when you are driving. If something is so important that it requires a a phone conversation, maybe it's best that you are in a stationary position when you make or receive the call, rather than picking up a device the size of a deck of cards while you are speeding along at 50 mph. I personally don't want to get into an accident and possibly die because you are giving advice to a girlfriend who is at the store buying a new pair of shoes.

Study upon study has shown that cell phone use contributes significantly to the cause of accidents. Several states have already banned them and I'm hoping that my state has enough sense to do the same.

Cars are for driving, they aren't portable telephone booths. Put your phone down and pay attention to the road in front of you. Nothing is more important than human life and personally I would like to maintain mine as long as humanly possible.

Mandatory Meetings and Getting Written Up

Where I work there are always meetings, meetings to discuss meetings, meetings where half the people are asleep and the other half are doodling, meetings that don't accomplish anything (the majority of meetings) and so forth. They can't be escaped. They follow you around like a lost puppy.

The worst meetings though, are "mandatory" meetings. Mandatory meetings are facilitated, presumely, because they are important. Because they are important you have to there; you are mandated to come. However, the problem is that over the course of the last couple of years, every meeting has become mandatory. I've attended these mandatory meetings because I didn't want to miss anything important. Because these meetings are mandatory, they probably have some very useful and important information I need to know. If I missed this important information it could affect my life in some adverse way. The word "mandatory" is like a sharp stick being poked into my ass. It's a signal that something earthshattering is going to transpire. Yet, sitting at these meetings and listening to yet another mouth piece blather on about this and that, I realized that there was no difference between meetings and mandatory meetings. They both were a waste of time and I rarely left meetings without any sense of having learned anything. Because the word mandatory is used so much, people take these meetings less and less seriously because they are realizing the same thing. There isn't any difference between one meeting or another. Subsequently, more people blow them off or don't pay attention. When it gets to the point where peoples' attitudes at mandatory meetings begin to coincide with their attitudes at regular meetings, what is management going to do to insure that employees attend meetings under duress? What word will be used then?

Getting written up, which also is known as getting a warning or a memo, is another one of those management strategies to control people and keep them in line. If you break the rules, you get a warning. Sometimes, you might not know the rules and still get a warning. Other times you do something that gets you a warning, but another person in the office is doing the same thing, but she's sleeping with the boss or he's dating the bosses daughter. You might get a warning because you remind your boss of a bully that used to smack him around in grade school or you might get a warning because your boss is in a bad mood. Some managers really get carried away with warnings. Every time they deem an employee is breaking some rule, some work related protocol, they get a warning. It kind of reminds me of that story where the Queen goes around saying, "off with his head" or "off with her head" for every silly transgression she sees or perceives. After a while everybody would be dead and then what happens?

Warnings, memos, and getting written up are supposedly designed to maintain structure and consistency in the work place, but they often backfire because they are over used. Someone I know, whose name will remain secret, has a boss who writes people up left and right all day long. He's like the Queen in the story. He threatens people with warnings and punishes them with warnings. It's gotten to the point that some employees have their personal file so full of memos that nothing else can fit in there. Every other word out of his mouth has the word warning in it. People no longer take him seriously. "Oh, another warning? O.K., thanks" *crumples paper and throws in the trash* Managers are supposed to manage, there is no arguing that, but for God's sake, a warning is supposed to be used after a verbal discussion has taken place, and one would hope for a negative action that actually could be construed as being wrong and detrimental to the work environment in some way.

Writing people up for the sake of writing people up is counter-productive, the same thing as those mandated meetings happen to be.