Eastern Shore|easternshore-123.com
Sep
12
Filed Under (Careers) by eastern
Virginia Bola asked:
If we are unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, we experience a personal tsunami - a misfortune of devastating proportions that sweeps away our routine lifestyle and forever changes the world we know.
Yet despite the frequency of such events - the tidal waves of Asia, the hurricanes of the Gulf Coast, the loss of life in the Middle East, the wildfires and mudslides of California - most of us are only indirectly affected. We bleed for those who have lost everything, give what we can out of our pocketbooks and our hearts, but our world is essentially unchanged and we move along in our personal life journey relatively unscathed.
The vast majority of us will never undergo the wrenching jolt of a major disaster, natural or man-made. The sheer size of the human race insulates millions of us from the floods, the bombs, and the mayhem. For us, the life-changing events we experience never hit the front page. Personal, quiet disasters - divorce, death, bankruptcy, or unemployment - change our lives forever but remain unnoticed by all but our closest friends and family. We pick up the pieces and try to get it together without government or private succor and support.
It is the isolation of personal loss that is so emotional destructive. We struggle alone to try to make sense of what went wrong and how we can recover our equilibrium.
Others are sympathetic and wish us well but there is an abyss between those who have a job and those who cannot find one. The longer we are out of work, the more alienated we become. Even those who love us start to worry that there’s something wrong with us. They start to suspect that we’re not as motivated as we say we are. Everyone has plenty of glib advice: “Have you tried . . . ?” Of course we have -many times and always without success. We become more disheartened as we analyze everything we’ve done and realize we have tried every trick in the book and still cannot find anything suitable.
Some of us get stuck in depression, anger, or paralyzing anxiety. Our energy drains away and even the smallest action becomes more and more difficult. As frustration and financial pressures mount, we wallow in the unfairness of it all and reminisce about how perfect everything was when we had a job and a future and hope, wondering why all this had to happen.
As with hurricanes and tsunamis and terrorism, the victims are not responsible for the catastrophe they face. Life-changing events do just that - change our lives, sometimes forever. Change can be negative, fear-provoking, and desperately uncomfortable. But, if we look closer, we’ll see it also has a positive face. Without change, our modern world wouldn’t exist. We would be living the way our ancestors did. And while olden times may sound attractive in their pristine simplicity, such times were filled with disease, inequality and a raw brutality we could not stomach today. We need to embrace change and, despite the turmoil it brings, look for the silver lining hidden within the storm clouds.
Although you now remember your job with nostalgic affection, there were undoubtedly times that you wished you could quit. Even if you loved what you were doing, any single job position only taps into a small part of your potential. Being forced to make a change allows you to develop other domains of your personal character.
Try to analyze your interests and preferences and identify things you would like to do which have not been utilized by your prior jobs. Can you think of an industry or a particular job title that might allow you to move in a new direction? Think about, and complete some preliminary research on, jobs in new industries that you might be able to do. You may not have directly related experience but there are common themes that permeate every kind of work: the ability to communicate, to work as part of a team, to learn rapidly, to be aware of details, to organize and prioritize. If you pick an area of genuine personal interest, you enthusiasm will clearly and naturally emerge and that is something all employers seek.
The job hunting you have been doing may, without your realizing it, have become routine and uninspired. The experience of failure and the frustration of never receiving positive feedback may have led to your merely “going through the motions,” already convinced, in your own mind, of the futility of your efforts.
Taking a new direction can open up your job search tunnel. Instead of beating your head against the wall and revisiting every technique and lead you’ve tried before, moving into a different environment may give you a new sense of purpose and appreciation of your own potential. That is when the positive effects of forced change can become a new source of pleasure and satisfaction.
EMMETT
If we are unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, we experience a personal tsunami - a misfortune of devastating proportions that sweeps away our routine lifestyle and forever changes the world we know.
Yet despite the frequency of such events - the tidal waves of Asia, the hurricanes of the Gulf Coast, the loss of life in the Middle East, the wildfires and mudslides of California - most of us are only indirectly affected. We bleed for those who have lost everything, give what we can out of our pocketbooks and our hearts, but our world is essentially unchanged and we move along in our personal life journey relatively unscathed.
The vast majority of us will never undergo the wrenching jolt of a major disaster, natural or man-made. The sheer size of the human race insulates millions of us from the floods, the bombs, and the mayhem. For us, the life-changing events we experience never hit the front page. Personal, quiet disasters - divorce, death, bankruptcy, or unemployment - change our lives forever but remain unnoticed by all but our closest friends and family. We pick up the pieces and try to get it together without government or private succor and support.
It is the isolation of personal loss that is so emotional destructive. We struggle alone to try to make sense of what went wrong and how we can recover our equilibrium.
Others are sympathetic and wish us well but there is an abyss between those who have a job and those who cannot find one. The longer we are out of work, the more alienated we become. Even those who love us start to worry that there’s something wrong with us. They start to suspect that we’re not as motivated as we say we are. Everyone has plenty of glib advice: “Have you tried . . . ?” Of course we have -many times and always without success. We become more disheartened as we analyze everything we’ve done and realize we have tried every trick in the book and still cannot find anything suitable.
Some of us get stuck in depression, anger, or paralyzing anxiety. Our energy drains away and even the smallest action becomes more and more difficult. As frustration and financial pressures mount, we wallow in the unfairness of it all and reminisce about how perfect everything was when we had a job and a future and hope, wondering why all this had to happen.
As with hurricanes and tsunamis and terrorism, the victims are not responsible for the catastrophe they face. Life-changing events do just that - change our lives, sometimes forever. Change can be negative, fear-provoking, and desperately uncomfortable. But, if we look closer, we’ll see it also has a positive face. Without change, our modern world wouldn’t exist. We would be living the way our ancestors did. And while olden times may sound attractive in their pristine simplicity, such times were filled with disease, inequality and a raw brutality we could not stomach today. We need to embrace change and, despite the turmoil it brings, look for the silver lining hidden within the storm clouds.
Although you now remember your job with nostalgic affection, there were undoubtedly times that you wished you could quit. Even if you loved what you were doing, any single job position only taps into a small part of your potential. Being forced to make a change allows you to develop other domains of your personal character.
Try to analyze your interests and preferences and identify things you would like to do which have not been utilized by your prior jobs. Can you think of an industry or a particular job title that might allow you to move in a new direction? Think about, and complete some preliminary research on, jobs in new industries that you might be able to do. You may not have directly related experience but there are common themes that permeate every kind of work: the ability to communicate, to work as part of a team, to learn rapidly, to be aware of details, to organize and prioritize. If you pick an area of genuine personal interest, you enthusiasm will clearly and naturally emerge and that is something all employers seek.
The job hunting you have been doing may, without your realizing it, have become routine and uninspired. The experience of failure and the frustration of never receiving positive feedback may have led to your merely “going through the motions,” already convinced, in your own mind, of the futility of your efforts.
Taking a new direction can open up your job search tunnel. Instead of beating your head against the wall and revisiting every technique and lead you’ve tried before, moving into a different environment may give you a new sense of purpose and appreciation of your own potential. That is when the positive effects of forced change can become a new source of pleasure and satisfaction.
EMMETT
May
06
Filed Under (Careers) by eastern
Virginia Bola asked:
A certain amount of oversight is involved in almost any job. The more important, the more highly skilled, the more successful the position, the lower the degree of oversight. At the bottom rung of the economic and social ladder - the laborers, the maids, the easily replaceable positions - the more watchful are the powers that be, the less secure are the workers, and the more personally vulnerable are they to any mistakes made.
When money or similar valuables are intermixed with poorly paid employees, the level of oversight reaches outsized and intrusive proportions. Diamond workers in South Africa submit to body cavity searches after every shift, a humiliation society normally limits to convicted felons or known drug traffickers.
In the United States, low-level workers in finance and banking are closely observed for cash or figure discrepancies. Too many errors lead inevitably to termination. The larger the amounts of money involved, the more significant the mistakes become. A fast food register a few cents out of balance differs markedly from a bank cashier imbalance of several hundred dollars.
The more pure cash is involved, the more difficulty there is in tracing a paper trail of transactions to establish where a discrepancy occurred. I just returned from three days in Las Vegas, the American capital of cash. Surely nowhere else in the country handles the thousands of hundred dollar bills that change hands in that town, to the tune of several billion dollars annually.
For years, in the counting rooms it was one pile for the house, one pile for the government, and one pile for “the boys.” Untold millions were siphoned off for the East Coast crime czars. The government hated being cheated of their fair share. The gamblers could care less where the money went as long as they had a fair chance of winning and their play rendered them free rooms, free shows, and free food. It was symbiotic - a mutually advantageous relationship. Any worker foolish enough to try to cheat the uniquely expert cheaters at the top, found their final reward in the unforgiving desert where flesh melts quickly and bone fragments blow quickly away in the beds of long-dry rivers.
Then the corporations moved in and “the boys” faded away into their old street rackets and the burgeoning drug trade. The corporate-owned casinos are no longer in the business of skimming: they can make legitimate returns for their shareholders through the huge returns guaranteed by the house advantage in every transaction. To add to the gaming cash, they moved to ensure a profit in related areas: rooms, food, and shows.
Even the owners and managers, with their accounting-oriented perspective on the world, recognize their vulnerability to greed, cheating, and theft in the huge cash side of their business.
Casino worker oversight, while not yet approaching the body-cavity-search level, is perhaps the most organized and intrusive in the western world. It ranges from dealers clapping and showing open, empty hands, to two or more floor walkers (depending on the size of the jackpot) co-signing on every hand-pay slot win. It involves floor men watching every table bet, box men watching every roll of the dice and its payoff stacks of chips. It requires supervisors to watch the floor men, managers to watch the supervisors, undercover security men to watch both workers and guests, and eye-in-the-sky overhead cameras that can observe and detect every one of a million transactions per day.
Does all this monitoring and second-guessing have an effect on employees? Personal trust is something we rate highly. Talk with someone whose spouse has cheated on them and you will find that the emotional pain has little to do with *** but everything to do with the loss of trust and the doubt that a relationship can ever really survive such a loss. Although secondary to intimate relationships, we would like our coworkers and supervisors to trust us also, as a mark of respect if nothing else.
On the other hand, we are aware that the world is full of cheaters, those who would break any moral, legal, or ethical code if it gave them an advantage in the race for success and financial independence. We want to be trusted to act responsibly and do the right thing but we are just a little reluctant to trust others to quite the same degree.
Close oversight of everyone gives us a certain sense of security - it levels the playing field for us all by rooting out those who would bend the rules to get what they want. We tell ourselves that we have nothing to fear because we are innocent and that will protect us.
Then we read about long-convicted prisoners whose innocence has been belatedly proved by newly developed scientific forensics. We miss a familiar face at our favorite casino and finally learn that the individual left town after an error-inspired accusation of misconduct resulted in termination and blacklisting from the industry.
Where there is cash floating around in generous amounts, there will always be temptations, overzealous suspiciousness, justice and injustice on all sides because the truth is not amenable to scientific analysis and every event has multiple explanations and perspectives.
So we keep on watching ourselves and each other. Those of us who loathe the concept of big brother and snitching on friends, draw back in disgust as we see the need for security invade our lives. We can stay out of the gaming world with its cameras and minutely regulated transactions but how do we avoid the monitoring threatened with every call for customer service or the cookies embedded in our computers to track our wanderings through the Internet?
The cheaters, the scam artists, the swindlers and the frauds have won. It is we, the innocent, who must dwell in prison cells of continuous third degree scrutiny.
GINO
A certain amount of oversight is involved in almost any job. The more important, the more highly skilled, the more successful the position, the lower the degree of oversight. At the bottom rung of the economic and social ladder - the laborers, the maids, the easily replaceable positions - the more watchful are the powers that be, the less secure are the workers, and the more personally vulnerable are they to any mistakes made.
When money or similar valuables are intermixed with poorly paid employees, the level of oversight reaches outsized and intrusive proportions. Diamond workers in South Africa submit to body cavity searches after every shift, a humiliation society normally limits to convicted felons or known drug traffickers.
In the United States, low-level workers in finance and banking are closely observed for cash or figure discrepancies. Too many errors lead inevitably to termination. The larger the amounts of money involved, the more significant the mistakes become. A fast food register a few cents out of balance differs markedly from a bank cashier imbalance of several hundred dollars.
The more pure cash is involved, the more difficulty there is in tracing a paper trail of transactions to establish where a discrepancy occurred. I just returned from three days in Las Vegas, the American capital of cash. Surely nowhere else in the country handles the thousands of hundred dollar bills that change hands in that town, to the tune of several billion dollars annually.
For years, in the counting rooms it was one pile for the house, one pile for the government, and one pile for “the boys.” Untold millions were siphoned off for the East Coast crime czars. The government hated being cheated of their fair share. The gamblers could care less where the money went as long as they had a fair chance of winning and their play rendered them free rooms, free shows, and free food. It was symbiotic - a mutually advantageous relationship. Any worker foolish enough to try to cheat the uniquely expert cheaters at the top, found their final reward in the unforgiving desert where flesh melts quickly and bone fragments blow quickly away in the beds of long-dry rivers.
Then the corporations moved in and “the boys” faded away into their old street rackets and the burgeoning drug trade. The corporate-owned casinos are no longer in the business of skimming: they can make legitimate returns for their shareholders through the huge returns guaranteed by the house advantage in every transaction. To add to the gaming cash, they moved to ensure a profit in related areas: rooms, food, and shows.
Even the owners and managers, with their accounting-oriented perspective on the world, recognize their vulnerability to greed, cheating, and theft in the huge cash side of their business.
Casino worker oversight, while not yet approaching the body-cavity-search level, is perhaps the most organized and intrusive in the western world. It ranges from dealers clapping and showing open, empty hands, to two or more floor walkers (depending on the size of the jackpot) co-signing on every hand-pay slot win. It involves floor men watching every table bet, box men watching every roll of the dice and its payoff stacks of chips. It requires supervisors to watch the floor men, managers to watch the supervisors, undercover security men to watch both workers and guests, and eye-in-the-sky overhead cameras that can observe and detect every one of a million transactions per day.
Does all this monitoring and second-guessing have an effect on employees? Personal trust is something we rate highly. Talk with someone whose spouse has cheated on them and you will find that the emotional pain has little to do with *** but everything to do with the loss of trust and the doubt that a relationship can ever really survive such a loss. Although secondary to intimate relationships, we would like our coworkers and supervisors to trust us also, as a mark of respect if nothing else.
On the other hand, we are aware that the world is full of cheaters, those who would break any moral, legal, or ethical code if it gave them an advantage in the race for success and financial independence. We want to be trusted to act responsibly and do the right thing but we are just a little reluctant to trust others to quite the same degree.
Close oversight of everyone gives us a certain sense of security - it levels the playing field for us all by rooting out those who would bend the rules to get what they want. We tell ourselves that we have nothing to fear because we are innocent and that will protect us.
Then we read about long-convicted prisoners whose innocence has been belatedly proved by newly developed scientific forensics. We miss a familiar face at our favorite casino and finally learn that the individual left town after an error-inspired accusation of misconduct resulted in termination and blacklisting from the industry.
Where there is cash floating around in generous amounts, there will always be temptations, overzealous suspiciousness, justice and injustice on all sides because the truth is not amenable to scientific analysis and every event has multiple explanations and perspectives.
So we keep on watching ourselves and each other. Those of us who loathe the concept of big brother and snitching on friends, draw back in disgust as we see the need for security invade our lives. We can stay out of the gaming world with its cameras and minutely regulated transactions but how do we avoid the monitoring threatened with every call for customer service or the cookies embedded in our computers to track our wanderings through the Internet?
The cheaters, the scam artists, the swindlers and the frauds have won. It is we, the innocent, who must dwell in prison cells of continuous third degree scrutiny.
GINO
