N.U.N.A.

Well, yesterday brought the news that we're creeping closer and closer to an "official" unemployment rate of 10%.

As an aside, this bit of joy wasn't the lead on NBC Nightly News. Nor was the Marine's new anti-Taliban mission in Afghanistan. Nor was it an update on the goings on in Iran. Nor Air France's latest announcement on the June 1st crash. Nor the Vanity Fair tell-all on Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign.

No, first up was , wait: I'll give you a hint: ABC, simple as Do-Re-Mi.

Yes, you have no doubt quite smartly guessed that the most important news story of the day was Michael Jackson.

And not enough to give it first up, NBC had to circle back to it with an exclusive interview with MJ's brother, Jermaine.  The small blessing is that, unless I missed it, there were no more true confessions from Gov. Mark Sanford.

But wait, as the late Billy Mays may have shouted there's more: I didn't see Hardball, but Countdown also led with Jacko. I'm faaaalllllling......

As so often happens, I digress.

The real news was that there's a still growing number of unemployed folks out there, and, while the official number is 9.5%, the real number - discouraged workers no longer looking, those who are working part time who want to be full-time -  is far higher. And this doesn't yet count all those musicians, dancers, and roadies who were scheduled to be on tour with MJ. (

For the real employment rate, I heard 16%. One in six! That sure made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Against this backdrop,there was an article the other day in the Wall Street Journal that focused on a disheartening bias against the unemployed on the part of the companies that are hiring. This means that instead of thinning the ranks of the unemployed, choosy hirers want to choose from the "passive candidates" who aren't actively looking.  After all:

“If they’re employed in today’s economy, they have to be first string,” says Ryan Ross, a partner with Kaye/Bassman International Corp., an executive recruiting firm in Dallas.

Puh-lease, Mr. Ross, does anyone actually believe that everyone who's "employed in today's economy" is "first string"? Or that everyone who's unemployed is a junior varsity, bench-warming scrub?

Mr. Ross in not alone.

Chief Executive Ralph Fargnoli [of Beacon Partners, a health-care management consulting outfit] is looking first for people who are still working. “If they’re still employed that means they have some significant value,” Mr. Fargnoli says.

Really?

I realize I do need to change tactics here. If I want to defend the hire-ability of the unemployed, I really need to stop raising doubts about the currently employed.

But seriously folks, I was fully employed during the last couple of really bad times  - early 1980's, dot-com bubble burst - and I do not recall that all of my similarly fully-employed compadres had "significant value".

This is about the unemployed, however. So, in defense of the unemployed, let me state that some of my best friends are unemployed. Let me further state that, when it comes to unemployed, I would (mostly) rather see than be one. But I have, in fact, been one. 

There are a lot of reasons you can get on that lay-off list other than being deadwood or an exceedingly dislikable misfit.

Sure, those who are deadwood and/or exceedingly dislikable misfits generally do find there way on to the list at the first opportunity.

That's because a lot of managers don't want to deal with performance issues head on. Especially if they're in an environment where lay-offs are regular or anticipated, managers may sand-bag a bad employee or two so they have a couple of sacrificial lambs when they're asked to reduce head count. I speak from experience here. (Baa!)

But, especially in an economy like this, really good people can find themselves unemployed if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Maybe they were last in, and it's easier to let them go than someone you know and love. Maybe it's easier - or maybe even smarter -  to get rid of everyone who worked on a canceled project/EOL'd product than to comb through and save "the best and the brightest." Maybe someone got to be among the chosen people because everyone knows their spouse makes big bucks, while the other guy just learned his wife's expecting triplets. 

A blanket decision not to hire folks who've been laid off strikes me as completely absurd. (Don't these anti-unemployed bigots know how to work their network to check someone out?)

God knows, I've made hiring mistakes in my career, and a couple of them were real lulus. But none of those hiring mistakes were because the person was "collecting" when I nobly offered them the opportunity to get off the dole.

Of course, the basis for the Journal article wasn't any scientific survey of employers. It's purely anecdotal. But I'm sure that there have always been folks who wouldn't hire someone who'd been pink slipped, especially in a crappy job market where you can afford, like the Jiff-buyer mothers of yore, to be choosy.

Job seekers sense the trend. A recent online survey conducted by Infinity Consulting Solutions of 417 job hunters in the New York area found that 59% agreed or strongly agreed that employers gave preference to candidates that are currently employed.

This might be more of a significant trend if they'd asked job-huntees , rather than hunters.

The WSJ does offer some good, if obvious advice: make sure you have good references, get letters of recommendation, let it be known if you were let go as part of a shut down of your department, as opposed to a selective hunt and peck.

To their list, I might add that, if you made it through any lay-off rounds, you should let that be known. Round One is, after all, where the deadwood gets cleared. (Round Ones can, of course, include more than just deadwood.)

No Unemployed Need Apply.

As someone who grew up hearing "apocryphal but true" stories about No Irish Need Apply signs, I really don't like the sound of this one.

A pox on any hiring manager or company who would not hire someone just because they were on the receiving end of a pink slip.

Ya got your small companies, ya got your big companies

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal had a little article on large company refugees who are finding asylum, as it were, in small companies.

I've always thought of myself as a small company person, because I did spend more than a few years during my full time career in companies that were on the smallish side. And most of the companies I work for now are smallish - some even downright small, small.  (Is 4 person small enough for you?) But I did log more than a few years in biggish companies - some even downright big, big. (Is 30,000 employees big enough for you?)

So I do get what works when it comes to working in either model. Not to mention what doesn't work.  Life being life, and work being work, half the time the upsides were also downsides. I could write these pros and cons in my sleep, and I may do so at a later date. But what struck me was the guy, downsized from DHL, who believes that working in a small company, he'll find more stability.

Poor baby. Poor, poor baby.

When it comes to small company stability, here are a few of the things I experienced:

• Where'd the guy from Sloan go? When I was interviewing for my first post-B school job - in the small company of my dreams - I was told there was a fellow Sloan School alum working there. He was away when I interviewed, but on day one, I looked him up.
  
  "Where's Allen?" I asked one of my new colleagues.
  
  "Oh, he got fired so they could hire you."
  
  So that's what he meant when my boss-to-be called and told me he'd "found the money in the budget to hire me."
  
  Stable enough for me, I guess, but not for old Allen.
  
• Payday's coming. I worked for many years - the last few as one of the top dogs -  for a small company that lived from payday to payday. We had a list of who wouldn't get paid if we couldn't scrape together enough dough to pay everyone. For a while there, I was number two on that hit parade. Fortunately, we never had to put Plan B into action, and after a lot of bowing and scraping, we were able to bow and scrape our way into a credit line to smooth out our cash flow. Still, we were often hovering on the brink, and everyone knew it.
  
• Yes, Virginia, small companies do have lay-offs.  In the 25 years I worked full-time, I must have lived through (and a couple of times died during) dozens of lay-offs. Small company, big company - mattered not. This was tech, and it was all pretty much Mr. Toad's Wild Ride - the flivver shaking, the wheels flying off. Sure, the lay-offs in big companies are, not surprisingly, bigger. But if you only have 40 people in your company to begin with, and 6 of them are weeping their way out the door carrying their carton of personal effects, it is just as unnerving and disheartening as trying to figure out who you knew in the latest round of 2,000 lopped off heads.
  
• Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from the capricious and the arbitrary.  In a smaller company, there may not be anyone  - HR or other - to protect and defend you from a sudden and arbitrary decision at the hands of the person running the joint. I was sitting there with the president of my company, and he looked over a me and, out of what to me appeared to be the clear blue, announced, "You report to her now," pointing to the person who up until that very moment had been my peer. Not that capricious and arbitrary doesn't happen plenty in big companies, but there are often a few protections that are completely absent in a small company. (The good news: I outlasted them both. The investors parachuted in a turn-around guy you turned-out that capricious and arbitrary president, and - a couple of months later - his sidekick there.)

There is much to recommend a small company, but stability was not in the repertoire for me, that's for sure.

But where is there stability these days?

You want stability? Win the lottery and stick it in munis.

 

 

 

Bereavement 101

The other day, my sister Kath was on HuffPo reading Maureen Orth's column on the death of Michael Jackson. Anyone familiar with Ms. Orth's work on Jacko might know that her piece would not be a swooning paean. In fact, she starts out by saying that when she first heard the news, she thought it was a publicity stunt. But my purpose is to neither bury MJ nor to praise him, but to note that, while Kathleen was reading Maureen, she noticed a banner ad for a course offering a bereavement certificate. (Alas, when I looked at the article, something else was being flogged: boring old GE Healthcare.)

While it's a bit curious and ghoulish that such a banner ad would fly atop an article on a celebrity death, it's not surprising that programs in death and dying are coming to the fore. After all, now that most of us have buried a parent or two, it is finally occurring to the Boomers that, unless the miracle that we're no doubt collectively anticipating occurs and this horseman passes by, we're next.

No surprise, either, that Catholic colleges are somewhat in the lead of the bereavement certificate movement - there are programs at Madonna University in Michigan and Maria College in NY. (Madonna? Maria? Didn't they get the message that St. Joseph is the patron saint of a happy death, not the BVM? Do I have to explain everything to everybody?)

The Catholic connection to bereavement studies is a natural one. If there's one thing that Catholics don't traditionally shy away from, it's death (happy or otherwise). Remember, man, that dust thou art and all that, where all that includes a lot o' death-related iconography, info on the gruesome ways in which martyrs got theirs, open caskets as the norm, and - at least if you were a Boomer who grew up an urban, ethnic Catholic - exposure to who and what's in those open caskets at an early age.

Whatever truck I may have with the R.C. Church, they do "get" death pretty darn well.

The secular approach seems more cut and dried. On the Arizona State certificate program page, the first sentence I read was:

"The morbidity resulting from bereavement contributes substantially to healthcare costs"(Kissane, 2000, 173:456).

At first glance, I thought that 173:456 was a wacky scriptural reference - the Gospel according to Kissane? - but I believe what this sentence tells us is that in makes economic sense to help those who've undergone the death of a loved one, or they'll just make themselves costly sick.

Mt. Ida College , just outside of Boston, has a degree program that includes "hands on practical training". (I assume that hands on is, for the most part, metaphorical. Hands on what?)  I do think that this is one pursuit that does require the old metaphorical hands on.

Thus, I don't really see bereavement studies as that appropriate for distance learning. Nonetheless, National University has a program, which I'm guessing was what Kath saw advertised.

I don't get how this would work.  Today's assignment, boys and girls, is to go out and find a recent widow, take her hand and tell her 'I'm sorry for your troubles'.

I'm not sure what National U teaches - it's probably not this - but this was, in fact, the real life guidance my father offered me when, at the age of 11, I went to my first wake solo.

Not really solo, of course. A classmate's father had died, and most of us gathered in front of the church on the Sunday of his wake to walk down to O'Connor Brothers together. We decided to pair up, and I fell in with Mary Agnes Cleary. As we walked down to the funeral parlor, we rehearsed. Mary A was going to hold Mrs. M's hand while I did the talking.

Mary A, alas, panicked, and I ended up doing the hand-holding and the talking, and now wonder what Mrs. M - who was one of the few Italians in our parish - made of my use of the ultra-Irish expression "sorry for your troubles."

Neither Mary A nor I had much to say to our friend and classmate Paul M, other than to stand there with him feeling badly and crying a little.

In any case, I do feel that fellow Boomers who lived the urban-Catholic-ethnic life have leg-up when it comes to bereavement certificates, so we could, perhaps, get Advanced Placement credit for wakes and funerals attended.

In truth, I think that it's not a bad idea to have people schooled in the bereavement process out there as we near the point at which the largest-generation-ever will start falling in droves into the Big Sleep. Mostly, I think we'll need the help because so few people these days seem to have extensive first-hand experience dealing with any one else's grief. Every once in a while I'll fall into a conversation with someone who never attended a wake or a funeral until one of their parents died. (Didn't they have neighbors? Didn't they have great-aunts? Sheesh.)

We do see a lot of phoney distance grieving for celebrities like Michael Jackson - great moaning, weeping, and gnashing of teeth over the death of complete strangers. Maybe these make decent practice runs for coping with the deaths of those nearer and dearer.

But I think the real bereavement certifications are going to be needed to help the Baby Boomers not so much to handle the death of our family and friends, but rather to handle the death that will be most up close and personal: our own.

I'm not a Baby Boomer basher, but I do fear that when the day of reckoning draws nigh, many of our cohort will be going to great and unnatural lengths to extend our stay on planet earth, a place that we just can't imagine without us.

I'm hoping that bereavement counselors, psychologists, death educators, life cycle educators, gerontologists and all the other categories listed on the National U site as good candidates for bereavement studies, will have learned how to help us all recognize when our time has come.

The time to give up our drivers licenses. The time to refuse to grab an organ that would be better used in the body of someone one-third our age. The time to make the big decision about whether we want to get buried in jeans and a concert tour tee-shirt, or in a nice, somber suit.

And I do have an idea that I think just might ease the transition for the Boomers: extend the use of medical marijuana to everyone facing end-of-life. We can all toke up, and go out humming 'truckin' like the doodah man' (whoever he is).

I truly believe that I'm on the something here.

So listen up, bereavement counselors in training.

This may be the only way you'll be able to get rid of us.

Take my dummy, please

In the beginning, was the clown.

But the clown didn't provide quite enough horror.

So there was the ventriloquist dummy.

I haven't thought of the ventriloquist dummy in many a year. Maybe not since I last turned my eyes and covered my ears to avert the specter of Ricky Lane and Velvel on the Ed Sullivan Show. (The horror. The horror.) And, not that I have an obsession with Ricky Lane and Velvel or anything, but I just googled "them" and an old Pink Slip post came up #1. (The horror. The horror.)

But then there was that recent The NY Times article on Kentucky's Vent Haven Museum, home to 700 ventriloquist dummies, where "the unsettling amazement is unremitting."

I'll bet.

Edward Rothstein/The New York Times

Not that I am anti-ventriloquist.

In fact, as a child, I longed to be able to throw my voice. As did, I suspect, every other kid sitting in a 50 kid classroom listening to a nun - often even scarier than a clown with a ventriloquist dummy combo would ever have been - spout nonsense or completely lose her cool.

How marvelous it would have been, on so many occasions, to throw a voice from the PA system or the statue of the Blessed Mother, saying "I'll just bet."

Like when Sister Saint Wilhelmina was giving us fair warning about shoplifting at Woolworth's by insisting that there were midgets in baby buggies with cameras snapping pictures of kids light-fingering rubber daggers, globe pencil sharpeners, or Hardy Boys mysteries.

These pictures would be developed, and store detectives - every bit as savvy as the PI's on 77 Sunset Strip - would spot the Our Lady of the Angels uniforms and zoom right over to nab the miscreants.

I'll just bet.

Or when Sister Mary Florence told us that if you bit your finger- nails, broke your fast, but said to heck with it and went ahead and received Holy Communion, you would go to hell if you happened to get hit by a rogue bus or a drunk-driving public school grad on the way home.

Really 'sta?  Really?

Or when Sister Aloysius Patrick told us that the fire that had killed a hundred of so kids at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago was actually intended for us. One of God's few mistakes, don't you know.

Sister, sister, sister: you are nuts.

So I did harbor an occasional desire to vent, and even practiced a bit.

Alas, I never completely mastered the closed mouth. Although I was deft enough to have become, like Edgar Bergen, a radio ventriloquist, where it was okay to move your mouth. It was radio, after all. (I could also, I suspect, have been a tap dancer on radio. Too bad radio days were over.)

There is apparently a precedent for Catholic-based voice-throwing, by the way.

Cardinal Richelieu is said to have used a ventriloquist in 1624 to frighten one of his bishops.

We could have used a little Cardinal Richelieu at my school.

Ventriloquism would, of course, also have served me well during my professional career.

All those meetings when I wanted to call BS.

Hmmmm. Come to mention it, I mostly did call BS, which may be why I never had the brilliant career I could have.

I will say that, while I do find most ventriloquist dummies completely and utterly creepy - and thus would not be apt to seek out this museum, if I were ever to find myself in Kentucky - I actually don't mind puppets.

With the exception of Howdy Doody, who to me was nothing more than a ventriloquist dummy with strings attached - the same slack jaw and bug eyes - I was rather fond of Kookla, Fran, and Ollie.  (Fran was a person, by the way.)

I loved Farfel, the puppet-dog - a version of which is displayed in Vent Haven - who shilled for Nestle's chocolate.

I loved Shari Lewis and her sidekick Lambchop, who was cuter than cute and didn't look anything like Jerry Mahoney or Mortimer Snerd or, God forbid, Velvel.

And the Muppets. What is not to love about the Muppets?

But ventriloquist dummies, I'm afraid...While I'm not exactly afraid of them, I do find them, for the most part, nasty, brutish, and short. Smart alecky I can live with, but there's a real malign aura to the "classic" dummy.

I did note on the Vent Haven site that modern dummies - as evidenced by the snapshots taken at their annual ConVENTion - are more varied and interesting than the wooden creature that most comes to mind when one thinks "ventriloquist dummy."

Which, thanks to The NYT, I have been thinking for the last week or so.

(The horror, the horror.)

RunPee...because

There are seemingly no end to the iPhone apps out there, which is one of the things that makes the iPhone just so darned desirable and appealing.  And when Apple says "Apps for everything," they really do mean apps for everything.

The latest app for everything that's come to my attention - thanks to my friend Valerie - is something called RunPee.

I'm not all that taken with the name, since it's not all that clear from the name exactly what you'd be signing up for. But apps do not live on name alone. (I think "PeeBreak" or "MoviePeeBreak" would be better, but maybe the url was taken.)

Anyway, what RunPee'll do for you is let you know what parts of a currently playing-in-the-theater movie you can miss without actually missing much. Plus it fills you in on what happened while you're takin' care of business.

You can do check things out already on their web site, so with a little planning ahead, you can learn that, in RunPee's estimation, the best time to run and pee during The Hangover is 43 minutes in, when Phil calls Tracy to let her know he's spending another night in Vegas.

You can then click on a block of scrambled text to learn what you'll miss during the 4 minutes that RunPee gives you to run pee.

Of course, this would be far more fun and easier if you could just do this checking in situ, on your iPhone, and not have to be prepared a priori.

RunPee is the brain child of one Dan Florio, a Flash developer, who sounds like a real character. (It would, of course, take a real character to come up with this particular application. Among his real character characteristics: he's worked as a nude model, lived in a tent while in college, lectured on celestial mechanics, been a massage therapist... He was also working in Manhattan on 9/11. Plus: note to my brother Tom, who's a professor there, he attended but did not get a degree from NAU.)

I'm sure that a lot of people will download this app for its novelty. But, truly, most movies last less than 2 hours, and even a middle-aged bladder like the one contained in my personal body can usually make it through a movie, especially if I don't go for the giganta flat, too-sweet, wretched Diet Coke, and stick with a more modest sized soda to wash down the god-knows-what's-in-it-and-what's-on-it popcorn. Anyway, these days, most of the movies I watch are on Pay Per View, so we take all the pee breaks we want.

And, if I do go to the movie thee-ay-ter, I'm not likely to be viewing Drag Me to Hell or Transformers - neither of which, I suspect, I would mind taking an extra-long pee break during.

I did check out the Classics movie list, but RunPee definition of classic is decidedly not the same as mine. (Yes, I know, it's his application - he can dub anything a classic. Plus the content is contributed by RunPee members, who are unlikely to share my cultural tastes.) On the RunPee classic list: Escape from New York, Terminator, and Die Hard.

Not that I didn't enjoy (more or less) these movies, but my list of classics includes titles like Casablanca and Wizard of Oz. (I am so pathetically yesterday. It's amazing I blog at all. I should probably be typing my poss on a manual typewriter and mimeographing them. Hmmmm. The just thought of that purple, foul-smelling mimeograph "juice" - whatever was in it - has irritated my bladder such that I feel as if I must run and pee.)

Well, now that I'm back, relieved and ready to blog from here to eternity (another classic, by the way), I do want to wish Dan and RunPee the very best of luck. And make a mental note to comb through the iPhone site to see what other peculiar little apps may be lurking there.

BlackBerry summer

Well, I'm in the market for a smartphone, and am leaning BlackBerry - maybe a Storm, maybe a Curve.

I like to think that I won't be one of those obnoxious people, continuously twiddling with my smartphone, checking for those all important e-mails - hey, I personally heard from Michelle Obama just the other day, and I wouldn't want to have missed that missive; not to mention  a key frequent flyer e-mail from American Airlines; and a note from a yarn store that I somehow got signed up for. (I, who barely know knit from purl, or purl from pearl, for that matter.)

But somehow, while I don't think I'll be the worst smartphone offender in the room, I will no doubt be at least occasionally and, I hope discreetly, e-mailing, texting, and googling away. After all, when I first got a cell phone, I almost kept it in a lock box, as if it were a revolver or a vile of anthrax. I only took it out when I was stopped dead in traffic near the Hood plant in Charlestown and called my husband with my E.T.A.

Now, while I'm not one for calling while in an enclosed public place when there are other folks around, I am one of those who walks down the street, yacking away.

There was an article in a recent NY Times on the use (and abuse) of smartphones during meetings, and some of the tales told were pretty interesting.

There was the one about the folks from a marketing firm who were pitching a prospect, who spent the entire in-person meeting playing a game on his iPhone. 

While this does seem a bit obnoxious, the prospect, like the customer, is always right - or right enough, anyway, so that you'd probably ignore this behavior if you wanted someone's business. Besides, the guy was paying some attention - he was asking questions. Still, I really don't think that small, in-person meetings - whatever side of the pitch you're on - is the time or place to be playing a game. One thing if the prospect said, 'hey, I need to respond to this txt', or even said, 'I'm going to be keeping an eye on my e-mail, but I am listening to what you have to say.' Game playing: bad form. And who'd want this guy as a client, anyway?

(I used to report to a manager who would be playing Tetris when you were meeting with her. She would pretend that she was working - 'I have to check something here, blah-di-blah'-  but we could see the little Tetris boxes reflected in her glasses.)

Of course there is nothing all that new about doing side work during meetings. Certainly, since the advent of the call-in meeting, folks have been working-while-attending.  When I worked at Genuity, there was one fellow notorious for calling in to one of the many large-scale call-in meetings we had - generally for some ominous or completely BS announcement from senior management. Most of us would gather in conference rooms to listen in together (put mute on, roll our eyes, and make comments to each other). But Sam would call in from his office, forget to go on mute, and we could hear him madly typing away during the entire meeting - as did everyone else on the call.

Before the tele-meeting, let alone the smartphone, I guess all we could do was cast meaningful glances at each other and doodle.

The Times article also had this anecdote:

In Dallas, a college student sunk his chance to have an internship at a hedge fund last summer when he pulled out a BlackBerry to look up a fact to help him make a point during his interview, then lingered — momentarily, but perceptibly — to check a text message a friend had sent, said Trevor Hanger, the head of equity trading at the hedge fund, who was helping conduct the interview.

Serves him right, the maroon. And as if the world needed another hedge fund manager....

Some folks cited in the article were all up in arms about smartphone use - it's insulting, etc. But others pointed out there there are legitimate reasons to tap away - note taking, fact checking, etc. Not to mention snarky, fun reasons like sharing running commentary with your colleagues. Before there were smartphones, I used to sit on call-in meetings in active IM with a couple of remote colleagues. I don't think we could have survived some of the more absurd meetings we had to participate in without resorting to our steady stream of IM commentary. Still, we were sitting at our desks - not in front of the company CEO or the VP of Sales. They had no reason to suspect that we were making fun of everything they said.

(And speaking of this VP of Sales, she was in a management meeting when a fellow on her team IM'd her to ask how things were going. She responded "like shit". Unfortunately, she was in the process of hooking her laptop up to the projector so everyone could see her preso. The first thing all the other execs saw was her IM session.  I wasn't wild about this VP of Sales, but she was the only woman on the management team and they absolutely, positively treated her 'like shit.')

Anyway, I will draw up my own rules for Blackberry use:

• Never in a client meeting without letting them know I need to check something or make a call . (Unless it's some huge-o client meeting, and I'm just sitting there in the audience, and I can do some casual, subtle tapping, and everyone around me is tapping away, not sitting there in rapt, still-finger silence.)
• Never when I'm with a friend without letting them know I need to take a call, or we agree that I need to google something - like what was the name of George Bush the Younger's dog.
• Never at a wedding, unless I'm sitting in the church waiting for things to begin.
• Never at a funeral, even if I'm sitting in the church waiting for things to begin.
• Never on a job interview, unless the interviewer asks for something that I need to find online.
• If I ever have a job-job again, only in mega, everybody's doin' it meetings - and never, ever in small-ish meetings with, say, the president or the CEO.
• If I ever have a job-job again, never while sitting there in a small or one-on-one meeting with Mr. or Ms. Big.
• If I ever have a job-job again, never while sitting there in a small or one-on-one meeting with someone who reports to me. (Talk about a power trip.)
• Never in a theater, or a concert, other than in the lobby.
• At a Red Sox game, only when something entirely fabulous happens  - like clinching the pennant, or watching 'Tek take down A-Rod again - and I just have to share the joy.
• Never while driving. (I rarely if ever use a cellphone while I'm driving, so it's fairly unlikely I'd get sucked into smartphoning while tootling down the pike.)

Other than that, the only hard and fast rule seems to be  - as with cellphone use - BlackBerrying is only okay when you're not disturbing others with your never-as-quiet-as-you-think-it-is tapping, or when you're not being out and out rude.

So I think I'll be okay, and not a total jerk with my new toy - whenever it is that I'm going to get it. But it really needs to be soon.

I'm in technology, for pete's sake. And I'm important.

Who knows? Just sitting here writing this, I may be missing out on all sorts of scintillating communiqués. Sure, I could just check my e-mail and IM and see whazzup. But that would be nowhere near as much fun as taking out my sportin' new BlackBerry and tapping away.

Mental health day or, don't cry for me Argentina.

I have to say that I was personally disappointed when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's AWOL excursion turned out to be an affaire d'coeur.

I was really hoping this was a case of I just can't stand this for one nano-second more.

Come on. Who hasn't hopped in the car, headed for work, and thought, I could just take off.

Having commuted north from Boston for many a year, there were plenty of times when I was hurtling up Route 93, heading for work where I knew I was going to have to deal with political intrigue, personnel psycho-drama, management by fire-drill, and fellow employees who were too damned self-centered to clean the remnants of their exploding lunch out of the microwave - when I just wanted to drive on through to Canada. For a few miles or so, I'd think, well, I could pull off the highway at some mall in N.H. and buy a toothbrush and some underwear. Then I'll be good to go for a couple of days in some rundown border town motel, glutting down Tim Horton donuts, and staring at the TV screen while considering career options.

And there were plenty of business trips when I'd think, it wouldn't be half bad to come down with a no-fly flu and have to spend a couple of days in this swank hotel, eating room service club sandwiches and reading People. (This thought never occurred when I was staying in a Grade B motel outside of Topeka, in a west-facing room in the middle of winter with nothing between me and the wind coming off the Rockies other than that flimsy, un-weather-stripped door. Only when I was in, say, a Ritz.)

Of course, I never acted on these impulses.

In fact, when I worked full time, I wasn't much of a one for taking a sick day, let alone a mental health day.

I am someone who has been blessed with spectacularly good health. When I worked full time, I may have averaged one sick day a year. Maybe.

I did take one mental health day.

When I worked at Wang, there was one day when, if Doctor Wang had showed up at my door and ordered me into my car at gunpoint, I could just not face the day there.

I called in sick.

And, guilt ridden, once-a-Catholic that I am, I proceeded to make myself sick, and spent the day languishing in bed. (It still beat work in that particular place, at that particular time.)

But call in I did. As I did the other times I needed to take the day off: the time I threw my back out and couldn't straighten up; the day I needed off for the breast biopsy; the day I hacked up some yuck from my lungs that was the consistency of a chicken bone.

Call in is what you do if you need to take some time off.

Pretty much the most ticked off a manager ever gets is when someone who's sick, or has a sick kid, or just needs a break, stays home without letting you know.

As a manager, to me, pretty much the only excuse for not calling in would be something so catastrophic that it would probably make the news. That or something so traumatic - spouse in cardiac arrest, child suddenly hospitalized - that it trumps all else.

Other than that...

Given the 24/7, gossip driven media, the news about Mark Sanford's affair - as personal and none-of-our-damned-business as it is - was bound to come out.

But what makes it so public (and ridiculous) is the disappearing act, and the faux 'he's hiking the Appalachian Mountain trail' story, when he was off with his girlfriend in Argentina.

Even the Governor of South Carolina is entitled to some personal time off, and it sure sounded like he needed a few mental health days.

So why not just call in sick? Or in dire need of a day off? Have your press secretary put out the story that you're taking a little downtime for personal reasons. Give your Lt. Governor the head's up that, if someone fires on Ft. Sumter, he's in charge.

Obviously, this guy wasn't thinking straight, and is under some supreme, self-inflicted, stress.

The philandering politician is certainly no big news. But aren't any of these guys capable of having a discreet affair - even one that gets exposed - without making them look like colossal jerks?