For an assignment in school, I had to take the TV ratings guidelines and evaluate a prime-time show against the guidelines to determine if the rating were accurate.
If you care to know what the TV-14 or TV-PG really means, please look here (TV Ratings Guidelines).
The biggest note I had was how the sub-category letters change in meaning, so a TV-PG “L” (infrequent coarse language) doesn’t mean the same thing as a TV-14 “L” (strong coarse language).
Posted in Lagniappe
Thought about this post for a while, since I don’t generally get political on my blog, but decided that I wanted to do this one.
According to the Government, we are rich. Not sure how they figured that, I would consider us as Middle Class ( maybe Upper Middle ). I’m not going to complain because we have a nice life, healthy kids, and we don’t need for anything or want for much. As a child who grew up with a single mom, lived in government housing, and didn’t get everything we ‘needed’ as a child ( shoes without holes in them would have been nice!), I understand the difference.
But let’s get to the crux of this article. I recently lost my job. It’s happening everywhere, so I’m not the lone ranger and I don’t feel sorry for myself (see above).
First, for the sake of this article, lets say I am rich. You know the top 25% of the people who pay 80% of the taxes or something like that, I didn’t feel like looking up the stat, but I’ve seen it enough to know those numbers are close.
Being prudent, after doing all the mandatory things you do when you are displaced, I turned to finances. Better make sure we cut discretionary spending.
First things to go are the “Maid Service” and the “Lawn Service” - since I won’t be traveling, we can do that ourselves. Let’s see I just took approximately $800/month out of the economy. I bet those people, not the owners of the cleaning service, but the ladies who work hard to clean my house won’t miss that money. I also bet the independent guy who does my lawn won’t miss the money either.
We figured we will cut Christmas spending by 40-60% this year. Now I know I’m just one person, but I bet that companies won’t feel that loss of revenue at all, I’m sure that won’t trickle down to the sales clerk trying to pay for college.
My wife discussed changing out her car (the New TL) for something we can buy in cash. That will be great to put some money in the economy, but I’m sure the long-term loss of interest won’t be felt by the auto credit company.
Oh, and if I don’t have a job by January, we will probably pull the kids from Before/After school (I’m home anyway). The loss of 2 kids (over $1000/mo) probably won’t even be a blip on a privately owned/woman owned business.
I think I made my point. When people continue to discuss raising taxes on the Rich and the Businesses to give to the poor, they are actually taking money from the poor. Because I thought we have learned by now that businesses that make money, spend money - how do they spend it - growth (people, resources, land, etc.). Taxes decrease the profits and as such decrease the amount of money they have to spend which results in layoffs and deferred purchases which result in layoffs for the employees of the supplying company.
So when I write this (if you’ve read all of it) please understand you do NOT need to feel sorry for me, because us RICH people will probably be OK, we just won’t have a life that’s quite as nice. BUT, a big but here, if there are a number of me’s out there who all feel the need to do the same things to protect their family’s future, then the ultimate people who pay are the people who want to work for a living.
You see, I’m not an economist, but I did grow up on the lower end of the economic scale. I worked for the rich people ( an independently wealthy gun-shop owner, a small pizza shop, a bank, a transportation company, a technology giant, a big pharma, and other major corporations ) and put away money, gained skills, went to school. I moved from government housing to military housing to college dormitories to rental apartments to rental houses to MY house.
I’ll find work. Mainly because as a wise man once said - I will use either my white collar skill or my blue collar skill to make sure I stay “rich”.
“Do you want fries with that?”
Posted in Money
Came across this in my email box. Most of it is a rehash of things you should and probably already know, but reinforcement is the key to learning.
Posted in Career Development
Been a while since I posted, but frankly nobody wants to hear my complaints about work, school, kids, soccer, etc.
So here is the update you all probably haven’t been waiting for.
Been busy, everything going well in most departments, but I did get Laid Off last week. So I’m back looking for a job.
No promises so far on how much Blogging I will do, but since it is something I’ve always enjoyed, I thought now was a good time to get back at it.
Posted in Lagniappe
While working on an RFP for work, I somehow got hit with a pretty nasty virus. So if working on a RFP isn’t painful enough, try basically having to do whole sections twice 
Went thru about 3 different Antivirus scans including the one provided by my company and couldn’t get it removed.
Lost a couple of files including parts 2 and 3 of my latest series on Retention.
Thanks to a recommendation at CNet; I finally loaded Avira AntiVir Personal (free, my favorite price) and it found five occurrences of this particularly offensive issue.
All the symptoms have gone away, and the performance on this machine is back to normal, so I’m hopeful that I got it cleaned out.
Hopefully, I’ll get caught back up this weekend and be able to salvage my posts (I had it in word while I was writing) or recreate them from my notes.
Posted in Lagniappe
We have a little thing in our family that when the kids get a new jersey, we try to figure out which pro athlete wears that number.
Well over this weekend, my son got his new Club Soccer uniform and when we took it out to see what number he was going to be, it was 33.
I immediately said, “Cool, 33 that’s Larry Bird?”
To which my 10 year old responded, “Great, but who’s Larry Bird”
I felt really old, really fast!!
I will also point out that this is the same child that told me last basketball season that he heard Michael Jordan was “pretty good” back in my day.
One shot with 9 inch ball and twelve inch hoop at a Fair. $3
Making the shot on your first try with your 8 year old watching - Priceless!!!
Welcome to family Mr. Turtle!!!
Posted in Life
Over the last two years, the lovable Turkey Master (OK, he’s not lovable, but I needed an adjective that I hadn’t used yet); has harped and harped about having your own domain and subsequently your own email address.
I likewise have on these very same pages acknowledged, begrudgingly, that he is right and true in his assessment for the many correct reasons that he cited and my only real argument against his reasoning was “It’s hard and it will take too much time!” Which isn’t a reason but an excuse.
Nevertheless, I still haven’t done it. And I almost swear he posts things sometimes just to poke fun at me.
But hey, recently I got as far as purchasing “said domain”; now I just need to set it up.
Anyway, as he is want to do, here is his little REAL LIFE story on someone else getting bit by not having their own domain.
Note the key to this story is that in most cases you lose an email address because of losing a JOB; but this one is different. Enjoy!
Posted in Career Development
The following five post set is based off of an outline I had used for a presentation on Employee Retention. The concept has a heavy IT lean as that is the audience it was presented to, but I think the Theory has value across all functional business areas:
Please note that the content has been distilled so as to make for a readable blog post, the level of details and examples is not designed to be all inclusive due to the forum this is being delivered in.
Overview:
Employee Retention is a critical and sometimes difficult area for most organizations. Every business entity faces the need to have a certain level of employee retention to aid in the consistency of values and the quality of deliverables to make it a viable and profitable concern.
An organization that has a very high voluntary turnover rate spends an inordinate amount of resources and loss of customer good will to retrain, requalify, and re-indoctrinate new employees to the organizations way of doing things. These cost can include recruiting fees, loss productivity, degradation of quality, loss of networking and relationships in the industry, a bad reputation with both customers and vendors, as well as many other cost both from a human capital and fiscal capital perspective.
Voluntary Retention:
Throughout this article, the term Voluntary Retention will be used often. The definition of Voluntary Retention varies a little from organization to organization, but the most common use of the term is when a company loses a resource that it deems to add value and will have to replace that resource with someone of equal or greater talents. Note that a key phrase in there is the need to replace the individual. Many companies now have facility closures and other corporate downsizing initiatives that result in the loss of quality individuals, though the actions of these employees may need to be replaced, these individuals would not count as a voluntary loss.
One of the most controversial topics related to Voluntary Retention is the loss of “attritionable resources.” These attritionable resources have always been a problem for the development of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). An attritionable resource is an individual that the company does not want to release for a number of reasons, but will not be replaced if they do leave. My thoughts on this subject is that they should NOT be counted against your retention KPI but only if they are clearly identified as such prior to their departure.
The Theory:
Employee Retention has many facets to be reviewed and a significant portion of it is dependent upon the industry, the company, and the position in question. What can be distilled though is that all retention of employees is based on the premise that the job the employee holds is more adds more value to their life and career than a job with another company or entity.
The best way to make an employee stay within a given organization is to remove the need or desire to look for a better position outside of the company. In doing this, the organization can be assured that the individual is fully motivated towards the success and focused toward the companies goals and objectives.
Many significant discussions of employee retention go directly to some of the details of the job performance and benefits, this can include pay, benefits, job satisfaction, work life balance, and many other aspects of the employee experience. While I do not dispute the importance of each of these issues, I think it is necessary to first take a more holistic look at the organizations interaction with it’s employees.
To do this, I think it is imperative that each organization view any of these interactions from one of four categories taken the employee’s viewpoint:
1) True Positive
2) Perceived Positive
3) True Negative
4) Perceived Negative
A significant number of organizations do a good job of identifying the True Positives and True Negatives of the employee experience, but likewise do not focus enough on the Perceived Positives or Perceived Negatives from the employee perspective.
It is also important to understand that interactions can potentially be in more than one of these categories. Many management groups make a bad assumption in believing that if an item is a True Positive, that it will be also viewed as positive, when in fact it can be a Perceived Negative.
A simple example of this was the recent experience of a company that had its management announce that they were going to curtail executive bonuses by 25%. While the significance of this to the organization is easily identifiable and as such can be a True Positive to the bottom line; many of the organization’s line employees perceived this as a purely public relations move. As such, the True Positive became a Perceived Negative if taken from the employee retention viewpoint. For a line employee whom is dealing with a 1% or 2% salary increase cap; the reminder to them that Executive Management were still getting a bonus of 75% of its original target (regardless of the amount) was a significant negative impact.
Throughout the next four installments, I will attempt to take each of the four categories and provide examples and details as to how the effective understanding and utilization of each of these can aid in employee retention.
Posted in Leadership
Went golfing on Friday with the G Brothers. Around the 11th hole I was getting back into my cart (I was riding alone) when something bloody and mangled caught my eye.
I jumped about 5 feet in the air and screamed like a little girl. As I turned around I found both brothers doubled over laughing. It appears that they had found a half disembowelled fish and decided it would be FUNNY to put it in my cart.
After I realized what was going on, I had to admit to them that it was funny in a sick and twisted kind of way.
But since no good prank goes unpunished, I am putting both the G Brothers (W and E ) on notice. Payback will NOT BE KIND to either of them.
As we speak I am looking for the Halloween picture of W when he dressed as Madonna with his hairy, hairy back showing out of a backless dress. But, lest he think that isn’t going to be painful enough (probably more so to my readers), it will only be the start.
This is WAR!!!!
