being cute

being cute
Originally uploaded by odhusky

I like this photo I found on Flickr.

Mothballs Don't Cover Stink

A couple weeks ago I started a new blog where I'm going to put all of my H.R. stories. I'm going to make this blog be just a holding cell for my random thoughts. My new blog is called Mothballs Don't Cover Stink. It was named by someone I went to high school with who I've gotten acquainted with on Facebook®. I didn't know this person, M., in high school very well at all, which was my loss because she makes me laugh a lot when she posts comments on my status. So, I was telling a story about a guy who had come into my office to drop off an application. He had a distinctive aroma of mothballs covering up body odor with underlying notes of marijuana. M. thought that a good title of my non-existent book on Human Resources would be Mothballs Don't Cover Stink. It made me laugh so hard for the rest of my day that I created the new blog as soon as I got home.

Anyway, this particular man was someone I'd interviewed for an opening I had 3 years ago. I decided back then not to hire him in part because of the wacky dance he did outside of my office after he finished his interview.

He comes back every couple of months to "check on the status of his application" and to hit on my administrative assistant. My assistant, by the way, has nicknamed him Bushwick Bill. I converted his name to Bushstink Bill. I guess a helpful suggestion to "Bill" would be that if my assistant disappears as soon as you pull up to our office, it's not a good sign for your romantic future with her.

More Winnipeg (Mid Century Modern)

I really like Mid Century Modern architecture and design. There is a Winnipeg neighborhood ("neighbourhood" in Canadian) near my apartment that was chock full of MCM houses. Here's a few of them from my Google Maps Streetview travels...

(The tall building in the background was where I lived.)









Here's the first view of a blue house:


And the second:



I like the window placement on the second floor:



The windowless front of this one is interesting. I'd like to see the other sides:



And finally a corner house two-fer. First the front:


And a view from the side:

Been Missing Winnipeg

Higgins and Main
Originally uploaded by Alana Elliott

Lately I have been missing Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada. I enjoyed living there back in the early 1990's. Ironically it was back in my pre-husky having days.

I love this picture which I found on Flickr. It calls of up Winnipeg of my memories. I had snow from November 1 until late April, I think.

The World of H.R.

I had to spend a few days over the last couple weeks with my H.R. boss. Someone in one of my offices had filed a complaint with the State Human Rights Commission about an incident she alleged had happened. Of course I cannot divulge anything about the complaint or our investigation. But I will say that this was not an entry level Human Resources investigation. This was a post-graduate thesis level Human Resources investigation.

It has been a strange couple of weeks at my H.R. office, and the above mentioned complaint was just the icing on the cake. I also had to deal with the following:

1. A bunch of people quit at once.
2. I had to hire a bunch of people.
3. One person I hired didn't show for her orientation. My Gruff Boss had be call her to have her come in the next day. It was not a surprise that she only lasted about 2 days before her attendance was a problem. In the one week surrounding her employment, she presented a bunch of reasons she had to delay her start date and/or had to leave work early and/or had to miss work. She had an uncle who was going to have his leg amputated and she needed to be there. She had a toothache that required her to be at the Emergency Room for 2 solid days. And some others I've forgotten already.
4. We had people from our American Headquarters come and train us on the new software we would be using. I had been in our Regional Headquarters at the end of February to train on the software. However, the computer network had issues and the 2 days of training were a complete waste of time.
5. IT people from our American HQ invaded our office to install new stuff that would make it possible for our European Corporate Corporate HQ to upload all payroll and billing information faster and more frequently.

The Government Did Not Get Involved.

I have a friend who opted out of health insurance in the spring of 2009. She felt that she couldn't afford the amount taken out of her pay check each pay day.

A couple months later she got bitten by a brown recluse spider. She ended up having to be admitted to a local private hospital for a couple weeks. She had to have surgery; three times I think.

When all her bills were tabulated, she owed more than $25,000.

But her social workers at the private hospital connected her with the billing department. The billing department looked at her finances. They were happy to get what she could afford each month, which was $40.

My friend paid each month the $40 she agreed to pay.

She got a letter from the private hospital last week telling her that she had paid them $280 by that point. The letter went on to say that they looked over her financial records and were deeming that she had now paid the bill in full.

She owed them no more money.

Her balance was $0.00.

And the government did not even get involved.

Let's Race

United States businesses aren't supposed to ask their applicants or even employees to disclose their ethnic background. However, Equal Opportunity Employer regulations require companies to track that info. See my notes from a previous blog entry for more detail about this stupid stuff.

So, you can imagine my surprise today when I had a conference call with my corporate HR boss and he asked if the new employee (K) we were replacing an old employee (L) with was black. My Gruff Boss asked why. Corp HR boss said, "Well, I just wanted to see if we were replacing a black person with another black person.

I told HR Boss that the old employee was actually white. We think he assumed she was black due to her name.

I wish I had said to him that I hadn't determined what either employee's race was because that information couldn't be used to make HR decisions.

Site of a Lesson Learned

Because it's been really cold here in Mid-Missouri (Mid-Misery), I have been playing around with the street view feature of Google Maps. I've been "driving" all over towns I used to live in or even ones that I just traveled through. I decided that I would do a screen capture of certain places so I could use them as an illustration for some blog postings.

The cool thing about blogs is that a person (me) can pretend that some minor event is really publish-worthy, rather than just a little boring story that no one but the blogger is interested in. With this in mind, I will try not to show a picture and only say something like "hey! that's where I got my gall bladder ultrasounded."

So here's the first story in this series:

Way back in the summer on 1990, I was heading south from Missouri to look over a couple of graduate schools I'd been accepted to. I was either going to go to the University of Georgia or the University of South Carolina. I'd also been accepted to the University of Hawaii, but had decided not to go there.

I'd packed up my little red Escort GT full of my stuff and was driving south to find a school and a place to live. I'd love to be able to do that sort of thing now--just pack everything up and move somewhere without much of a plan. But when you get older, you often lose this freedom.

Anyway, I was driving through a town called Fayetteville, Tennessee and wanted to stop for the night. I had supper at the Shoney's in the picture below. It was after I finished eating that I learned an important lesson:

If you are in a town you've never been in before and ask someone for directions, and that individual starts his directions by saying "You know where the old jail used to be," you should just answer in the affirmative. You probably won't understand the directions that follow.

What's That?

I worked for 7 years in a nursing home. One day we had a nurse educator visit to teach the staff how to care for a new resident we would be getting. I was in the conference room with nurses and the educator was putting a tape in the VCR.

One of our residents, B, wheeled herself into the conference room. B always wanted to know what was going on. She asked the educator who said, "We're getting ready to watch a video tape on tracheostomy care."

B asked, "What's that?"

The educator began a lengthy description of what a tracheostomy was and was getting into describing special care it may need.

B interrupted the educator and said, "No. I meant 'what's a video tape?'"

(This is one of my favorite stories of the nursing home, but I realized that pretty soon people won't get the humor because VCR's and video tapes won't be commonplace.)