I had the same reaction to that article -- not only did she sound like a jerk, the article felt too much like self-promotion to be a real apology.
Great, now I'm going to have "Life's a Dance" stuck in my head all day.
I didn't get that mad at her until I read this:
I didn't disagree when another female editor said we should hurry up and fire another woman before she "got pregnant."
I do think that we need to hurry up and get fathers more involved, and everybody needs flexibility. But there will always be jobs where you have to do a shift--retail or nursing. Those employers need to be able to call in someone else. Employees get sick too, but daycare needs to be more accommodating of sick kids too.
Maybe there should be daycare doctors who do "house calls" at different daycare centers to treat minor childhood illnesses like ear infections.
Also, why does day care get out so early. I think that 5:30 would be more reasonable.
Don't even get me started on half day kindergarten.
"I didn't realize how horrible I'd been - until I had a child of my own."
I don't need to read any further. She's got no empathy.
(Cf. "I didn't realize homosexuals were real people until my son admitted he was gay." "I didn't believe racism still existed until my daughter became friends with some African Americans and I saw that they really were treated differently." "I didn't believe in global warming until it was over 95 degrees for 10 days straight in my town last summer (and now I don't believe in it anymore because there's been lots of snow this winter).)
Oh god and now I've read a few paragraphs in and it's worse than I thought. I'm not reading any more.
It strikes me that "I didn't believe in the existence of [routine aspect of discrimination] until I [cared about a real live person who experienced it]" may be more of a rhetorical trope than a personal belief. That is, I think that a lot of the time, it's something that people say because they think it makes them believable to other people like them more than because they themselves believe it.
There's something I can't quite put my finger on about this - I think that there's an underlying cultural assumption that everyone is basically totally self-interested, that there's something suspicious about being concerned about something that does not touch you personally. What's in it for you? Why do you care? What kind of weird kink or personal anxiety are you expressing by being a white person who pays attention to anti-black racism?
Sort of a general suspicion of "ideology" even if by "ideology" we mean "it bothers me that people get shot by the cops because they're black, even though I am not black".
So the most "above-reproach" seeming framing is one where you don't care about something for some kind of stupid bleeding heart self-important reason, you care because family.
Also, this is definitely a nation (I cite a long-ago read of Peter Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation!) where violence and action are legitimated primarily through insult to property - insult to a wife, a daughter, etc, used to justify savage war but also used to justify all kinds of labor organizing, etc. So it's not cool to be like "but creeping on girls is sexist" because that's weird and either self-interested (if you're female) or creepy (if you're male) but it's perfectly legit to be angry if someone creeps on your girl because no on puts property in the corner.
I saw this making the rounds on FB. I'm not a parent and don't plan on having kids, but I think I can manage not to be an asshole to people with different schedules and priorities. I hope she doesn't need to learn the hard way that people handling medical crises (either themselves or in their family) also deserve a break at work.
What bothers me about this is that the 'I didn't realize until I was...' genre can be ok, but only with the sort of general microaggressions that people don't actually realize they're doing or see how prevalent they can be. This isn't that. This is the equivalent of "I didn't realize how hurtful my hobby of attacking random strangers with a knife was until I was attacked with a knife." Yes, woman, yes you damn well did realize what you were doing at the time you just don't want other people to do it back to you.
We've got a 'being shitty to mothers' situation going on at my office, and I have no idea what to do about it. Coworker has recently had two kids, and is working 80% time: no Fridays. Coworker is also, legit, really bad at the work we do. Boss is out to get her, which would be reasonable on the basis of the quality of her workproduct, but which boss couches as a matter of work ethic on coworkers part (which seems completely wrong to me).
I find the whole situation maddening -- I can't defend coworker as doing good, useful work, because she largely isn't (oh, she's not a net drain, she's just not functioning at a normal level of competence. But she does get some useful stuff done). And that makes it really hard to talk Boss out of her Ahab-like fixation on the idea that coworker isn't working hard enough.
In sum, people suck.
Sort of a general suspicion of "ideology"
IT'S THE FACT-OPINION DISTINCTION! (Seriously, your comment is very astute.)
9: My chair would do that sort of thing. With my chair, I feel comfortable saying something like, "There's a difference between the quality/lack of quality of someone's work, and their work-ethic." Don't know if you feel comfortable saying that.
6 is very good, especially 6.2. 'I didn't realize' may also be cover for 'I realized, didn't care enough to act, and am now ashamed'. Pleading ignorance instead of moral cowardice.
I say that as a moral coward who hasn't read the article.
Is saying someone does shitty work actually better than saying they have a shitty work ethic? For a boss, that is? "This person isn't working hard enough" suggests a more fixable condition than "This person tries very hard and still sucks."
I say that as somebody who never tries really hard so I always have an excuse if it doesn't go well.
I agree that Frowner's take on this personal-experience-of-injustice is very astute; I haven't been able to take it at face value either and this is a very good articulation of what's going on.
I have said that explicitly, along with things like "She's getting all the work done that you've assigned her, and she's not missing deadlines. At that point, there doesn't seem to me to be a problem with the amount of time she takes off." (There isn't anything literally wrong with the amount of time she takes off, she's taking vacation days that she's entitled to with permission. Boss just thinks that if she was working harder, she wouldn't be able to.) I'm just not making any headway with changing my boss's attitude. Once again, people suck.
'I didn't realize' may also be cover for 'I realized, didn't care enough to act, and am now ashamed'. Pleading ignorance instead of moral cowardice.
Right, it can also be a rhetorical move. It gives cover to the listener, allowing them room to hear the point without getting defensive. "Oh, this speaker thought the same way I do, until she was put in a different situation." may be easier to hear than a speaker who is just telling me I'm a self-absorbed monster.
It just infuriates me when people are unable to generalize the point.
14: Well, one's true and one isn't. If I were in Boss's shoes, I'd be having a talk with coworker about how the work we do doesn't seem to suit her, and she's probably deadended at working on the dumb stuff forever unless her work product improves, and if that makes her unhappy she should be looking around.
But the problem doesn't seem to me to be work ethic, and it really doesn't seem to me to be related to her parenting and resulting work schedule, and I wish Boss would stop making it about that.
All I have to say is I'm fond of the sarcastic use of "life's a dance you learn as you go" and hope to make use of it soon.
Probable impending horrible earworm but whatevs. I don't think I can remember the tune well enough to get it really lodged in there.
I have said that explicitly, along with things like "She's getting all the work done that you've assigned her, and she's not missing deadlines. At that point, there doesn't seem to me to be a problem with the amount of time she takes off." (There isn't anything literally wrong with the amount of time she takes off, she's taking vacation days that she's entitled to with permission. Boss just thinks that if she was working harder, she wouldn't be able to.) I'm just not making any headway with changing my boss's attitude. Once again, people suck
Wait, so this isn't even a flexible working hours situation? The one in five days off is vacation time? How is it even entering the conversation then?
And I'm not clear what "out to get her" constitutes heres Attempts to gin up a reason to fire her? Poor pay? Shitty comments to her face? Behind her back? Basically what would changing the boss's opinion from "lazy" to "shit" achieve?
She is both working an 80% schedule, and on top of that takes her ordinarily accruing vacation (I assume she gets 80% of what a fulltimer gets, but I don't know). This is, obviously, not wrong of her.
Mostly, the 'out to get her' is shitty comments to her face and behind her back. I don't know if it would make any practical difference to the situation if Boss was treating her more fairly.
All I have to say is I'm fond of the sarcastic use of "life's a dance you learn as you go" and hope to make use of it soon.
I love to say it to students.
People kept telling me I was a shitty dancer, so I stopped. Maybe I should have tried harder?
Well, if I were a Buddhist, I'm assume I was a huge asshole in my previous life.
You know what they say about the size of a man's asshole.
6 is great. I hadn't understood it that way before.
Also, I think this framing ("I care about this, not for myself, but because it affects someone I know personally") is more often used when there is a power imbalance, when the speaker is advocating to someone of equal or higher status, on behalf of someone with lower status. You'd hear this framing when a white person talks to a white audience about anti-black racism. You wouldn't hear it when a white person talks to a black audience about that same subject.
More admiration for 6.2, and it's linked to the 'limousine liberal' accusation as well, right? That anyone whose politics are intended to benefit or support anyone who's not in the same position as themselves (mostly affluent people who want the government to help poor or working-class people) is a hypocrite with bad motives.
17: Are the rest of you taking your vacations? ( I didn't, in my twenties, and am sorry for it in hindsight. I am a monster too.)
6.2: That rhetoric also normalizes civil rights as a form of patronage, flowing down from those who are so virtuous that they hold power in one hand and charity in the other... I think many people who have had the personal outrage conversion, even most, can generalize. But the rhetoric is comfortable for people who regard justice as more of a hobby than a duty.
People mostly use their vacation time, and Boss certainly uses all of hers.
well ffs, then.
Is your office so much worse off for having someone resigned to the scutwork?
No, there's nothing wrong with having her do the low-end work consistently. It just burns me listening to Boss make a fuss about her work ethic and maternity leaves and how she can't expect working part time to be easy when none of that seems to me to be the problem. Substantively, I don't think coworker's being mistreated, but interpersonally and behind her back, I think Boss is being an incredible ass.
Which is infuriating but probably not the hill to die on.
Is your boss jealous? does she dislike her own family? brainwashed by Sherrold? a hierarchical creature who needs a scapegoat? suffering sciatica?
Boss is complexly annoying on many fronts, so I'm not dead sure. Some intergenerational "I suffered and people thought badly of my work ethic when I was out on maternity leave and working part time, back in the day, so by God she should suffer too," I think.
And maybe boss could have reframed herself as being kinder & more effective than her bosses, but it's hard to change in midstream.
OT: if this FREAK security flaw had been part of the plot in a fictional story it would have seemed like a laughably unrealistic weak link in the plot.
The flaw resulted from a former U.S. government policy that forbade the export of strong encryption and required that weaker "export-grade" products be shipped to customers in other countries, say the researchers who discovered the problem. These restrictions were lifted in the late 1990s, but the weaker encryption got baked into widely used software that proliferated around the world and back into the United States, apparently unnoticed until this year.
How the hell does the continued existence of a deliberate change to encryption intended to weaken security just go "unnoticed" for 20 years?
40: Haven't we talked about software here?
anyway, this doesn't surprise anyone who objected when the original crypto ban went in.
32 -- I've found it useful to say, when I've heard this term, that limousine conservatives are way worse, and always gotten agreement. It's self-evidently true. And my God, just think about limousine libertarians.
Subtext of the article. If you want to get ahead in life don't be prematurely empathetic.
