Life After 9/11

I took my 2 year old nephew to Revere Beach last year, and he loved seeing the planes on the approach to Logan Airport, so close you could read the airline names on the sides. Myself, I'm not so crazy about seeing low-flying planes, even when I know they're just heading for nearby runways. It's strange to think that eight years later, I'm still bothered by low-flying planes, even though I'm confident in the government's ability to stop any potential terrorist attacks.

Today, this email was sent around my office:

Please be advised that a military fly over consisting of six F-A 18 jet fighter aircraft and one C-130 transport is tentatively scheduled to occur today, Wednesday, July 1st between 1:00 and 1:20 p.m., weather permitting. The flyover is being conducted by the U.S. Navy Blue Angels in conjunction with their recent visit to an air show in Rhode Island. The Blue Angels are the U.S. Navy’s aerial demonstration team and they applied for and received permission from the FAA for the Boston flyover at an altitude of 1000 feet to take promotional photos if conditions are favorable.

Please notify your employees who may observe the jets as they pass by, in order to avert any potential anxiety or apprehension the sight of these military aircraft may
cause.

It's sad to think that we're still so axious that we have to be "warned" of our own planes doing air stunts.

Diversity Etiquette

Today's Little Pink Book--a free daily workplace tip from PINK Magazine--features a sometimes touchy issue, and handles it with grace and aplomb:

Gay Friendly = Better Business

You've long been a champion of women's rights (and we love you for it!). Racism in the workplace? You'd never stand for that. But how much energy have you given to standing up for that other (less protected) minority in the workplace – gays and lesbians?

New York recently passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. And President Obama declared June "Gay Pride Month." Smart businesses are also making including gay professionals a priority.

Other than just doing the right thing, making your company more inclusive for homosexuals is becoming a business imperative. "There's tremendous buying power [estimated at $759 billion in 2009] and brand loyalty among those in this community," explains Jean-Marie Navetta of Parents, Familes, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. "Plus, when workers feel included and able to be their authentic selves, their performance is better, they're better employees."

There are some great resources on the web for helping employees appreciate the diversity of their coworkers. My personal favorite was this piece from DiversityInc.org:

7 Things NEVER to Say to LGBT Coworkers

By Daryl Hannah

For most, coming out at work is not an easy task. You can't be sure how your company or peers will respond to your revelation. And despite recent reports that the workplace is growing increasingly accepting to LGBT employees, people often don't know how to welcome a colleague who recently came out of the closet.

PricewaterhouseCoopers executive Stephanie Peel's history is a corporate America coming-out success story. When she came out professionally nearly 10 years ago, she was welcomed by her colleagues. "I came out personally in 1997 and came out professionally in 1999. Fortunately, I never heard anything not positive," says Peel.

Peel now serves on the company's LGBT-partner advisory board, which consists of 10--12 leaders in the firm who are LGBT, and provides guidance to the management committee to help further advance initiatives and activities. PricewaterhouseCoopers is No. 12 on The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity® list and No. 8 on the Top 10 Companies for LGBT Employees.

"I often tell people who ask me about this [that] it's not just about what you can't say or shouldn't say, because sometimes I find that colleagues feel stymied in that they shouldn't say anything at all. There is a lot of room for the things you can say to give clues to people that you are inclusive and culturally sensitive," warns Peel.

So what are seven things you should NEVER say to your LGBT colleagues? Here's what GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), Out & Equal Workplace Project, and Peel suggest:

No. 1: "I suspected you were gay."

Although it is a common response, it's insensitive and plays into stereotypes.

No. 2: "I'm sorry."

Why should you apologize for a colleague's orientation? This implies judgment and can make the situation more difficult. Would you apologize for a person's ethnicity or gender?

No. 3: "Why did you tell me that?"

It's important for people to bring their "whole selves" to work, and coming out of the closet is certainly a part of who one is. "The notion of leaving a big part of your self at home and walking into work is like walking around with two types of shoes on," says Selisse Berry, executive director of Out & Equal, an advocacy organization that provides services to companies, human-resource professionals, employee-resource groups and individuals.

No. 4: "Which bathroom do you use?"

Transgender people often are asked what gender they are. Such questions are inappropriate, warns Out & Equal. It is important to remember that gender identity is becoming an increasingly sensitive subject.

No. 5: "We are not close enough for you to share that information with me."

Not all employees are interested in their coworkers' personal lives. If you feel a colleague may have shared too much information, you can simply say, "Thank you for telling me that," says Peel.

No. 6: Referring to coworkers as "she-male."

There has been a lot of uproar these days over this phrase. Transgender employees often are the brunt of culturally insensitive jokes and comments.

No. 7:
"What do you like to do in bed?"

Sexual questions and comments are always off-limits. Not only do you run the risk of offending a colleague, you are also teetering the line of sexual harassment. It's important not to be confused between trying to understand someone's personal life and inappropriate sexual harassment, warns Kevin Jennings, executive director of GLSEN.

If you explore the Diversity Inc site, you'll find a lot more about what is and isn't appropriate to say regarding diversity hot-button issues in the workplace. This is a great place for managers to go to evaluate how well they are managing diversity issues in the office, and how to improve the office environment.

Biking in Boston

On Wednesday, I discovered that people in East Boston can't take the Blue Line one stop (across the harbor) with a bicycle, which threw a wrench in my plans to commute by bicycle on Wednesdays. So, I wrote letters to Dan Grabauskas, General Manager of the MBTA, and Mayor Menino, bike enthusiast. Here's my letter (I mention the Trek bike specifically since Menino rides one too):

Dear Mayor Menino,

I have been a resident of Boston for six years, and have been very impressed with your dedication to making Boston a better city for bicycle commuting. I recently acquired a small Trek women's bike, and this morning set about commuting to work near Government Center. I live at (address redacted) in East Boston, and in order to get to Government Center, I have to get across the harbor. Bikes are not allowed over the Tobin Bridge or in the Sumner or Williams Tunnels. Therefore, in order to get my bike over the harbor, I went to Maverick T stop this morning to take the T one stop to Aquarium.

I left my house a little later that I usually do, because I know that the trains running to Bowdoin have fewer passengers after 8:30 am, and there would be more room for my bike (which is not that large to begin with). I paid my fare and went through the gates at Maverick, and was stopped by a T inspector, who informed me that I can't bring a bike on to the T until 10 am. I understand that he was enforcing policy, but I have never before had a restriction on my taking a bike on the T during peak hours. To his credit, the Inspector didn't let me get on, but I snuck on while he was distracted, in the last car of a six-car 8:50 train. There was penty of room on it for me and my bicycle. (In fact, there was plenty of room on the four trains that went by prior, while the Inspector was holding me on the platform.)

I don't like not following the rules, but this is a discriminatory rule. If someone who lives in Allston wants to ride a bike to downtown for work, she can just go ahead and do it. If someone in East Boston wants to, she's stuck. I can't ride my bike in the tunnels, and I can't take it over the Tobin Bridge. This is seriously unfair that I am unable to commute by bike for one T stop (Maverick to Aquarium). I would like to request permission to move my bike by T from Maverick to Aquarium on Wednesdays at 8:30 am. I am completely amenable to riding in the last car of six car train to minimize space issues, and I am willing to wait for a train carrying fewer passengers that would have room for me. My bike takes up roughly the same space as a motorized wheelchair. If I were on one of those, you couldn't deny me access to the T, even though I would be taking up a lot of space. I take up less space than two-child baby strollers, which are also allowed on the T during peak hours.

I know that you don't control the T, but is there some way that you could coordinate with them to allow East Boston residents to take bikes on the Blue Line from Maverick to Aquarium on weekday mornings? I want to use my bike more, and appreciate that on my weekends I can ride for all of my errands and trips, and would really like to add my weekday commute to that list. Maybe you could help the T make an exception for me?

Yours truly,
Kate Hutchinson

I haven't heard back from Dan Grabauskas, but here's the Mayor's office reply:

Kate,

Thank you for emailing Mayor Menino. This email is to confirm we received your message. Your request has been forwarded to the appropriate personnel. This is an issue that the MBTA NEEDS to address.

Sincerely,
Mayor's Office
One City Hall Plaza
Boston, Ma 02201

It will be interesting to see if this issue could actually be raised. Considering it's an election year, here's a little issue that Menino can use to boost his image: helping East Bostonions become green commuters. AND taking on the T. That must be worth a lot of votes.

Assessing Your Leadership Skills

Are you a good leader? It's a hard question to answer, and one that takes serious thought. So where do you look for answers?

Start with your definiton of a good leader. Think of people you've worked with, and how you felt about their leadership. Do you have a leadership role model? Look at your industry and find the top rated leaders there--do they align with your idea of an ideal leader? If you can't think of a person who exemplifies your idea of leadership, begin with listing traits that you feel make a good leader. (For ideas on leadership traits, try visiting Jim Kouzes and Barry Posners Leadership Challenge site.)

Once you've defined the parameters of good leadership, the next step is to evaluate your own leadership qualities. If you feel that leading by example is an important part of good leadership, do you follow that principle? An excellent tool to help you assess general leadership traits can be found on MindTools. Jot down how you measure up to your own leadership standards.

When you look at your definition and your self-assessment, do you see any gaps? Writing this down helps you to find your leadership strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps you excel at motivating those around you, but you could improve your projection of yourself as a leader.

A self-assessment is the starting point, but also remember to solicit feedback from others. Ask a trusted mentor or supervisor how they would assess you as a leader. And ask someone who works with you outside of the office too. Consider where you shine as a leader; if you are a great leader of your Girl Scout Troop, but less so for your Strategy Team at work, you should find out what you're doing right for the Troop to improve your leadership of the Team.

Always remember that being a good leader means continually assessing your performance and looking for ways to improve. You'll notice that the The Seventh Habit of Highly Effective People is to "sharpen the saw"--meaning go back through the first six habits and apply them to your next level of personal achievement. It's important to know that you can always find some way to improve.

Recommended Reading:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The Leadership Challenge
Head, Heart and Guts

Well Mannered

While we all know that well-mannered women rarely make history, it is also true that they have a harder time breaking into C-level jobs. The way to the top is certainly polished with proper greetings, handshakes, and thank you notes.

Recently I have been looking for an Executive Finishing School in Boston, and while I haven't found one that both suits my needs and fits my budget, I did find a lovely company called Mannersmith, which maintains a blog of etiquette advice. I thought I would pass along this resource to others out there who are seeking to polish their social graces.

A Recipe for Delicious

The old phrase goes, "monkey see, monkey do..." Last week I read the NYT article on the new hipness of canning, and I felt a wave of nostalgia that brought me to this week's extracurricular project: pickle making. I have a stash of memories involving my family and making things in clean, glass Ball jars that were just so delicious. And half the fun was putting them in the jar, the best part being the sucking snap of the seal at the moment the jars reached the right temperature.

My family recipes are not for the exotic asparagus of the NYT article; they are for pickles, relishes, jams, and grapes. On my great-great-aunt's farm, one point in a triangle of my grandparents' home and my aunt's house, there was an old grapevine, over a century old, and I loved to pick the grapes from the vine. They were sweet and somewhat leathery--nothing like grapes from the grocery store. My father would collect them, store them in jars with sugar and water. Then after months, you could pull out the sweet grapes and eat them, and the water became a grape juice cocktail. When the old farm was sold ten or so years ago, my father took some cuttings from the old vine, and he now has his own vine growing over a homemade trellis on the deck.

I am far from the grapes, but there are plenty of cucumbers to be had. Yesterday I went down to Shaw's and with a little help from the produce department, I picked out fifteen fat juicy cucumbers. Here's the recipe:

Sweet Brown Pickles, from the kitchen of Grammy Kitten

• 3 to 4 quarts of cucumber chunks

This involves peeling the cucumbers, removing the seeds and cutting the remaining fruit into small chunks:

Put the cucumber pieces in a large kettle, and add 4 to 5 tablespoons of salt. (In the old days, we used Morton's. For this batch, I used fancy schmancy sea salt from Williams Sonoma.) Cover the kettle and shake to evenly distribute the salt. Leave for several hours so the salt will absorb the excess water from the fruit--I leave it overnight. In the morning, the cucumbers will be floating in salt water.

Dump the cucumbers into a collander and drain the salt water. RINSE THOROUGHLY. You do not want salt in this recipe, so rinse and rinse again. I rinse, then let them drain in the sink, rinse again, about four or five times. Taste a piece to make sure they are throughly de-salted. When they're clean, put the cucumber chunks back in the (also rinsed) kettle.

Put on a low heat. Add:

• 2 cups of cider vinegar
• 2 lbs of dark brown sugar
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg

Let simmer to a slow boil, for about half an hour to an hour, stirring occasionally. My grandmother's notes say "leave until soft and of a good color."

Once they're cooked, get out your jars, rinsed in hot water. (You can boil them if you want to be strictly by-the-book, but I just run them under the tap. Ladle in the pickles with an even amount of the juice into the jars, add the flat lid and the screw lid. (Now for the fun part.) Let them sit on the counter, and as they cool, the dissapating heat sucks in the flat lid in a vacuum seal. (I just heard mine pop!)

Now you can't eat these pickles right away, they need to cure. So put a label on them (file labels work fine, or you can usually buy labels from the hardware store that sells the jars), with either the date you made them, or a date three months later--which is when they are ready to eat. They are lovely with meatloaf or steak, or any red meat, but feel free to try them with whatever you want.

My Mom Is On Twitter

If you asked me 6 months ago if my mother would ever get into social networking, I would have said no, particularly based on the Facebook Incident.

This morning, I got a notice from Twitter that my mom is following me. Her one and only tweet to date involves her great love: Revolutionary War re-enacting. Apparently 14 hours ago, she was rolling black powder cartridges for firing the cannon for a Memorial Day ceremony. This would most likely have involved a Civil War era cannon, but my parents are also part of two cannon crews in New England from that era.

My first reaction to hearing my mom was on Twitter was a full on, "Good for her!" It's great to know that she's trying something new, and maybe she'll meet other re-enactors on Twitter. Then comes a thought: do I now need to censor what I'm tweeting? After a few moments of consideration I realize, I never tweet anything I wouldn't want a potential boss to see, and so I think I'm fine with my mother seeing that.

It's strange to think how far I've come when I first had a diary-style blog and I wrote some things that my whole miniature hometown started reading, and someone with my aunt's IP address began leaving seriously nasty comments... I suppose I'm happy I was burned a long time ago, before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, so I think I'm a little more careful than most people. I use my own name on all my writing now, because I know that someone will always figure out who I am. I see people who hide behind anonymity as cheaters, free to jeer and threaten without consequences.

Which is why I'm glad that my mom chose her own name for her Twitter account. (Well, the user name is a combo of family initials, but it shows up under her own name.) So, maybe there will be some Hi Mom tweets from me. If you're interested in learning about re-enacting (or even want to join up!) feel free to say hi: @sjkecrh.

Media Consumption

This week has been a lovely vacation between spring and summer semesters, and I've been taking the time to read the pile of books that waited patiently all spring for me:

Alberto Ferraras wrote this lovely Cinderella tale about a larger woman learning to find her inner beauty. It could be dismissed as fluff, but I really enjoyed the descriptions of B incrementally building her self-esteem. I also admit that reading about B's transformation was fairly uplifting, to the point that I started to re-evaluate my own self image. It's a quick read, good for the subway or beach.










Girls in Trucks was a lot heavier than I expected, but Katie Crouch has an incredible writing talent. The story follows Sarah Walters as she wanders from her tradition-steeped home in Charleston, South Carolina to the North. The characters are deftly created, multi-layered with real feelings. While Sarah is undoubtedly the heroine, the supporting characters are incredibly real and play major roles in the story. Some are mirrors for Sarah, some are alternate realities, and some hold promise for her future, or repeat her past. The ending reminds me of my favorite classic movies, where there is no neat ending, but enough resolution to allow the reader to imagine where the story will go beyond the last pages.






I loved Carrie Fisher's classic Postcards from the Edge; Wishing Drinking is another animal altogether. It's funny, witty, and based on Fisher's one woman show, which I now would love to go see, because I'm pretty sure it's all better in person. If you've never read any of Fisher's previous books, you might not want to start with this one; it's very self-referential, meandering--almost navel gazing. But above all, funny. I laughed out loud reading this book, and particularly enjoyed the photos that accompany the stories. Such as the two page layout of all the different ways that her family is connected, with its multiple marriages.







This one I'm still working on, but it's a classic historical murder mystery, which most people know is something I can't resist. I can remember when this book first came out, and everyone I knew read it. At the time I was not into crime novels, preferring to plow through, say, the complete works of Alexandre Dumas. (The Count of Monte Cristo is my absolute favorite book of all time.) I'll let you know how this one goes.










And then, in addition to books, I've picked up some albums from the library:






























I'd love to hear any suggestions for books or music for my next vacation in August.

Spam Yoon Strikes Again

Dear Mr. Yoon,

Last time I wrote about you, it was to complain about the unprofessional e-mail you sent me. I've received more e-mail from you since then, and while I would like to give you a silver star for "Most Improved E-mail Campaign," I just can't bring myself to do it.

Why? Because you've turned into a spammer. The first e-mail you sent had no "unsubscribe" link, and I never asked to be on your list. So I wrote to you at sam@samyoon.com and asked to be taken off of your list.

The next e-mail I received did include an unsubscribe link, but the link just took me to your homepage, with no instructions on how to be taken off the list. I wrote you another e-mail that you ignored.

The third e-mail, I replied to with a request to be taken off the list, and then I reported you as spam.

The fourth e-mail that arrived today is very irritating. I get a lot of crap e-mail messages, and I end up wasting a lot of time getting rid of them. Since I know e-mailing you won't get me off your list (although I tried again anyway), I'm hoping a nice blog post will get your attention. Maybe this post will be picked up by Universal Hub and then you'll notice it. And then, maybe, you will actually take my e-mail address off your mailing list.

Copy Editing

From the Nitpicking Department:

While the newspaper industry has been hit by audiences moving to digital news over the morning paper, I applaud the effort to keep up with breaking news via the web. However, I've noticed several online articles over the past few weeks with major typos. Last week, I found "in the the office" in a NY Times piece. Missing apostrophes are [not] everywhere. I often think of these things as one-offs, not caught by a spelling/grammar check program. I was completely disproven today.

A screenshot of an article from the WSJ on Capital One's loan losses:

Twice, Reiker uses "oversees" instead of "overseas." So I shot him an email pointing out the error (I certainly want to know when I've made errors). He replied almost instantly:

Yep. That’s wrong. Thank’s for pointing it out. Sorry
about that. Matthias

I think I'm going to send in my resume to the WSJ to check copy. And emails.