Employers always say they want employees who are bold, creative, self-directed, take initiative, and aren’t afraid to speak up. But what they really want are worker droids. Read more about this and other Top Management Lies, thanks to Kathy Sierra.
Disturbing the Store
My vote for “Prank of the Month” (well, last month) goes to the New York-based Improv Everywhere crew for flooding a Best Buy department store with around 80 people dressed almost like their staff.
The full report on this prank shows how the store management couldn’t cope — they didn’t like it, and people get nervous when confronted with something “different”.
It’s also interesting reading the comments on Bruce Schneier’s write-up of this event, where so many commenters fail to see the difference between a “threat to the store” and a “threat to the perceived authority of the store managers”.
Boost, call me “Amandaâ€
Boost Juice Bars annoy me. It’s not the product — that’s just fruit juice. It’s not the loud music — that’s just a futile attempt to drown out the machines. No, it’s because they always want to know my name, when all I want is juice.
For Boost, this is part of “Our Guarantee”. I can’t link to it, they’ve got one of those stupid Flash websites. But it includes:
Be polite enough to call you by your first name.
Dodgy grammar aside, this assumes everyone wants to be called by name in a juice bar. I don’t. Apart from having an unusual name and not wanting to draw attention to it, like many people who grew up in the country I find it rude when a stranger demands my name. And I find it uncomfortable when some teenager calls out my name in a busy shop.
As Allan and Barbara Pease write in The Definitive Book of Body Language:
People raised in sparsely populated rural areas… need more Personal Space than those raised in densely populated cities.
This applies to psychological space as well as physical. I won’t tell a stranger my name until I know them a bit better. If I’m just buying juice, I’ll probably never see them again. So I’ll be polite, but I won’t want them to know anything personal. And I won’t be so rude as to ask them either.
Boost does this with best intentions. “Our Guarantee” also says:
Make you feel great, give you something to smile about and always give you a reason to choose BOOST!
But once I’ve placed my order, handed over cash and received change, that’s the end of the transaction. Psychologically I’ve moved into that state called “staring aimlessly at random objects while waiting”. A personal question at this point is unsettling.
So Janine Allis, founder of Boost, I’ll continue to tell your staff my name is Amanda Vanstone and let them suffer a little discomfort too. Unless , of course, there’s another juice bar nearby where I can remain comfortably anonymous.
Yes, it looks like tabloid meth
So did Four Corners go all tabloid over methamphetamine last night? I don’t know yet, I’m catching the repeat on Wednesday. But a friend certainly found it “really disappointing”.
“The Ice Age was ‘the usual deal’,” he says, showing the extreme cases and linking it with heroin. It left his questions unanswered.
I was really hoping for an investigation of the weekend recreational culture, which so many people seem to be able to sustain…
I don’t know many that can afford 3 grams a day…
Well, no, given that 3 grams would cost about $2000. [OK, that’s retail, but even as a low-end dealer buying wholesale that’s still a very expensive habit.]
If there are 73,000 addicts as claimed, a lot caused by no heroin, how many recreational users are there? What is the damage? How do people juggle it and what [do you] do if you’re falling?
Predictable Response
The ABC program guestbook is mostly predictable.
There’s the usual bleating from the talkback radio herd who can’t stand their hard-earned tax dollars supporting these blah blah blah kill them like Singapore why when I was a lad my dad used to whack sense into me by golly jingo. Yeah, them.
There’s the usual stream of “shocked” and “horrified” townsfolk, for whom the freak show achieved its shock-horror aim.
But occasionally, though, there is clarity.
Linthi: There is an underbelly of society that exists to which we only pay cursory attention. If these advanced addicts were offered a choice of immediately going clean or a lifetime supply of Ice, I know which they would choose. As mad as it sounds, some people like this life, it’s a culture in which they are comfortable.
This “underbelly” has always been with us, of course, and always will be. There will never be a Utopia. Some will never fit in — because they’ve slipped and fallen, or were pushed, or were defective or were damaged.
Drug Porn Exploitation
Barbara Farrelly was “disturbed” by the program’s approach.
Barbara Farrelly: struck me that you offered no hope to addicts. The rooms of Narcotics Anonymous are full of people who have overcome addictions.
I feel you also exploited people who could hardly give informed consent to being exposed in their degradation. They seemed happy enough to clown for the cameras on their highway to hell. Touting this as “rare footage” is ingenuous. Taking pictures of these guys was like taking candy from a baby…
I felt like I’d been subject to drug porn…
And while you are talking up ice as a major problem, it is estimated that every year 70,000 Australians die as a result of alcohol abuse and a further 20,000 from the effect of smoking.
You failed to present both sides of the story: Addiction isn’t pretty but recovery is beautiful.
Billing the program as showing us how the drug is affecting Australian society, but only showing those enduring the worst addictions, is like promising us a documentary on the wine industry and only talking to sherry-soaked derelicts. For shame.
That said, the special broadband edition of the program has an excellent timeline documenting the drug’s heritage and what apppear to be longer versions of the interviews. Why wait until the repeat?
4 Corners’ Tabloid Line of Meth
Flagship current affairs program Four Corners covers “The Ice Age” next week:
A shocking close-up study of the new drug of choice — “ice” — and its trail of human wreckage.
Crystal methamphetamine is indeed more common that a decade ago. I’m glad someone with the respect and authority of Four Corners is taking a look. But I hope this lurid tabloid screeching is only the marketing department.
There’s more…
Beer is Healthy
On a Sunday morning, I’m especially pleased to discover that beer is good for you.
According to New Scientist magazine (so it must be true), beer may be as good for your health as red wine and green tea. Apparently it dampens down arterial inflammation that leads to heart disease.
But even better!