When Good Geezers Do Nothing...

—this article contributed by The Professor—

Seriously. This is kind of advertisement is no longer unusual. 

It’s not unusual to be dismayed by the Sunday paper; news is sometimes distressing, and always provocative.  But every once in a while there comes along a bit of trivia that should make a geezer stand up (slowly) and take notice.  

In this Sunday’s Times of London it was reported that men now average over 1700 pounds a year (about 2,300 dollars) on beauty products.  And it’s not just beauty products: gender equity is catching up in areas like cosmetic surgery.  American idol host Simon Cowell (granted, not a role model for most geezers) states that “to me Botox is no more unusual than toothpaste.  Breasts aren’t the only things being augmented either: requests for pectoral implants have risen notably,  and cosmetic surgeon Michael Progers offers: “Men want to enhance their masculinity, so jawline enhancement is important.  George Clooney looks attractive because of his strong jawline.”  Cosmetic interventions such as eyebrow plucking and body waxing are now a common thing, obtaining their own euphemistic description: “manscaping.”

One is tempted to be reasonable and say “so what? To each their own”, and for a while I tried to stay in that camp.  We are supposed to be non-judgemental about things, aren’t we?   But when did exercising judgement get to be such a bad thing to do? And let’s face it: some of this stuff is just ridiculous in a literal sense: it is "eminently worthy of ridicule."

 In thinking about what to do in the face of this encroaching silliness, I am tempted to slightly alter Edmund Burke’s well-known statement about evil and say: “All that is necessary for the triumph of silliness is for good men to do nothing.”  I think that doing nothing (and saying nothing) as this social trend builds is at minimum ill-advised and at worst threatening to the life(style) of sensible, spoiled men —in whose company I place myself.

Of the many advantages men have enjoyed over the years of patriarchy (perhaps unfairly), one of the most appreciated is that we can more or less dress and present ourselves in a way of our own choosing.  As long as men stay relatively neat and clean, with a minimum of body odour, we are have usually been allowed to go about our sartorial business as we please.  In this area there is a marked gender contrast.  Women have been consistently victimized by a culture where,  if they wished to be regarded seriously, a certain adherence to fashion and cosmetic norms is expected.  

One rather obvious example: consider the comment, attention and distraction caused by a woman choosing not to shave her legs. I’m not experienced in this area, but I would guess that most professional women would consider not shaving their legs to be beyond a reasonable possibility in a professional environment.  The social/visual/grooming norm has been set, and there is in this instance little a person can do but conform.  To a lesser degree, these social norms present themselves to women in the need to have hair regularly “done” and to have it done in a relatively current fashion.  I would argue the same could be said for dress. I’m not ashamed to say (although my wife says I should be) that I obtained my current job in 1987 after an interview to which I wore a conservative, cheap JC Penney suit which I had purchased in 1968. Could a woman reasonably choose to show up for a job interview in a twenty year old suit? 

The results of such social norms being set so strongly go beyond mere visual conformity.  Women’s clothes are far more expensive that men’s, and arguably of a much lower quality (they are certainly less durable.)  Women’s hair-cuts cost much more (but this—amusingly—doesn’t stop increasing numbers of men from switching from the cheap, sensible barber shop to the “hair salon.”)  Put simply: unchecked social pressures—and materialism—have contributed to establish social norms that significantly diminish the choices many women can make when determining how to present themselves in a professional environment.

These fellows need a little bit of gentle
ridicule. We geezers owe it to them. How else
will they realize their silliness?

One can argue the forces behind all of this.  Many instinctively point to sexism and assume that men’s “gaze” is the dominant propellant for these expectations.  I would argue that there is a lot of evidence to support the theory that women dress and present themselves as much to impress other women as to impress or attract men, but that’s for a separate essay.  The bottom line is that, by buying fashion magazines, by dressing their children a certain way, by actively noting the choice of dress at public events, by commenting in the rest room on others’ fashion taste (or lack thereof) people create an environment that reinforces certain body and dress expectations.  

Men have traditionally been relatively free from such socially-imposed expectations.  But with men spending 2,300 dollars on beauty products each year, can such expectations be far behind?  Can we prevent the day when a manicure becomes a businessman’s essential preparation for an out of town meeting, or when Botox injections become the antidote when a fifty-something man is labeled “behind the times?”

To my mind—and this will sound harsh—there is only one prudent course of action to take: we must make fun of those men who are contributing to the trend toward adoption of traditionally feminine beauty techniques.  The argument that it isn’t any geezer’s business what a Metrosexual up-and-comer does has a certain first-blush logic.  But when one thinks about how social expectations are formed, and how such expectations can come to impose restrictions (and additional cost) upon men who wish to be considered “traditionalists,” the issue isn’t quite so straightforward. 

Can we count on the fact that we will always be able to show up in a sensible suit and black wing-tips without being labelled “out-of-touch?”  Clearly young men are searching for ways by which they can project a sense of masculinity.  And if the reason young men look to fashion magazines and cosmetic surgery for solutions here because there are no older men close enough to them to provide guidance is only one of many theories to explain some of these trends.  But, really, would a quiet word along the lines of “your bronze base looks good, but—really—men don’t really need that kind of thing” be such a bad thing to offer someone who is seemingly foundering in the complicated currents of gender identity and projection? 

They took Jason, and suggested that he dye his hair and have his nails dealt with, and I said nothing; they took Josh and convinced him that only Dior could possibly be acceptable, and I said nothing; they took Jeremy and introduced him to defoliant, moisturizers and filler, and I said nothing. 

And then they came for me…

Embarrassed for Minnesotans

I'm just a little bit embarrassed for Minnesota today.

Time was when it would have taken a two-foot snowstorm and/or -30 degree temps for a week or two before we'd get at all concerned about the weather. We delighted in being a state that could stoically bear anything and everything the weather gods could throw at us. Not any more, it seems; we've become a state of wimps, judging from the evidence of the last two days.

Over the weekend, the local television news stations were touting a serious and dangerous winter storm bearing in from the southwest. When I looked at the details of the forecast, though, I was rather taken aback: 3-6" of snow, mixed with a little sleet.

And in the event itself, the situation for even more tame—about 2.5-3", maybe.

Now, this is starts to qualify as meaningful
 snow. In my day, we thought nothing of
walking to school barefoot in weather like this.
Not like today's wimpy youth. 

This is no "storm," for crying out loud.  It's barely even a snowfall worth mentioning. Surely back in the day (which is to say the 1950s through 80s) we would barely have given this little bit of weather a second glance. It's no more newsworthy than a full moon once a month. But for the last decade or two, Minnesota has become almost as nervous about the weather as, say, Charlotte NC. It's starting to be embarrassing.

In recent years, the typical evening news forecast of a local television affiliate dedicates a full 15 minutes out of  a thirty minute broadcast to hysteria about the weather. And it isn't just a winter phenomenon; in the summer months, we're now quite hysterical about the incredibly faint odds that we will be sucked up by a tornado during one of the frequent thunderstorms that plague the midwest from April to August.

These days, it's really not uncommon now for Minnesota schools to close if we get a foot of snow, and for mothers to huddle in the basement with their kids if there is a report of a possible tornado 200 or 300 miles away. Back in the days of Geezer youth, on the other hand, I remember exactly zero days when we closed school for snow; and a pending thunderstorm was an opportunity for kids to gather in the yard in excitement and stare with wonder at the sky, hoping desperately that we might see a funnel cloud.

Now, Minnesota has always been overly fascinated by the weather. It comes from our farm heritage, where favorable weather could bless your family's financial stability, and a terrible storm might mean utter bankruptcy. But the traditional farmer, while obsessed with the weather, was and is still a pretty stoic guy. What in the world has lead to this recent collapse of Minnesota weather stoicism?

It is, I think, partly because we have universally become a nation feeling entitled to continual comfort. Our cars these days have dual climate controls—as though it's too much to ask a husband and wife to agree on the temperature settings. We have leather seats that heat our asses in the winter, and cool them in the summer.  It seems to escape people that it makes sense to feel cold when it's cold outside, and to sweat when it's hot. Bad weather is uncomfortable, and hence we feel entitled to complain about it a lot,  since we believe our right to never-ending comfort is inviolable.

Secondly, though, and maybe more importantly, I blame the news media. The networks and local affiliates seem quite desperate for drama these days, and since there is weather every day they must make good use of it for the 24-hour news cycle. Minnesota is not a state where there is a lot of traditional drama, so we make full use of weather to feed the news cycle beast. There is nothing so obvious as the disappointment of a television weather forecaster who must acknowledge that the "storm of the century" he'd been predicting was a flat-out lie.

I hate to say it, but we Minnesotans are on the verge of losing our reputation to the folks in Massachusetts and Connecticut, who didn't complain much at all when they were just belted with 3 ft. of snow. They will complain loads about the Celtics and Patriots, but bear an ice storm very nicely.

Suck it up, fellow Minnesotans. I want to hear no more complaining about the weather this year. Or at least not until ice-fishing season starts next November.

The Imaginary Ego

—this article contributed by Mercurious—

It's a common assumption that each individual among us has an ego. That is to say, we have a readily identifiable "I", or "Self” that serves as the author of our experience of the world. We're so sure of it that we capitalize the personal pronoun "I" when we depict it in language, and almost no one (except maybe devout Buddhists) would ever question the existence of the "Self." Writers like Thich Nhat Hann, the very popular Vietnamese spiritualist, will suggest that the utter interconnectedness of all things makes an autonomous, independent ego/self an illusion. And some of the mystical, transcendental writers and artists, from old-timers like Meister Eckhart through new age writers like Echhart Toll will suggest the existence of a kind universal soul that is a more primary reality than the illusion of individual ego.

But these are the exceptions that prove the rule: virtually all of us take our "self" as a given. We believe that there is a stable and identifiable ego or self lurking within —an entity that is the ground zero, the prime mover of our experience in the world.

But are we really sure of this?  There are moments when an objective view seems to call this assumption into question. For one thing, whatever you might want to define as "self" clearly changes from moment to moment, from circumstance to circumstance. The person I am when at work supervising colleagues in our publishing business is a considerably different person than I am as a father to my adult kids, which is in turn different than the husband I am to my wife, which is much, much different than the smart-ass crony I am when hanging out in the company of my geezer pals. Now, I might be more mercurial than most in this regard, but I daresay this social  variability is true of most everyone. Don’t we  all “wear a face we keep in a jar by the door?” sometimes? Are we really different than Bruce Springsteen when he admits “two faces have I”?

 If there is a definable "self", why is does it vary so much from moment to moment?  If "self" was a piece of hardware, a car, for instance, it's as though it is a Suburu station wagon one moment, a Ford f150 pickup the next, and a Chevy Corvette in the next instant.

And it's not only changing social circumstances that change the self. I'd argue that even in the absence of other people requiring us to don different social stances, each of us really changes rather fluidly from moment to moment. One morning my commute to work might find me to be a very sanguine, philosophical self utterly at peace with the world; another morning might find me grumpy and a little hostile to the world if I've had a bad night (or maybe a little more Scotch than is healthy). Here, too, you are hard pressed to define anything that is a concrete, identifiable Self that remains the same from moment to moment.

And it goes even further. I'd further offer the suggestion that each of us, even in any given moment, is really a multiple personality with different moods and "selves" that interact with one another. This is not psychopathology in any way, just the human experience. We all have moments of inner debate, where we consider the rewards and costs of behavioral choices before adopting a course of action. There are a whole range of human experiences that seem to be based on one aspect of the personality passing judgment on another "self."  Embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride—all these very common human experiences are really nothing more than one "self" observing and passing judgment on another.

So where is the single identifiable "self" that we all want to believe in? If you make a concerted effort to find that self, can you even do it?

So it seems to me that there is another possibility, which is to surrender the defense of the illusion itself. We spend a good deal of energy and angst trying to establish and defend the boundaries of ego and self against other people and the world at large. (As my friend, the Professor puts it, we "take ourselves too seriously").  An awful lot of misery in the world is caused by this effort, both on an individual psychological level as we struggle to be that lonely ego in the world, and, by extension, on a global scale as nations insist on the sanctity of their geographical and ethnic boundaries. Have you ever considered how absurd it is, really, for an individual to be born on the earth, and then to have constraints placed on where he may wander on the surface of the planet? Like "self", national and ethnic identities are pretty false constructs. There  is nothing so imaginary as a line on a map, and nothing so ironic as ethnic groups at war with one another even though genetically there is no difference between them whatsoever. 

What happens, then, if we imagine for a while that it is not a definable "self" that is the author of our experience, but rather that the self is a fluid, ever-changing thing that is actually authored and defined by shifting phenomena? I'm suggesting something exactly opposite to common wisdom: that it is actually experience that defines self, not self that creates experience. Who we are at any given moment is largely governed by the inner and outer phenomena we experience in the moment, not by any kind of prima facie truth.

At the very least, it's an interesting spiritual callisthenic, one that can be rather refreshing and restorative.  You can get the sensation of an enormous burden and weight of artificial responsibility lifted, if for example, you take a few minutes to consider the simple act of breathing. What if there is no "you" that is choosing to breath as an isolated, lonely individual in the world; but rather that the cosmic world is "breathing you" as one element in a larger connected whole. And contrary to the fears that taking such an approach is to surrender free will, I wonder if we'd be considerably more free if relieved of the tyranny of ego defense. This subjugation of ego is, of course, the goal of much spiritual pursuit, and perhaps is the impetus behind the use of mind-altering drugs—ala Aldous Huxley.

And the more discerning among you will now see the inherent dangers in this line of argument. (One of my Geezer friends reviewing this piece prompted that recognition.) While there is certainly some merit for taking a break from ego, it’s also possible for ego/self dissolution to be a problematic event. Drug abuse is one such danger. And one definition of psychosis, in fact, is that it is a personality that has lost all boundaries between self and other. Individual personality that is totally subsumed in collective can lead to nasty things like a Nazi political movement.

So perhaps it is not that ego/self needs to be entirely dissolved, but that we need to take a vacation from it occasionally, or better yet, acknowledge that while Self exists, it is a flexible, fluid entity. Examined closely, the “Self” is a concept that more closely resembles the vaporous nature of a cloud than a fortress to be defended at all costs.  There is considerably freedom in loosing our hold on such an unreal construct.

It's worth considering, anyway.

A Look into the VA system.

As my father-in-law has been going through the process of being diagnosed then treated for a heart attack, we've spent quite a lot of time at the Minneapolis VA hospital system over the last three weeks, and it has been quite an eye-opener.

First of all, there is the paradox of the VA system itself. On the one hand, the physical hospital itself, and all the incumbent technology and facilities, are quite state-of-the-art. I have been in private hospitals with very lofty reputations in which the facility itself has been pretty old-fashioned and out-of-date. Not so with the VA, where the hospital building features bright, wide hallways, enormous waiting rooms for families, and intensive care units that really appear to have all the bells and whistles that modern technology can offer.

But managing this finely tuned  race car of a hospital is a managerial system that is positively medieval in its clumsiness and inefficiency. When my father-in-law had his heart attack, he was initially brought to the University of Minnesota, a world-renowned research hospital where the very first open-heart surgeries were pioneered. It's the place where Christian Barnard, the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant, was trained. Today, it is still a world-renowned hospital that is absolutely cutting-edge when it comes to heart treatment. So this is the facility that did the initial work-up on this 87-year old veteran, the hospital that told us precisely what was going on.

But the old guy is part of the VA insurance program, so we needed to then transition to that system for the actual care. The VA, in its infinite wisdom, simply could not or would not accept any of the reports or information offered by one of the world's best hospitals, so it started over from scratch performing the same tests and workups that had already been done (presumably at significant taxpayer expense), and then announced exactly the same findings we already had from two weeks earlier.

As a result, my father in law finally got his by-pass surgery yesterday, a full three-weeks after his initial heart attack. Not within a few days, as you would rightfully expect. A friend of mine, a younger veteran from Vietnam, smiled ruefully when I told him this story, and said this is pretty much the same story as with the American military itself—great, space age equipment, but an administrative system that is utterly feudal in its processes and logic.

Ironically enough, once you get into the system, you then rise above the administrative nightmare at the VA.  The actual teams doing heart surgeries for the VA are the same top-notch teams from the University of Minnesota, who come over a couple of days each week to bang out these heart surgeries like nobody's business. The heart ICU units and all the doctors and nurses there are consumate professionals, and we couldn't be more pleased with what we've seen, once we made it about the first-floor administrative offices. Within six hours of having his chest split wide open, his heart stopped and replumbed and then jolted back to life, the old guy was awake, alert, and asking when he'd be able to fish again.

I've spent quite a lot of time at the VA cafeteria recently, and this, too, is an interesting study. The clientele is divided into two rough groups these days. There is an older segment that includes veterans and families from the era of Vietnam through WW2, and a much younger segment populated by the folks from the various gulf and afghanistan conflicts.

It was a little startling for me at first to see that the Vietnam and WW2 vets seem like part of the same club, now. In my own head, of course, since Vietnam was the war of my own youth, I think of these guys as being far, far younger than WW2 vets. But these groups look much more like each other now than they do to the younger vets, and that makes sense when you think about it. Vietnam started in the mid 60s, less than 20 years after WW2 ended, and the older Vietnam vets are approaching 70 years of age, some of them. On the timeline of history, these groups are quite close together when compared to the youngsters fighting in Afghanistan today.

While there is a similarity of appearance between the Vietnam vets in their mid to late 60s and the 80-year olds from WW2, with their grey hair and gimpy knees, it's interesting to see how the Vietnam vets set themselves apart. There is a kind of uniform you see among those vets seeking treatment at the VA. Many of them wear caps, for example. Rarely are these armed forces caps; baseball teams, farm implement companies, fishing tackle manufacturers,; all these are advertised on the caps worn by so many Vietnam vets. You also see quite a few of the soft "bush" caps that resemble the soft fishing hats sometimes worn by fly fishermen. In the winter, it's pretty common to see these vets dress in hooded sweatshirts under heavy plaid flannel overshirts. It's so common as to be something of a stereotype. Vietnam was a pretty working class group, by and large, since so many of the college boys deferred in those days of the draft.

The WW2 vets, aside from being notably older when you look closer, seem to be prouder of their heritage, as they are more likely to wear clothing that is marked with quiet references to the armed forces branch or even the ships or divisions in which they served. Other than this, though, there is little to distinguish them from retired school teachers or hardware clerks.

But the larger group now are the veterans from the Gulf and Afghanistan, with very young families including toddlers and infants. It's a little shocking to see 26-year old fathers without legs bouncing infant children on their laps as they sit in wheelchairs waiting to see their doctors. And there are so many of them: so many young men with missing limbs or heavily bandaged legs that are being salvaged.  Minneapolis serves the needs of five full midwestern states, and so many of the worst injuries come here for treatment.

As difficult as life was for the Vietnam era vets, I fear it will be worse for this group. Three separate wars spread over a long, long historical period means that are many, many of these veterans who will come to depend on the VA system as they grow older. And because battlefield treatment is so much better these days, there are great many very seriously injured soldiers who might not have survived the same injuries had they been incurred in 1968.

In a few years, the plight of this veterans group could well be worse than that experienced by my own contemporaries from the Vietnam period. And it seems to be already starting, as a newpaper story this morning reported that veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 22 each day.

Overheard: Feb.1, 2013

In the enclosed above street walkways of downtown Minneapolis at lunch today, I came across an elderly man of slightly disheveled appearance peering through the window of a high-end jewelry store, bending over to look at the expensive rings and necklaces. His clothes were slightly worn, though not soiled as is often the case with the street people who stay outdoors, even in the winter. He wore one of those furry caps with the earflaps, though, and a felt jacket with a lumber-jack plaid pattern you associate with the Alaska bush country, so he clearly had come in from the cold recently.

Our friend was in striking contrast to the young and fashionable professionals that clog the indoor retail "streets" at lunch-hour. He was wholly ignored by all of them as they scurried to their noon-hour flirtations and fashionable lunches. They gave him not even the barest of glances.

As he peered at the pretty shiny baubles in the window of the jewelers, the man bobbed his head and sang in a clear, vibrato baritone voice that didn't at all suggest mental deficiency, except for the incongruity of the setting.

"Gooood Day, Sunshine....Gooood Day, Sunshine..."

Geezers in Management

A while back,  I  promoted a young woman from a rank-and-file position into one with low-to-midlevel managerial responsibilty. She now supervised three others with functions similar to her own.

I hold weekly one-on-one meetings with my direct reports, and at the most recent meeting I asked this new manager how things were going and if there were any notable problems. She signed and leaned back heavily in her chair. "Managing the processes and the work flow is a breeze," she said. "But I had no idea that managing personalities was going to be so damned hard."

Any geezer in a position of business management will smile in sympathy.  This is exactly the issue in corporate management: navigating the strange and unpredictable personality conflicts and emotional baggage that otherwise competent workers bring to the workplace.

A friend of mine, an affliliate geezer, points out that as a species we have only come down out of the trees about a month ago. What he means is that we all still labor under a huge burden of fairly primitive fearful and hostile biological instincts, and that we are by no means all that civilized yet as a primate species.  (If you want proof of this, just attend a professional hocky or football game, or go to a rock concert, and watch the behavior of the performers and audience very carefully.)

Nowhere is this more true than in the workplace, where apparently normal people can behave in paranoid, unconscious ways that bedevil a manager.

Here are some stereotypes that most managerial geezers will be familiar  with:

• The Entitled Youngster
It's not entirely fair to say that this is a stereotype confined to young workers, though I will say you see more or it here then in other demographic groups. This is the worker who expects to succeed, or even receive praise, for almost everything he or she does. One young editor I managed, after having the same marketing piece sent back for revision several times and then finally earning praise for an adequate result,  said blankly, "I had no idea it was hard to do a good job."

• The Sandbagger
This can be a worker who is otherwise smart and talented, but whom has decided to put the bulk of their effort into doing the bare minimum to get by. He will routinely arrive 30 minutes late and leave 30 minutes early, and take extra long lunches just as long as he can get away with it. If you point out to him that a particular task could have been done more completely, better, he will say: "Well, you didn't tell me exactly what you wanted."  This becomes something of a mantra for this guy, as he will always say that he was lacking the full perspective on what is required—even after a decade in the job. With this guy, I give him a performance review that includes about two sentences. When he complains, I ask him to enumerate in writing all the performance standards he'd like feedback on.

• The Saboteur
This is a truly creepy character who actively seeks to undermine your company's success. It's hard to know what drives these characters, and fortunately I've known only a few over the course of 30 years.  This is the one who you worry might be erasing a company file server is he's given access to it. I had an art director once who spent hours trying to get coworkers to sign a petition arguing that the color monitors being used produced harmful radiation. It was purely an effort to cause trouble. If you even suspect you've got one of these, fire them post-haste.

• The Ledbetter Paranoid
This is somebody who sees gender or age discrimination behind almost every shrub. As a manager, you very much want people who'll remind you if there are instances of unequal pay for equal work, but there are also those that see such discrimination everywhere. At one point, I used to start staff meetings with the phrase "Okay kids, let's get started."  Mind you, some of these folks in attendance were even older than me.  Months later, when I let an incompetent worker go, he filed a grievance arguing that my calling everybody "kids" was evidence of age discrimination on my part.

• The Procrastinator
A worker who will never, ever change. These are the folks who are just plain wired to always put things off until the last moment. There is no amount of personal coaching or career education that will create the proper habits in this guy. They never, ever, will get anything done on time. With one of these folks, I lock the door to the conference room 30 seconds after a meeting is due to start. And then yell about them missing the meeting.

• He (She) Who Is Without Sin
Occasionally you'll run into the worker who is genuinely talented at making you believe that the fault for every problem lies with someone else rather than himself.  Oddly enough, this often is not a terribly conniving or deliberate act—often this fellow is really wired so as to be completely unable to recognize his own mistakes. Proper approach: continue to smilingly point out his or her mistakes, and accept no passing of the buck. Once in a great while, this type will have an epiphany and grow up.

• "Mea Culpa"
Less common, and also less problematic than "he who is without sin" is this worker, who really insists on accepting blame for almost anything. Sometimes this is simply a worker who is terribly uncomfortable "ratting out" a fellow worker who has screwed up,  though occasionally you might find an example of someone who really wants scolding and discipline for some perverse reason. Usually, this is not a difficult problem to overcome, though.

• Malingerer
Very common: the guy who seems to be sick constantly. I personally don't have a problem with somebody taking a mental health day occasionally to play hooky, but there are some of these folks  who treat sick leave as vacation days, and are tardy or leave early whenever they have a headache,  or do all their doctor appointments on company time.  Almost everybody deals with these folks, so there's no point in discussing it.

• The Control Freak
The worker who insists on having his or her hands on all reins, and who really can't trust anyone enough to delegate even the smallest detail. Seems to be more prevalent in positions of authority; in fact, you may well have been managed by this person yourself. If you manage a control freak in a mid-level position, it will take a lot of coaching to get them to loosen the reins. It can be done, though.

• Disciple of The Word
A very annoying one for me: the worker who insists that if it isn't in his job description, he can't be expected to do it. I've had some workers who really believe that before tackling anything new, they require an entirely new job description that adds a new bullet point articulating the new task. One asked me to add "sending faxes" to his job description. To which I responded "Please fax in your resignation."

• The Child of Dysfunction
Here's the worker who is quite vocal about their private misfortune, and will not only tell you about their miserable childhood or recently failed marriage, but will blame virtually every work-related problem on this fact. There's nothing wrong with having colleagues on your own level with whom you share friendly confidences on personal time,  but at the point where a worker wants you to excuse their poor performance because his wife drinks too much and he never gets enough sleep, you've got a serious problem. The proper response: "Everybody has problems. Suck it up. "


—this viewpoint offered by Mercurious—

A Tale of Long Underwear

Okay, so I'll admit it. I wear long underwear sometimes. My kids would undoubtedly say something like "TMI,"  but there you have it.

I live in Minneapolis. It is winter-time. It is cold. I am a geezer, so my circulation is a little less robust than when I was 40.  When you are facing a week with temperatures dipping to -8 to -16 degrees F. in the mornings, I'm not the only geezer commuter who will admit to wearing a layer of discreet long underwear under my business-casual attire as I brave the walk to and from the bus stops, as 20 mph winds cut like a knife.

This is a tale of long underwear.

Last week, realizing that we were in for a severe cold spell, and also realizing that my closet was under-stocked with the appropriate cold-weather under-layer, I stopped in at Target to pick up another pair or two of nice thin long-johns—the kind you can wear comfortably under clothing without feeling like an complete rube. Trust me, this can be completely acceptable attire when you live on the edge of the polar icecap—a Minnesota winter.

Some years ago, I came across a type of long-john that was very thin, not at all like the heavy, puffy white thermal underwear we geezers knew from our youths. The new version is pretty practical, and almost stylish in some ways. The fabric is a blend of something called polypropylene and other synthetics.

So I thought I was buying the same new-fangled long-underwear I'd come to appreciate as a genuine and valuable innovation.  That is, until yesterday morning when the morning temp was -15 degrees and I went to get dressed in the morning.

The odd item I put on was a strangely stretchy, snug-fitting garment that required me to pull it up over my legs starting at the bottom, by sort of scrunching up the material and gradually tugging it up and up until full coverage was achieved. It was a full 60 second operation. At first I thought I must have inadvertently purchased the wrong size. But no, it was marked correctly for my current girth.

No, this not a rendition of me in my long underwear.
The reality is not nearly so appealing. 

Then I looked very closely at the two garments side by side: the long underwear I've worn successfully and this new contraption.  Nearly identical on the surface.  My favorite is something called "Cold Gear Men's Full -length Bottoms."  The new one I was struggling with: "Cold Gear CORE Full length bottoms."

A brief bit of research tells me the following: this kind of "core" garment is designed to squeeze your legs rather fiercely, which supposedly has some merit when you exercise very harshly, in terms of keeping blood flow moving. It also supposedly lets you recover quicker from very stern athletic regimens. It is a available in both tops and bottoms, long sleeves and short, but is distinctly different the last generation polypropylene-blend underwear that I appreciated. Some NFL players wear this new stuff because they swear it causes them to ache less in the days immediately following a game.

But don't be fooled, geezers. This is really nothing more than pantyhose for men. There are no toes on these things, but putting them on certainly reminds me of the strange contortions observed when my wife puts on pantyhose. The fit must be exactly like she experiences, I imagine.

Having no other long underwear to wear at the moment, and it being damned cold outside, I tugged the silly things up over my ass this morning,  put on the rest of my clothes and went to work. Now, it wasn't entirely unpleasant to have this very mild squeezing of my legs and butt and naughty bits all day long, but I did feel a little like a tube of toothpaste being squeezed by a fist around the bottom. It did help cut the wind, though, and I was distinctly warmer than I would have been wearing just trousers.

But undressing that night, I became dizzy and nearly fell over when the blood rapidly flowed back into my legs after having been forced into upward migration all day.

I may have to retire my magical underwear.