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LOL I use office messenger to talk to all the girls around here hahaha.All the boys from sales & CS are over here trying to chat up us girls in admin all damn day long. I wish they would GTFO of here and let us surf the internet in peace.
All the boys from sales & CS are over here trying to chat up us girls in admin all damn day long. I wish they would GTFO of here and let us surf the internet in peace.send them to this thread and see what they think.
LOL I use office messenger to talk to all the girls around here hahaha.All the boys from sales & CS are over here trying to chat up us girls in admin all damn day long. I wish they would GTFO of here and let us surf the internet in peace.
chewing ice is a sign of sexual frustration. You should help her feel better.
Amazing that my office of 95% women get anything done. Since we all stand around jabbering about how our husbands pick up all the credit card bills from our beauty regimes and 3 hour lunch shopping excursions.
Oh, wait. . .
Plain and simple, this is a management issue, not a gender issue. Clearly, your management has no problems in allowing an employee a three hour break to get their hair done (now if it's PTO, stop ing about it - pto is there to be used for anything they like and if they want to waste it on frivolity, that is their decision and none of it impacts you). If management is ok with employees clearly discussing non-work-related topics for extended periods of time, that is on them.
Stop bringing gender into it. In my old office, I did my job and 60% of my coworker's job. HE didn't show up until 9:30 each day and HE left by 4:30 each day and HE missed deadlines that affected ME (FEMALE) so I had to pick up the slack. Did I make unfounded, sexist, overly generalized statements about male coworkers? No, I ed about him.
BTW - it is still sexist, even if you don't mean all women. Saying 'No Offense, but as a rule, you people suck' is still offensive. Just about your coworkers, and not about women.
And for whomever brought up women on FMLA. Kiss my ass. I had to burn a 10 days of FMLA for my miscarriage. My husband also got to use FMLA to stay with me when I was dealing with the medication to make me pass the tissue. Men are eligible for FMLA too, and not using it is on them. Oh, and additionally, one of my MALE employees just took three weeks of FMLA to cover his knee surgery. Guess we should all slam him too, huh? Him, and all the other lazy assholes who have the audacity to have knee surgery after they destroyed it playing high school football. Those guys all suck!
Last edited by easjer; 12-09-2008 at 03:57 PM.
DUDE THAT. SHE IS HUGE AND GROSS. SHE HAS WARTS ALL OVER HER FACE AND NECK. She does have a oral fixation though for she is always eating or chewing something.
Man I've just gotta say that I am really surprised how much work time some men waste monitoring others work habits!! Why don't they just do their work like they want everyone else to?
You dont work and stay at home all day so stfu!!Man I've just gotta say that I am really surprised how much work time some men waste monitoring others work habits!! Why don't they just do their work like they want everyone else to?
I slack off at work like none-other. I shine though because I take my work home and get stoned as before whipping the out of it late at night. Something about working in an office is just sickening to me. 4 hours at my home desk feels like 2, but 15 minutes spent doing actual work, while I'm at work, is like a ing eternity. Probably the fluorescent lighting and leg shackles.
That kind of interaction I can understand and engage in sometimes myself because it can be done at my desk while I am still working or waiting for someone to call in. The behavior that irks me is the walking away from your desk (making yourself unavailable to take a call) to discuss non-work things with people in another area...why should I (or anyone still at their desk working) have to foot the work responsibility of someone else because she feels like discussing someone's newborn or asking about how American Idol was last night? And to top it off, those "socialites" are the people that get the good reviews/promotions because that behavior is deemed "team oriented" and being "social with your co-workers". It's a double standard I don't understand and probably never will...
Sometimes yeah it feels like forever. In crunch time though it feels like there isnt enough time especially when your carrying the load of others that you work with.
See? that makes me the perfect impartial observer! And it's not like I've never had a job; been there, done that.
your just arguing for the sake or arguing. To your original ques. We observe others around us because you have no choice. Stuck in a desk for many hours its kind of hard NOT to observe that .
Anybody else completely isolated along political/socio-econmic/cultural lines from their co-workers? Most def makes for some interesting people watching.
I think it's the nature of the job. I could only take so much of it for a while until I had to get up, even if it was to get a drink of water...and by that time I was talking to someone at Reworks. I understand the double standard there. I was past up for a training position because the other person knew the manager and I had only worked there for like 3 months..and that's another story.
And if there are reports or whatnot that say you are getting in as many calls (for us it was 20 per hour) and then Juanita Talksalot only has 15 with an average talk time below yours...then you need to look into that. Then Juanita gets the promotion over you. That's stupid. But if she's getting that 20 and is able to talk at the same time, then I don't know what to say.
I wasn't painting a brush on all women, just speaking to my personal experience around the office that I have observed. I'm sure there are penty of guys that do it too and I would be just as upset if the actions I described were done by a guy but it just isn't as common where I work.
Those es! (non-gender specific) I'm lucky I don't have that problem.
I can type while completing work related phone calls, even being a male I can multi-task.
If you'll take the time to look at the beginning of my thread you'll notice I was just taking a representative sample of where I work. I pointed out that there are mostly likely plenty of female employees who work hard and plenty of male employees who waste time at work. Calm down.
pppffffttttt women
And I can be social, I don't mind saying o to someone on the way back from the copier, and I can from time to time engage in pointless small talk. Now if I stopped to join in the huge amount of useless conversations that take place around my office? I don't see how I would ever get things done.
Plus, I would think as a commnity organizer it's part of your job to be social. When I'm at my desk working, I'm not getting paid to be social. They're paying me to act professionally and get the job done.
The Myth of Multi-Tasking
Can't copy and paste, but...
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/public...f-mul asking
Worth reading just for the University of London study on internet/phone multi-tasking comparative to being stoned on marijuana. Guess which causes a larger drop in IQ relative to your main task? Two times over.
I'm an independent contractor who telecommutes from home now, but my last "real" job was in a travel call center in Southern Virginia. I was promoted to this high-volume sales position, and the room they were in, there was only one desk free for the night shift, so I took it. It was next to the redneck. There was me, the redneck then across from us, the two Puerto Ricans, then across from them the two Black people, then across from them, the two Hispanics that are not Puerto Rican. The girl whose job I took had been a redneck, so here I come, the white-looking Mexican to up their system.
Boy, did they give me , particularly about not understanding enough Spanish to want to take Spanish phone calls. When I pointed out that as Puerto Ricans they should be able to speak Spanish as well, all the sudden they were 'women of color' who embraced their "black heritage" and no Spanish is spoken in Africa. OK, so what about Afrikaans or even French, which is still spoken in many African nations? All the sudden I am racist and hate my Mexican heritage because of my white skin
do or do not. there is no try
The Myth of Mul asking
Christine Rosen
In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”
In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people—so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: mul asking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, mul asking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of mul asking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets—particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices—celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word mul asking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players. “We have always mul asked—inability to walk and chew gum is a time-honored cause for derision—but never so intensely or self-consciously as now,” James Gleick wrote in his 1999 book Faster. “We are mul asking connoisseurs—experts in crowding, pressing, packing, and overlapping distinct activities in our all-too-finite moments.” An article in the New York Times Magazine in 2001 asked, “Who can remember life before mul asking? These days we all do it.” The article offered advice on “How to Mul ask” with suggestions about giving your brain’s “mul asking hot spot” an appropriate workout.
But more recently, challenges to the ethos of mul asking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of mul asking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a mul asking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Ins ute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 wasLinda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of mul asking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”
Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory le CrazyBusy, has been offering therapies to combat extreme mul asking for years; in his book he calls mul asking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, “Attention Deficit Trait,” which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points,” Hallowell argues, and this challenge “can be controlled only by creatively engineering one’s environment and one’s emotional and physical health.” Limiting mul asking is essential. Best-selling business advice author Timothy Ferriss also extols the virtues of “single-tasking” in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek.
Mul asking might also be taking a toll on the economy. One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing mul asking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme mul asking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.
Changing Our Brains To better understand the mul asking phenomenon, neurologists and psychologists have studied the workings of the brain. In 1999, Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Ins ute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (part of the National Ins utes of Health), used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to determine that when people engage in “task-switching”—that is, mul asking behavior—the flow of blood increases to a region of the frontal cortex called Brodmann area 10. (The flow of blood to particular regions of the brain is taken as a proxy indication of activity in those regions.) “This is presumably the last part of the brain to evolve, the most mysterious and exciting part,” Grafman told the New York Times in 2001—adding, with a touch of hyperbole, “It’s what makes us most human.”
It is also what makes mul asking a poor long-term strategy for learning. Other studies, such as those performed by psychologist René Marois of Vanderbilt University, have used fMRI to demonstrate the brain’s response to handling multiple tasks. Marois found evidence of a “response selection bottleneck” that occurs when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once. As a result, task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which task to perform. Psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan believes that rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of “adaptive executive control” takes place, which “schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order,” as he described to the New Scientist. Unlike many other researchers who study mul asking, Meyer is optimistic that, with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively, and there is some evidence that certain simple tasks are amenable to such practice. But his research has also found that mul asking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.
In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “mul asking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while mul asking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or mul asking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to mul ask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”
If, as Poldrack concluded, “mul asking changes the way people learn,” what might this mean for today’s children and teens, raised with an excess of new entertainment and educational technology, and avidly mul asking at a young age? Poldrack calls this the “million-dollar question.” Media mul asking—that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail—is clearly on the rise, as a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed: in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent mul asking. “I mul ask every single second I am online,” confessed one study participant. “At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message.”
The Kaiser report noted several factors that increase the likelihood of media mul asking, including “having a computer and being able to see a television from it.” Also, “sensation-seeking” personality types are more likely to mul ask, as are those living in “a highly TV-oriented household.” The picture that emerges of these pubescent mul asking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence: “I get bored if it’s not all going at once, because everything has gaps—waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” one participant said. The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps intended to be optimistic: “In this media-heavy world, it is likely that brains that are more adept at media mul asking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected,” the report states. “After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful.” This is techno-social Darwinism, nature red in pixel and claw.
Other experts aren’t so sure. As neurologist Jordan Grafman told Time magazine: “Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren’t going to do well in the long run.” “I think this generation of kids is guinea pigs,” educational psychologist Jane Healy told the San Francisco Chronicle; she worries that they might become adults who engage in “very quick but very shallow thinking.” Or, as the novelist Walter Kirn suggests in a deft essay in The Atlantic, we might be headed for an “Attention-Deficit Recession.”
Paying Attention When we talk about mul asking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”
William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties of human attention. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), he outlined the differences among “sensorial attention,” “intellectual attention,” “passive attention,” and the like, and noted the “gray chaotic indiscriminateness” of the minds of people who were incapable of paying attention. James compared our stream of thought to a river, and his observations presaged the cognitive “bottlenecks” described later by neurologists: “On the whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule,” he wrote. “But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way.”
To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien—as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today’s mul asking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.” Like Chesterfield, James believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline—and so was illustrative of character. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” he wrote, “is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”
Today, our collective will to pay attention seems fairly weak. We require advice books to teach us how to avoid distraction. In the not-too-distant future we may even employ new devices to help us overcome the unintended attention deficits created by today’s gadgets. As one New York Times article recently suggested, “Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and priorities to serve as a high tech ‘time nanny’ to ease the modern mul asker’s plight.” Perhaps we will all accept as a matter of course a computer governor—like the devices placed on engines so that people can’t drive cars beyond a certain speed. Our technological governors might prompt us with reminders to set mental limits when we try to do too much, too quickly, all at once.
Then again, perhaps we will simply adjust and come to accept what James called “acquired inattention.” E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming—all this may become background noise, like the “din of a foundry or factory” that James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of mul askers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.
Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Christine Rosen, "The Myth of Mul asking," The New Atlantis, Number 20, Spring 2008, pp. 105-110.
I think it is probably simply an issue of the things that these people do to waste time are irritating you while the things you do that waste time- you think- do not impact them. For example, their talking bugs you but your surfing the internet does not affect them. So you notice the things they do that you think blatantly waste time, but you probably waste time too, just in different, less vocal ways- like typing and working at the same time which does waste time and is not efficient.
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