What do we do with spontaneous memorial sites?
Major Michel Lavigne, who manages and oversees the national sentry program and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, said public works employees dealt with most of the flowers and wreaths, composting those that were dead or wrecked, and taking the others to veterans’ facilities. Soldiers dealt with the other items, sombrely picking up candles, teddy bears and pictures, and loading them carefully into boxes.
“I have to admit this is the first time we’ve seen this at the war memorial, so it’s a little bit new to us,” said Lavigne.
Some of the items were sorted at the site; glass candles that had fallen and broken had to be thrown away, notes that had deteriorated too much to keep were photographed, Canadian flags were neatly folded. From there, the boxes were taken by two soldiers to Hamilton, where Cirillo’s regiment sorted through them more fully, cataloguing and documenting each memento.
So what’s changed since the 1960s and ’70s? Overtime pay, in part. Your parents got a lot of it, and you don’t. And it turns out that fair overtime standards are to the middle class what the minimum wage is to low-income workers: not everything, but an indispensable labor protection that is absolutely essential to creating a broad and thriving middle class. In 1975, more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Not because capitalists back then were more generous, but because it was the law. It still is the law, except that the value of the threshold for overtime pay—the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime—has been allowed to erode to less than the poverty line for a family of four today.
Please read every word of this RadioShack story.
YOU KNOW WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT RICHARD III
Don’t get drug resistant TB.
Just a 100% clear-cut case of kidnapping, Jesus CHRIST.
Miscarriage is normal, and normal hurts:
One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, though they are rarely portrayed on TV or in movies. Mine was something called a blighted ovum, which is when the fertilized egg never gets past the blastocyst stage, the ball of cells that burrows into your womb. The blastocyst didn’t have arms or legs or even a face, and it didn’t have a heartbeat. But my body kept making placenta for a few extra days. And then it stopped.
Even though it was a very early miscarriage, too early to have much physical effect beyond cramping, it hurt a lot. Miscarriages are difficult, and because they are rarely talked about, bewildering. At first, I didn’t even know if mine qualified.
I love Annotation Tuesday, and this is the best one yet.
I don’t think I could get in, but I went door to fucking door on that street. Every fucking house. Some people who were still there would tell me things. I remember that day, the dejected feeling. The thing is, in the bowl of details, each is hard-won. I got enough details to give you a sense of things. I think it’s important to point out that magazine journalism, to some degree, is blue smoke and mirrors. Because if you get the sense of the plot, then you can find little snippets of things that, through digression, you don’t need a whole lot of action. If you can find three or four lines of dialogue, and then sprinkle in the characters and motion and attitude and setting, then you’re able to advance a point without having a whole lot. You find little moments of time, little scenes. Omission is a very important part of journalism and also the friend of the writer. You have some things and you don’t have other things. You go to your strengths to see what you have. But before you do that, you get everything you can possibly get.
Closing the racial gap in disciplinary policies at school.
SPLOOGE CAT be praised.
So I guess I won’t be sending that XDR TB article around to my colleagues who work on it!
But wow, that’s a great article. I love that BuzzFeed is doing these long meaty pieces.
They really are knocking it out of the park recently.
Spontaneous memorials and roadside memorials are so, so, so tricky to navigate for everyone. With regards to roadside memorials specifically, there’s a school of thought that says they’re more accessible and “customizable,” in a way, for young people–since it’s mostly young people who die in road accidents, their young friends are less comfortable with cemeteries (thinking they are for “old people” or for the family) and instead choose to memorialize the accident site itself. There are no rules, so they can put up a cross, put up a teddy bear, leave flowers, leave beer cans, leave whatever they like–there are no strictures, their mourning and grief can be more relatable to them specifically.
Leaving spontaneous memorials can be such a huge problem, too. When Diana died and people left just shocking numbers of teddy bears, flowers, etc., at the gates of Kensington, they just did not have the resources to deal with literal truckloads of stuff. There’s no way. When people donate overwhelmingly to tragedies, as that article touches on, it creates new problems–where do you go with the sixth delivery of teddy bears that day? It’s burdening an already-burdened system usually dealing with some kind of tragic event.
And I really feel for the families and friends of the people involved–I cannot imagine suffering the tragic loss of a partner or son or friend, and then having a truck of Stuff delivered to my house that people I don’t even know left in his memorial. Teddy bears and candles and sculptures and little knickknacks and whatnot. I hope I never have to experience that–I fervently wish that no one ever had to. It’s just too awful, in its own particularly-twisted way.
Yes. You put it so well — far better than I could.
I wish a brilliant mind somewhere would come with/convince people to use a different spontaneous sort of commemoration. In my dreams everyone would start carving little wooden miniatures if they wanted to participate in this kind of mourning. Or plant actual living plants by the roadside. Or cover it in knitting like the guerrilla knitting groups do with lampposts. Or maybe we could have local communities put up a giant post and everyone who feels moved could cut out a notch when they go by. Some sort of rituals actually wonderful — but a ritual that doesn’t burden grieving families and doesn’t involve rotting teddybears.
Well, it’s so hard, especially because many roadside memorials are actually on private property (especially those alongside highways), and property owners don’t always look kindly on long-running memorials–they attract people and/or animals that can be dangerous when congregating alongside busy roads, frequently memorials aren’t kept up and the owners end up having to clean up rotting crosses or litter off their land, they simply don’t care for trespassers, etc.–which is why legislation is often passed to deal with this kind of thing specifically. Because it’s SO fraught and yet it intersects at a lot of very, very touchy places. Cities often deal much differently with memorials than rural areas, and there’s just no “right” way to do it, but nobody ever wants to talk about it because it’s so difficult and painful and nobody wants to be painted as the one stepping on the toes of the grieving family.
It’s worth pointing out here that memorializing the place of sudden death is an ancient practice in the West. Under Germanic law, placing a memorial was part of the restitution for killing. You can find them in Britain, France, Germany, Poland, some in Northern Italy (not many though), and probably other places too.
This is the only thing I can find in English about them that’s not behind an academic paywall. http://polandpoland.com/murder_crosses.html
Here’s a big German website with a bunch of pictures. The German ones often have the instument of death carved into them. http://www.suehnekreuz.de/
ETA: Apparently there is a wikipedia article for them, and I was just searching under the wrong name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_cross#Atonemen…
We have a similar tradition in New Mexico. The roadside crosses and memorials are called descansos, and if I remember correctly, they are protected by state law.
Maybe charities could sell some kind of little token-ish thing people could place? And then unless the family wanted to keep them, the tokens could just be collected and sent back to the charity to be sold again, so long as they’re in good condition. That might satisfy all the people who are all “why doesn’t everyone donate to charity instead?”
You’d have to sell them at flower stores and toy shops, I guess, because until they caught on people wouldn’t spontaneously think of them the way they think of flowers and teddy bears.
Oh man, overtime. I need to vent a wee bit so please forgive me. I got a whopping HOUR AND FIFTEEN MINUTES OT last week, which is unheard of. Because I am salaried, I get straight pay for OT hours worked. The way our company (and from what I can tell, my industry in general) works is that if I have any “admin” (time that doesn’t go towards a specific project) on my timesheet, and I work “overtime,” that I have to back out my hours to “cover” the admin so that I have 40 hours of “billable” time and that PISSES ME OFF.
I’ve been doing a lot more field work lately, which ends up being longer days (but fully billable). I worked a ten hour day yesterday, but I’m in the office for the rest of the week. If I have any admin on my timesheet, I have to take the two hours OT I got to “make up for” the admin that I’ll have worked, so it all falls into this stupid category of “uncompensated overtime.” I would really rather be compensated for the additional time that I’ve worked.
I’m not a lawyer, clearly, but something about this whole practice really gives me pause from a legal perspective. Can someone that knows more advise?
but…admin time is still WORK
That’s the part that gets me. Like, I’m clearly working, and here between working hours doing work, why do I have to “make up” for it just because it isn’t towards a specific client/project??
Unsolicited Advice from Chouffe Time!
Don’t do the admin work. Let it stack up. Show them what happens and that it’s a valuable part of your position. This is probably the worst advice you’ll get today.
You’re not a contract employee, right? I would definitely google around about NLRB or something that could advise you on this. Because you should be compensated for your time. It’s not like it’d fly if you just stopped doing that admin work.
Nope, not contract – I think I will dedicate some time this weekend to looking into this, because it’s bothered me the whole time I’ve worked here (2+ years).
So, I worked for a year as a paralegal doing a hybrid of admin and billable work. And the lawyers loved to stress out about whether I was billing enough hours every week (which is one of many reasons in the “don’t go to law school” camp for me, I LOATHE trying to capture billable hours even before the boss starts whining).
But it was still undisputable truth that my admin hours were considered hours worked, and a 45 hour workweek still had five hours of time-and-a-half in it. I actually had to enter those hours to the “admin” billing account the same as any other work I did, complete with details of tasks performed.
So, yeah, my gut feel is that your scheme may be quite with the illegal.
The billable time dance is the WORST.
Hmm, I’ve worked places where this was the unofficial rule (we needed to be 95% billable, but non-billable work comprised far more than 5% of our duties as writing proposals and whatnot weren’t billable so you’d make it up by working billable overtime and not recording all your non-billable time) but I can’t imagine it’s legal to actually make it a requirement. I think you definitely need an actual law-person to look into it, though, because there are all sorts of little loopholes and maybe there is one that covers this.
Yeah, I think that’s the catch – I’m supposed to be at 90% productivity, but there is clearly no way to get that unless OT overwrites admin. It’s the worst.
I commented on that Radioshack story when it was linked on the Billfold but OMG. It was a great read, but I’m so anxious to know if he ever went to the labor board, because the way he was paid (and apparently arbitrarily NOT paid even though he must have been non-exempt) CANNOT have been legal.
That overtime article makes me kind of sad. Working in France, I definitely can’t complain about my benefits etc, but ‘officially’ my company has a 39 hour workweek… I regularly put in a lot more than that and it would be so nice if that was paid on top of my salary.
Mr. Blazes worked at RadioShack for about a year before we were married. Not only do the vignettes ring true, they actually seem pretty tame compared to some of the shit my husband was put through. As a manager, he made like 29k but was expected to put in 6-day 60-hour weeks and could be fired for taking vacation.
That adoption story, Jesus. I can’t even begin to see how one gets a resolution to that that’s simultaneously legal, moral, and won’t hugely and further traumatise the little girl involved.
I also have a lot of feelings about memorials, and memorial culture.
A good thing about working overtime at my job is that, because it’s a state job, all overtime pay has to be approved by Harrisburg, (the capital of Pennsylvania, GEOGRAPHY TRIVIA TIME), and Harrisburg NEVER approves overtime.
So I do not work one solitary second past my time. Project didn’t get done today? Too bad! We’ll finish it tomorrow!
“Hey, boss, I need to put some extra time in to get these renewals done.” “No you fucking don’t.”
It’s pretty nice that part. Extra money would be good, but strict and inviolable limits on how much time I’m expected to give to my boss is pretty nice, too.
Yep. Exactly. I don’t mind being on salary, but you better believe it affects how much time I spend in the office.
That’s exactly why I don’t work OT if I don’t have to. Like, I could finish this project, but if my OT is going to be uncomped, lolno I’ll see you tomorrow.
I also…I mean, I like my job okay, and I actually feel like I’m often able to good things at my work (surprisingly), so it does give me a personal sense of satisfaction. But I also think that for the most part, work is bullshit. For the most part, it’s not improving, it’s not consequential; 90% of people work to get paychecks. So yeah, I like a job where I am out the door at the end of the day and done with it.
(I am revealing that my attitude is a deep betrayal of my Dutch Protestant ancestors. I have no Protestant work ethic! I don’t actually believe that there is any divinity in labor! I think this whole system is a dumb waste of energy! The ghost of John Calvin is going to haunt me tonight for sure.)
I feel much the same way. However, I am also watching my boss sloooowwwwly go mad because she spends 60+ hours a week at work, doesn’t get OT, and literally thinks about nothing but this job, all the time, and nope. Nope. Not doing it. Period.
I love my job, I love my field, but fuck if I’m going to sacrifice my life–which I have worked a shit-ton of shit jobs to earn, and spent a lot of time in shit relationships compromised by work on both sides, and grew up watching neither of my parents ever have an outside life beyond work–for a job that’s nice but frankly doesn’t pay all that well. Fuck. That.
(eta I am in a particular temper because of some Things Going On in the office so I’m going to go make a cup of tea.)
Yeah, don’t let it get you down. No matter how important the work is, TEA IS ALSO IMPORTANT.
But I also think that for the most part, work is bullshit.
Co-fucking-signed
Part of why I became a librarian and not a teacher was so I could work 40 hours, and only 40 hours and never ever take work home or check work email outside of work. Not all librarian jobs are like that, but I’m damn glad mine is.
Same here, although I do find I am still taking some work home on occasion just because my library is SO STRICT about making sure I only have 40 hours on the clock each week. That and all of the reading I do for my job (I’m the sole teen services librarian so I do all the ordering, booklists, school visits, etc.), which thankfully I usually enjoy but could still technically be considered part of my work, since I couldn’t get away with NOT reading as much. Still, I have it tremendously easy compared to some of my teacher friends, or people I know in the tech field.
yeah I am a teen librarian with no ordering responsibilities, but I still should read more than I do. But it’s hard when I’m playing Dragon Age II to care. I maybe should care more and bring work home, but I just do as much as I can in 40 hours and shrug at the rest.
Yes. If I got paid hourly, I’d be a fucking millionaire.
Signed,
A Writing Teacher in the middle of reading end-of-semester drafts
The ghost of John Calvin can suck it, and I’ve spent probably half of my life training myself out of my Dutch Protestant upbringing to be able to say that. I have much more important work to do in my life than the thing that I get paid for. (Which, I’m lucky, I think that’s important too. But that’s not the only thing that is.)
Public sector employee fives! OT approval chains don’t go allll that far away (I’m a fed in DC), but the use of OT is pretty strictly looked down on. And when it does get approved, it almost always go through as comp time instead. Which the unionized part of my soul finds a little sketchy, but the far larger lazy part of my soul is more okay with.
Same here! I get time off in lieu if I do overtime, and I keep a note of it and my manager is strict about me taking it (she doesn’t need to be, I am never going to not take it). I deliberately chose a job that wasn’t going to involve my own time. Luckily it’s not an expected company culture thing in our department, and if anyone is noticed to be staying late on a regular basis (when it’s not that they’re going out that evening and cant’ be bothered to go home and come back into town) she speaks to them and we look at their time management and workload.
I work to pay for the stuff I like to do, so I’m not having the time to do that stuff eaten by my job.
Throughout my childhood, there was a street corner in my town that had a picture and a cross on one of the signs for a kid who had died there. And I mean a little kid, maybe 7 or 8? It was there for years and years, and then I have a memory of some legislation being passed about roadside memorials and how long they could be up and it just disappeared. But I have no clue if any of this is accurate or who the memorial was for or what. I never got close enough in the car to read it.
It was especially memorable since across the street was a random cemetery with literally two headstones. In the middle of a shopping center. One of my biggest regrets in life is not going to look at those headstones before my parents moved out of the area.
You might be able to find that tiny cemetery in Find A Grave: http://findagrave.com/tocs/geographic.html
Additionally, if you look on the website for the city/township it’s in, they frequently have lists of cemeteries/gravesites in their communities, locations, and additional information.
Thanks for the help! I just ended up doing a quick google search and here it is!.
It seems like it belonged to a single family and people were likely buried there between the 1700s and early 1900s. I guess people still place Confederate flags in front of the grave of the Civil War POW, because we always need a not-so-friendly reminder that Northern Virginia is, in fact, the South.
!!! I live there! My husband is easily spooked and refuses to use that entrance to the Safeway. We always have to go around the corner to the light to not go by the graves. I’m so tickled to finally know more about that!
Right??? I still reflexively say I’m from “the DC area”. And there was That One Guy Who Has A Confederate Flag Outside His House that no one in town talks about because we’re all trying really, really hard not to be from the South.
RICHARD III OH MY GOD
“Richard III and his royal rival, Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), were both descendants of King Edward III. The infidelity could, in theory, have occurred either on the branch leading back from Henry to Edward or on the branch leading from Richard to Edward.”
Uh, totally on Henry’s side, Henry SUCKS, Team Richard 4ever
MY FAVORITE
I find it amazing that the Tudor propaganda machine was so effective that they were able to re-cast Richard as the dark, slight changeling brother when he looked exactly like his brothers when he was a kid. They pulled that off? Let’s think about what OTHER things just got thrown under a massive shadow.
I know, Tudor propaganda is my favorite example of “history is written by the victors.”
I think the new genetics finding is amazing, and illustrates the ridiculousness that has been monarchy for centuries. I would like a Royal Response!
YES. This was the best news article I saw this morning! I am so glad Toast linked it/it is being discussed.
Edit: Nevermind, I’m an idiot. It has to do with John of Gaunt’s legitimacy anyway. OOPS.
It always has to do with John of Gaunt. Always.
So, who else has read Josephine Tey’s “A Daughter of Time”?
The definitive #TeamRichard4ever novel.
Oh see my pick for that would be Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour but I just looked up the Tey book and it sounds AMAZING.
“Why not both?” 😀
I did recently after it was recommended on here! Now going to hunt for the one catoclock has mentioned.
oh yeah, Daughter of Time was super-formative for me. Even though now I’m like, “yeah, but…applying forensic standards of “proof” to events from the 15th century — what evidence exactly do you expect to be available?”
Also, I now generally feel that one should give literary historiography (especially from other periods of hsitory) credit for doing the thing that it’s doing, and not dismiss it as “not objective” (dude it’s not trying to be!) or “biased” (well, duh — it’s a piece of literature written by a human being with a point of view who is actively trying to communicate that point of view, in many cases) or “just propaganda for the winners” (e.g Thomas More may be toeing the party line, as it were, but he’s doing a lot of other things too, and that fact doesn’t make what he produces not a work of literature/opinion in its own right.)
Basically my philosophy now is: reading history for “the truth”? Why would you want to do that?
(And comments like these are why The Toast is awesome)
Tey’s approach is intriguing because the allure of finding out “the truth” through historical works is strong (especially the notion that if you read enough books you’ll find out some notion of “truth” — Mr. Causabon’s key to all mythologies, in a way). But .. it’s just not how research, or history, can be handled.
Or, just because Shakespeare’s works were politically motivated, doesn’t mean that they aren’t great literature.
What I really appreciate about “Daughter of Time” is the humanity it conveys to the historical figures (rather than the ultimate quest for “truth”) — and it also does a good job of encapsulating how much the Tudors (Henry VII, VIII and Elizabeth) drove so much historical and literary narrative.
Currently re-reading when Mockingjay gets to be too much.
How about Elizabeth Peter’s The Murders of Richard III? Present-day murder mystery + historical info + Jacqueline Kirby.
I think my favorite Ricardian novel is John Ford’s The Dragon Waiting: alternate-history 15th century where Richard III + motley crew of female Florentine physician, German werewolf, and a couple other people I can’t remember fight vampires and the Byzatine empire and also Henry Tudor.
There was also this juvenile fiction novel called…..Knight on Horseback? About a modern-day boy (who has severe asthma I think?) who is sort-of vaguely befriended by the ghost of Richard III. I remember it being very nicely done — making R3 sympathetic but also showing how the usurpation+murder-the-nephews scenario might well have happened. Pretty subtle stuff for a kid’s book.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. I need to read this yesterday.
“More than ever Grant wondered with what part of their brains historians reasoned.”
MY THEME through an undergrad degree and three grad degrees in history.
Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime. You know many people like that? Probably not.
Ha ha, yes! Are people “like that” even real?
to be fair, I make a good bit more than that, finally, but I am still not paid half enough to read Politico so probably they are correct in that poors barely exist as far as their readership is concerned. Certainly WE don’t know anyone like that, do we
that line *REALLY* bothered me too. Esp since Politico is read by a lot of unpaid Congressional interns side hustling at Home Depot nights and wkds.
That was SO WEIRD.* Why would they say that? Like, duuuude it’s the internet all SORTS of people read it.
*Weird, and deeply, tragically offensive and out of touch.
Someone once summarized Politico to me, and this is really the best explanation I’ve ever heard, as the Tiger Beat of the Beltway. Not all sorts of people read it, a fairly specific sort of person reads it.
The whole tone of the article bothered me- all the “I’m rich so this doesn’t really apply to me” seemed like unnecessary bragging.
Im having a history nerd-gasm over the Richard III story AHHHHHH!!! I love that there are Qs about the legitimacy of the Queen! Its also interesting to note that he had a unique DNA from his maternal side– isnt his mother rumored to be a witch of some kind?! SCIENCE PROVING MAGIC OMG I LOVE EVERYTHING.
I had not heard about rumours that Richard III’s mother was a witch, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised.
Several medieval monarchs were alleged to have had witchy or fairy mothers – it shows up first in medieval French chronicles attached to various members of the Aquitaine family (the most famous iteration of this is the Mélusine story) then made the jump to England when Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II.
It shows up in a romance treatment of the life of Richard Coeur de Lion, which merrily rewrites the record to erase Eleanor and make Richard’s mother a Saracen princess who is also a demon who flies out at the church roof upon being forced to attend Mass. The implication is that demonic/foreign heritage (often conflated in medieval romances) lies behind Richard’s brutality in war – in this telling he’s a cannibal as well! – and John’s general awfulness. Awful king? Demon mother. Obviously.
I wonder if something similar was attached (at the time or retroactively) to Richard III for similar reasons?
I honestly think I picked up this rumor from a Phillipa Greggory book, but it stuck w me!
ummmmmmmmmm I want to read this right now
Although why anyone would want to cut Eleanor out of the story is BEYOND ME, she’s the best.
It’s a spectacularly bizarre narrative even for a medieval romance (which go to some very strange places). It hasn’t received all that much critical attention but there is a précis here: http://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk/mer/45
There’s no edition online, but if you have access to an academic library they may be able to get hold of one for you. The most recent edition was a PhD thesis from a few years ago, accessible through the British Library if (again) you are affiliated with a university: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.etho…
Ah thanks!!
Is this what you study and/or work on? If so I will be infinitely jealous.
I wrote my Masters thesis on dynasty and inheritance in medieval popular romances! I don’t work on it at the moment though – I’ve contemplated the PhD but decided against it as the MA was very rough for me. I will happily rabbit on about it, however.
It wasn’t Richard’s mother that was the witch–it was the Wydeville/Woodville women, Jacquetta, her daughter Elizabeth (wife of Edward IV) and her granddaughter Elizabeth, to a lesser extent (eventually wife of Henry VII) that were witchy. Jacquetta was formally accused of witchcraft and Elizabeth (elder) was under strong suspicion. Ended up having a fairly large impact on the succession–Edward was supposedly married prior to meeting Elizabeth, but there was a court faction that insisted she and her mother placed a spell on him to get him to marry her. Since Edward and Elizabeth’s marriage would have been bigamist under that circumstance, their kids were declared illegitimate and the path opened up for Richard III to take the crown from Edward V.
This was a serious plot point in the first few episodes of The White Queen, which was kind of weird.
What I learned from the memorials article: white bikes by the side of the road are “ghost bikes” marking where a cyclist died. That is a very interesting and sad piece of trivia. I think I’ve seen a few ghost bikes around Boston so I will definitely take a moment to pause the next time I spot one.
DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE GHOST BIKES
I have worked a LOT of 10 and 12-hour days in the past couple of weeks, and I won’t see a red cent in overtime for any of it. We have an informal policy (though HR told us this at orientation, so it’s not that informal) that you can take your overtime as comp time, but we don’t have a good mechanism for tracking it. I would actually be fine with not getting paid overtime if I could officially record it and have it count towards my leave bank, but right now it is basically free labor. I mean, ideally it would be money, but I work for a non-profit, so I would take the comp time.
Want me to design an easy spreadsheet you can note it all in? If you walk into your boss’s office with a piece of paper claiming that you are owed, say, 15 hours of comp time in exchange for OT worked in the past two weeks (or to HR with the same if your boss is being reticent), the burden is now on them to either approve it or try to claim it didn’t happen.
I once got my boss to research our policy on clocking a certain number of community service hours as hours worked via the “walk in with a piece of paper and ask for what’s owed” method. Turns out I was misinformed on how the policy worked, but we still took it to the official regs before amicably resolving it, and it made it much easier to ask for the next thing I needed (approval for a six-month detail).
I don’t actually need one, I could easily track it in a spreadsheet if I really wanted to (and I probably should, but it is only recently that it has ever been more than an occasional extra hour here or there).
Our office culture is such that if I said “I am taking Friday off as comp time” they would just say “okay” without really questioning it, unless that was a really bad day for me to take off for other reasons.
However, there might be other Toasties who might really benefit from it!
As a far-away observer to this tiny thing, I would totally and loudly encourage you to do both; document and take the time. You probably wind up feeling better about working for them, and maybe also other people feel encouraged/empowered to do the same.
Yeah, I just built a spreadsheet so that I can keep more accurate track as opposed to mentally tracking it.
I have a similar non-profit situation. We’re also relatively understaffed, so I never feel like I can take the comp time I’m owed. I love many things about my job, but that part sucks.
Yo unless you’re a bunch of nuns who’ve taken a vow of poverty and sworn to wash the feet of starving orphans for the rest of your life nonprofit doesn’t remotely mean ‘no money’, get paid mang. You’re in a business with an HR department and everything, just one that balances its books a certain way.
My best-paying clients have always been nonprofits. Their execs live like goddamn rockstars. They also screw their interns and low-level gets-an-orientation types habitually and plead poverty.
I drive a LOT for work, through rural areas mostly. And I see so many roadside memorials that are way beyond just a cross or some flowers. I am talking about small homemade billboards, poles with pictures tacked to them and stuffed animals hanging down below the pictures, sandwich board style signs, etc. There’s one on a route I take frequently that gets bigger every year, it seems. Like people are going back and adding more to it. When I first drove by it in 2011, it was some crosses and floral arrangements. Now there’s a mini billboard with the kid’s picture and birth and death dates and an eagle statue in addition to the crosses and the floral arrangements (which are different every time! So sad). It is really and truly in the boonies, so not blocking anything. In busy areas or on busy sidewalks I can see how it could become an issue.
Mostly it just makes me think of the Drive By Trucker’s song “Plastic Flowers on the Highway” which I cannot listen to in the car because I’m extremely superstitious.
Yeah, I just touched on this a bit more upthread–and it can be very fraught, because lots of private property owners just do not want that on their land, which is actually a valid thing to not want. It is so difficult and uncomfortable to deal with, because nobody wants to be the horrible mean Scrooge-style property owner who’s telling the mourners to get off his damn land, BUT it’s valid to not want a constant stream of people on your property, creating litter and/or damaging things, creating a hazard, etc. So hard.
Truth. I have wondered who owns the land it’s on, and if they knew the kid who died and that’s why it’s kind of been allowed to not just remain but grow by leaps and bounds. It’s such a sparsely populated area it’s very possible.
I guess it’s a delicate thing, saying when it’s been “long enough” to take those things down. Some people who lose family members would say, when is NEVER and then what do you do? I feel like there was a Dear Prudence or Dear Abbie column about this – where someone had been killed, a girl maybe, and the person living on the street didn’t like the sidewalk memorials because it was a morbid reminder of death striking someone in their prime, etc.
I think I read something similar once upon a time–someone had purchased a tract of rural land, and it had a memorial cross on it for a young couple who’d died, and on the five- or ten-year anniversary the families planned to erect a memorial bench or gazebo or even BIGGER cross on the land, and the property owner was vetoing it (because it was a large building project with strangers tramping across his land), and the families were throwing a huge fit because they’d made these plans, it was a community venture, they wanted to memorialize their loved ones–I think it eventually went to a legal dispute because the owner was From Somewhere Else, it was just a huge and awful shitshow for everyone involved. It’s AWFUL and yet so tricky because grief is so hard for the people involved, and the people not-directly-involved receive weird aftershocks.
UGGH so terrible all around, really. I can totally see how you might not want to walk out your front door and gaze across your vast property and see a constant reminder of your impending mortality and deal with strangers, etc. Personally I don’t think I would mind (my dream is to live near a cemetery cause uh, yolo I guess?) but not everyone feels that way. BUT THEN you feel and/or look like a total turd telling people they can’t come grieve anymore.
There’s grieving and then there’s constructing a Goddamned vacation resort on someone else’s property for free, what the fucking hell a GAZEBO
YES EXACTLY. If you wanted to put up a cross on someone’s property….maybe. You cannot just go along merrily building structures on other people’s property. But it was a Community Thing and grieving parents who felt slighted were involved, and just….the whole thing sucked on a zillion levels.
(A gazebo, really?)
Out here in VA anyway there’s a certain yardage from the (non-private) road that’s state property, not yours. They eminent-domain it and will bar you from developing it for the purposes of allowing room for widening roads, etc. If your memorial, campaign ad, church banner etc. cannot fit in that space it is not a sign, it is a SMALL HOUSE
(Please excuse the little bit of thread hijacking here.)
This is daisy again. I posted a while back about having a bad time with depression and I wanted to let people know that I’m doing better now. I’m not mentally healthy yet, but I’m getting help and I think I’ll be okay someday.
A blanket thank-you to everybody here who offered support. I’ve been all over the map on whether I’m up to responding to kind words, but it really does help. Even if I can only summon the energy to read the comment text in my email.
I am so very glad to hear that you are doing better! Please do not fret on responding–just know we are thinking about you and wishing you the best.
So glad to hear that you’re getting help!! Do what you need to and know that us Toasties will be here if you need us. 🙂
thanks for letting us know!
daisy, thanks for keeping us updated and I’m glad to hear that you’re feeling better.
I’m glad you posted this, and glad you’re feeling some improvement!
RICHARD III!!!
Also, I’m always glad for the BBC making sure everything is spelled out clearly:
“The instance of female infidelity, or cuckolding…”
JUST SO WE’RE ALL ON THE SAME PAGE.
Also: “Investigation of the male genealogy focused on the Y chromosome, a package of DNA that is passed down from father to son, much like a surname.”
Yep yep, that is the natural biological way surnames are passed down.
Yes! The weirdo tone of the article makes this story even better, which I didn’t think possible.
I read a different (also British) article about this where they referred to it as a “non-paternity event.”
Which is the more misandrist way to refer to it? I would like to know so I could adopt it.
Wait, is there a different word for male infidelity? Or is that just “male”?
“Youthful indiscretions”
I just saw an excellent college production of the play Richard III, which means I told the director about this article right away and talked about how the actors might have played it differently with this new info. And I agree about the weirdo tone of the article making it better.
Although under Guatemalan law Karen Abigail Monahan was trafficked, her sale doesn’t constitute trafficking under US law, since the child wasn’t purchased for reasons of forced labor or sexual servitude.
And since US adoption agencies are licensed by the states in which they operate, federal authorities have almost no power to monitor their activities, and even less ability to punish those involved in trafficking.
I think it’s ludicrous that there’s no federal regulations involving international adoption, and that this apparently doesn’t count as human trafficking.
it shows why the focus on “sex trafficking zomg” is so damaging. Not to say that sex trafficking isn’t horrible, clearly it is, but it’s not the only kind of trafficking and should not be the sole focus.
There’s an intersection here with colonialism as well, I think. In Canada; we’ve never described seizing First Nations kids as trafficking (whether the 60s adoption scoop or residential schools); but are quick to criminalize First Nations women for moving out of remote areas if they engage is sex work.
Oh man, that Radio Shack story… I remember going to Radio Shack when I was a wee thing and buying big strands of LEDs and other components with my dad. And then we stopped going, because digikey came along, and there was no reason to count on a limited store inventory anymore. And then I went to one recently, looking for an FM adapter for an iPhone, and it was… so sad. It’s neither a good source of consumer electronics nor a serious hobbyist shop. And on top of that, they mistreat their employees? I don’t even feel nostalgically bad for the company anymore.
That CueCat bit also brought back memories. I remember how badly that failed, and then thinking exactly the same thing would happen with QR codes, but advertisers still love QR codes.
Yeah I always kind of had a fondness for RadioShack based on going there during my childhood, so this story just made me feel… sad and weird?
I’d love to read an insider’s view of what happened to Radio Shack at the corporate level, because it doesn’t seem as if they could have made a worse string of decisions FOR DECADES if they’d actually been trying.
You know, my husband worked for a company like this (filed for bankruptcy last year!) and there was no interesting saga, it was just a lot of middle and upper management (and the normal employees, to be honest) unable or scared to change years of habits formed during the good years. It was pretty pathetic to watch all in all.
There’s this whole process of decay in stuff like Radio Shack and Best Buy that’s so similar and so plainly, visibly awful over such a long period that I can’t think of any explanation that doesn’t involve convoluted revenge schemes at the executive level.
Yeah part of me, as an amateur electronics hobbyist (who makes the electronics herself bc i mean psshhhhhh Shure doesn’t have anything on my amplifiers! …. ….) is sad at the decline of Radioshack… thinking more that it’s a harbinger of the end of electronics hobbyists,modern society is too used to buying this shit cheaply and ready-made, the decline of makers and the rise of consumers, etc.
… but then that article made me feel much better about it. allelectronics.com forever.
“the lack of any match for the Y-chromosome lineage is quite curious and suggests an intriguing new avenue for dynastic DNA studies”
DYNASTIC DNA STUDIES.
DYNASTIC DNA STUDIES.
How come this was not mentioned as a possible career choice in my high school careers-advising unit?
I want to be the one to tell the Queen that, due to my intense dynastic DNA studies, I have concluded that she has no right to rule!!!
I loved that the question about her right to rule was tidily disposed of with “well it’s cool though because some other king passed a rule in the early1700s to make sure that his right to rule was set to go forever, Protestants 4 Lyfe, suck on that!”
I <3 the British Monarchy
YES that would have combined my love of both history and biology perfectly.
That adoption story. ugh. I have so many ill-formed thoughts, particularly negative ones about the American family and their irresponsibility when so many red flags were being thrown up, and then the way they question the mother’s dna test.
The Radio Shack story! Jon Bois is a national treasure.
God damn, those RadioShack eulogy stories are amazing. I feel so fortunate to have never been stuck there.
And as for that last link, well, that gave my cat problems some major perspective.
I don’t *think* this has already been linked on the Toast (sorry if I missed it!) but did you guys read Kathryn Borel’s account of being harassed by Jian Ghomeshi while working at CBC? It’s here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec… if you haven’t seen it. Clearly CBC fucked up really bad, but reading it reminded me of the countless stories of workplace harassment I’ve heard about from friends/family in all kinds of different workplaces and industries. I’m glad she was brave enough to write this, I hope employers are paying attention.
It is in my roundup for tomorrow! The CBC totally fucked this up.
Yeah, I totally retract my comment here a couple weeks ago commending the CBC for firing Ghomeshi. They are horrible and the organization deserves to collapse unless new management is brought in.
Yeah, the sudden shift from “We want to do the right thing through this process and not put undue pressure on anybody” to “DNA is sort of viewed as a title, and we strongly feel that Karen isn’t property” makes me absolutely SICK. It’s just the embodiment of American hypocrisy.
(ETA @kilks401)
I don’t get overtime, but I have a lot more flexibility than people who do. I don’t have to come in right at 9 (really, any time before 10:30 is acceptable), I can leave during the day for doctor’s appointments without using sick/personal time, I work from home instead of taking sick days, and I get a half or full comp day if my manager feels that I’ve been working an inordinate amount. My salary is also pretty cushy for the work that I do. Personally, I’d rather have a higher base salary + flexible work schedule than OT.
The Thanksgiving table fight this year was over unions, with the more capitalist party suggesting “it’s better for everyone when management and employees work together, rather than viewing each other as adversaries.” (He did concede that unions can exist in a place of collaboration.)
And obviously that’s true, but of course it completely misses the point that there’s basically no incentive/enforcement mechanism to keep management working in collaboration and not straying towards exploitation. Your set-up does sound pretty nice (and I’m really not trying to argue you shouldn’t be happy with it!). In my case, the ability to telework from home when sick is something my union fought for, as is the overtime policy, as is the availabilty of flexible work schedules. And I, for one, would be nervous moving to a system where comp time depends on my manager’s “feeling” of time worked.
My favorite phrase from Richard III DNA research: “Paternal Instability” or what I like to think of as The Queen’s Revenge”
The Chronicle of Higher Ed is doing a phenomenal series on Binge Drinking/Drinking Culture on American college campuses this week.
Here’s the first one. http://chronicle.com/article/A-River-of-Booze/150…
Ask a Manager has lots of good (American centred) advice about overtime and being exempt. I find her super helpful, the comments are sometimes OK and sometimes not. http://www.askamanager.org/search-results?q=overt…
I worked for RadioShack back in the day, when I was too young and having too much fun at life to fully be aware how much it sucked. Also, it was 1999 and I had way more fun than is really ethical selling people things they REALLY MIGHT NEED, YOU NEVER KNOW to restart civilization after the upcoming Y2K apocalypse. We also sold cell phones, and people were constantly like, “I can’t imagine I would ever really need more than 30 minutes of phone time per month, since this is just for emergencies,” and I would say, “You have to believe me, once you have it, you will find *a lot of reasons* that you want to use it. Please get 120 minutes.” The past is another country, guys.
“Their analysis shows that DNA passed down on the maternal side matches that of living relatives, but genetic information passed down on the male side does not. ”
YEAAAAAAAAH IT’S NOT. I want to go back in time and high five all the Plantagenet women now.
I also appreciate how this makes the real War of the Roses even MORE like Game of Thrones.
I do not love my cats that much. They would be gone.
I get what you’re saying – and I’m totally pro-union – I hope my comment was not perceived as anti-union in any way. In my particular case I’m the only one who works in my department and I work for a university (which provides great benefits), so I don’t think my setup would work for a vast majority of workers in the US.
I live in Newtown, CT, and this was a very complicated problem after so many large spontaneous memorials popped up following the shooting two years ago. The largest one was in the center of Sandy Hook’s “downtown” area, so it was especially difficult because many people had to drive past it every day (and the traffic to the area was hurting local businesses). Ultimately it was decided that the items that had been left would be mulched and saved to be used in the concrete when a permanent memorial is built, which I think was a fair solution. The memorials were also dismantled at night, to minimize the number of people who had to see parks and rec employees taking everything away.
I was on hold on the phone reading that cat story and just prayed my disgusted laughing fit would be over by the time I was off hold. So gross/so good/all hail six-balled spoo cat!
Yes. If I got paid hourly, I'd be a fucking millionaire.
Signed,
A Writing Teacher in the middle of reading end-of-semester drafts
"More than ever Grant wondered with what part of their brains historians reasoned."
MY THEME through an undergrad degree and three grad degrees in history.
YES that would have combined my love of both history and biology perfectly.
Six testicles. Six.
Can I just jump in super late here and gripe about this particular bit in the overtime pay piece:
“And so business owners like me have been able to make the other 89 percent of you work unlimited overtime hours for no additional pay at all. In my defense, I’m only playing by the rules—rules written by and for wealthy capitalists like me.”
Like, I get that you’re ostensibly concerned for the shrinking middle class in this country, and you’re explaining that the law allows for this to happen, but if you think I’m not going to blame you for strictly adhering to the bare minimum that the law requires, rather than doing your best as someone in a position of power to improve the lives of the people who work for you by providing the better overtime pay that you believe the law should require, then you’re an idiot as well as an asshole. It’s great that someone’s talking about it, and even better that it’s someone who knows how BS the current system is. The tone, though, comes off as “look at how awful things are. You not-super-rich folks are totally getting shafted here. I know what we do now is awful and damaging to the economy long-term, but I won’t do anything about it myself unless and until someone forces me to under power of law.”