Which way to the Ugly Dog contest?

‘ey, Lady!  You can’t double park there!

Ltr2: It’s a double-edged sword no matter how you look at it.  You have the right to take legal action against an abusive employer when HR does nothing (and they usually don’t).  Then future/potential employers have the right to perform a background check that often includes whether or not you’ve sued previous employers.  They can then pass on your application and say simply that they’ve hired a "more suitable" candidate. 

Finding another job is the best option.  But with millions out of work right now and no end in sight, it’s almost a non-option.

Everybody has a Crazy Boss story.  I had one who once threw a chair across the room that almost hit me.  I turned in my resignation, struggled for a little while, but then landed in the best position of my life.  In a sense, that maniac’s actions led me to a brilliant new future.  His career and lofty aspirations, on the other hand, have since imploded. My new employer performed an extensive background search on me, and I’m glad I didn’t have that kind of litigation on my record.  The Crazy Boss turned out to be quite adept at digging his own grave.  He didn’t need my lawsuit to end his career.

If the chair had actually hit me, I could have filed criminal assault charges.  Now that would have been satisfying, whether or not it turned up in my background check!

Really, Rocky?  I haven’t read much meanness in the responses to this topic.  Sounds a bit more like self-deprecating giggles.  Nothing terribly wrong about recognizing the silliness of our own weird youth, is there? 

Also, the article said most of these pictures came from the kind of hair-do magazines they had in salons and barber shops in those days.  That makes it even funnier.  We used to pay people to do this to our hair!

OMG… I take back everything I’ve ever said about the total lack of fashion sense of today’s young people. 

Just the other day, I was ranting about my inability to understand how anyone could find tattooed butt-cracks sexy, or nose/eyebrow/tongue piercings, or elephantine jeans. "I could never fall in love with anyone who looked so weird!" I told my nieces.  Well, I was wrong.  Some of these guys looked way too familiar.  And some variation of many of those hairdos once festooned my own head.  Ughh… somebody shoot me.

Great collections of short stories:

        For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander

        The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

        Doce cuentos peregrinos (Strange Pilgrims) by
        Gabriel Garcia Marquez

All contain stories that make you laugh out loud and make you weep so sloppily that you can barely see the words on the page through the tears.  Great authors, truly gifted.

Nitpicky non-sequitur of the day:  "Latina woman" is redundant.  To call her "Latina" would be sufficient. 

Better yet, let’s just call her Sonia.  Or Judge Sotomayor. 

I’m much more interested in knowing what she’s done as a judge, and what she might do as a Supreme Court justice.  Ethnicity and gender are not what matter most in this appointment.

I think she looked a lot happier before.

Of course.  Living by our values is all any of us can — and should — do. 

I can relate to your self-employment choice.  I did the same thing a few years back, after the non-profit organization I was working for decided to become "faith based".  That left a very bad taste in my mouth.  I didn’t mind that the charity aligned itself with the religion of the majority of the clients it served, but when management began to "strongly encourage" staff to participate in religious services, my stomach did a slow roll.  If they had said it was mandatory, that probably would have been illegal.  But they got around it by "encouraging" staff to go to special services and then subtly marginalizing those of us who decided to pass on the invitation.  What made it worse was that the only reason the agency began defining itself as faith-based was because there were more funding opportunities from the federal government under the Bush administration.  I found this vile on too many levels.

Leaving the agency was not without conflicts, though.  The reality was that that agency did great work for the people of that community.  They were absolute miracle workers, and I loved being part of that work.  And there’s the rub in this larger discussion we’re having here:  these choices are rarely as clear-cut as night and day, black and white.  When we say, "I won’t support [the such-and-such organization] because of their views on X," we have to weigh the value of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

It’s interesting to look at this from the other end of the telescope.  I’m absolutely certain I’ve collected (and happily cashed) paychecks from employers whose personal views were diametrically opposed to mine.  And having cashed those checks, I was free to support causes and charities that were diametrically opposed to my employers’ personal views.

If the work they hired me to do had nothing to do with politics or religion, and the employer didn’t judge my performance based on my politics or religion, was it wrong of the employer to give me money?  Wrong of me to take it?  

We exchange money for goods (products) or services (job skills), and the transaction pretty much ends there.  The employee, boss, or retail giant is free to spend or squander the profits any way they want, even on stuff that might offend people on either end of the transaction.

There’s a chromosome for that?

There’s nothing elitist about stating a simple fact.  There are millions of Americans, natural born and otherwise, who speak more than one language.  Many of these are not far removed from their immigrant roots, and at home and on the streets, they speak the language of their forebears — Spanish, Polish, Russian, Mandarin, Italian, French… you name it.  Stand on any street corner in New York for five minutes and count how many conversations in foreign tongues pass you by.  America is the only country in the world which every language is spoken.

You many not have been exposed to that kind of diversity where you’re from, and that would be a shame.  It’s an amazing and wonderful thing to behold. 

America is bigger than Texas, Kelly.  Explore it a little and you’ll see.

ask anyone…anyone off of the street…a regular citizen and ask them what language we speak in America

A regular citizen would probably respond, "English."  A smart citizen would respond, "All of them."