It's Reality. Seriously?

Every Sunday night, I get the blues. Then I get in a fight. I’m not blue because I have to go to work on Monday morning, and I’m not fighting with my wife or my kids. I’m blue because I’ve just been stuck in a two-hour train wreck called The Apprentice, and I’m fighting with the crazy-haired freak on the screen called Donald Trump. And for the last two weeks, I’ve been yelling at the losing project manager.

If you haven’t seen or heard of The Apprentice, you’ve likely just arrived from your home planet, or you’ve been stuck in a North Korean prison for the last bunch of years. I find Donald and the crew highly entertaining, that is, until the last ten minutes of the show, when whatever shreds of ‘reality’ quickly dissolve in what’s called the ‘boardroom’, where the only certainty is that, ‘… someone WILL be fired.’ 

That’s really the only thing you can count on when you invest two hours in watching the show. In it’s current iteration, Celebrity All-Star Apprentice you’ve got a bunch of C, D, and E list ‘stars’ coming back for their second kick at the Apprentice can. As an avid consumer of pop culture, I find it hard to call someone I’ve never heard of a star, much less an ‘all-star’. I mean we’re talking about aging Playboy bunnies, models, and lesser-known siblings like La Toya Jackson and some lame Baldwin dude.

 

Seriously.  Who the hell are these people?

So I watch shows like Celebrity All-Star Apprentice with one eye on the entertainment value, and one eye on the work aspect, since the show purports to be about work and teams and that kind of thing. Whatever. This show is to work as Taco Bell is to fine dining. And just as I enjoy the odd late-night cruise through the Taco Bell drive thru, I enjoy Sunday nights with the Donald. Trouble is, they both give me gas.

If I’m anal about the work part of the show, it drives me bloody insane. For the sake of entertainment, let’s set aside the crazy antics of the team tasks every week. There is no way that any of those tasks even look a little bit like work. Even when it’s not Celebrity Apprentice (although I’m sure the Donald has completely given up on the real nobodies, and now favours the celebrity nobodies full time), the tasks don’t resemble anything like actual work or actual work locations, so I’m focusing on Donald himself and his pretend boardroom meetings.

In the last two weeks, Donald has commented on Lisa Rinna’s reduced lip size (your lips look better smaller, Lisa), and on somebody’s boobs. I have chaired a thousand meetings in my career, and I’m fairly certain lips and boobs have never come up. At least out loud. He regularly comments on how beautiful the women look, and he’s been known to talk about how he could never be gay. I get that it’s the Donald, and that it’s TV. But reality it’s not. At least not any reality that I’m a part of. I’m pretty certain that even in the US, Donald would be getting his ass sued every single week for the smack he talks.

Speaking of smack talk, have you seen this prize-winner, Omarosa?  OHEMGEE!  Omarosa is a treat. This bitch will take you down before breakfast and have your body eaten up, digested, and crapped out before lunch. If ole Omorosa acted this way in any company, she’d be done, and this is her third time back at the Apprentice. She’s a ‘celebrity’ because of her three visits to the Apprentice, and nothing more. And she’s evil. She doesn’t stab you in the back. She doesn’t even stab you in the front…she stabs you right in the face, and smiles while she’s doing it. 

Omarosa.  Not afraid to bust out the tears to take somebody down.

For three seasons, they’ve called her every name in the book, sent her off on obscure magical mystery tours to get rid of her, and plotted her demise. She’s a menace. For the last two Sunday nights, she’s been at the root of my 10:59pm discontent and outrage. Let me explain my dissatisfaction. For two complete episodes, Omarosa has been her usual self, and her team went on to lose the competitions on both episodes. In both episodes the project managers identified at various times that Omarosa was their problem…their weak link. But Omarosa the bully, on both occasions had the project managers scared shitless, and when required to bring their poor performers back to face the music, both opted to let Omarosa go free, and both brought back their stars.

I’m sure there were millions of other people screaming at the TV on Sunday night, and it was good to hear Donald and his flunky kids berate the project managers for their lack of stones. Then the Donald, knowing that the project managers were just cowards who were afraid to engage Omarosa, duly turfed them both. Bye Bye,  La Toya. Bye Bye, Claudia (whoever the hell you are).

I hate myself for loving this show. As mad as I get, I know that I will be back there next Sunday, and the Sunday after, judging the project managers for their bad decisions and the Donald for his HR violations and his propensity to create hostile workplaces and fantastic entertainment at the same time. Reality?  I dunno. Good TV?  You betcha.

You Gotta Laugh...

I love work. There, I said it. Lots of people don’t get it, and I’ve given up trying to explain it. I’ve had great jobs, and a really shitty job, but, I love work. For me, it’s about the people. I have worked with some freaking awesome people in my career. Rockin’ bosses, great peers, and I’ve been lucky to have the very best people working for me. I’ve also worked with a couple of losers. Big time losers. This blog isn’t about the losers. It’s about somebody that I worked with for a short time who continues to make me smile every time I think about her. This is about Margaret.

Margaret and I were a very unlikely duo. Margaret is a petite, whispy little thing, and I’m, well, whatever the opposite of petite and whispy is. We looked painfully mismatched when we were together. Margaret is a wife, mother and grandmother who brings a boatload of life and work experience to the table. I, on the other hand, was a prissy young manager with a thimble full of life experience. I think it’s safe to say that she could easily look down her nose while staring up at me. So I’m not exactly sure where or when it was that I discovered Margaret’s awesomeness. She was good at her job, and her team liked her, but that’s not where her awesomeness came from. It’s because she made me laugh. A lot. It’s also from the fact that she had absolutely no trouble telling me like it was, and calling me on my bullshit. To me, that’s awesome. I managed her remotely, so a lot of what we did was on the phone.

One morning I was on the phone. She could talk. Blah, blah, blah. This is not what made her awesome. If it could be said in 5 words, Mags could say it in 50. During this conversation, I zoned out and went to the happy place I go when I’m not paying attention. I’m not sure how long I was gone for, but it was bliss. I was gone. Like really gone. At some point, something snapped me back to attention, and still the incessant blah blah. With that, I looked at the phone, and hit the key to delete this never-ending voicemail message. I was wondering why Margaret’s voice wouldn’t stop, and she busted me…”What the hell are you doing?  You’re trying to delete me, aren’t you?  You think I’m voicemail, don’t you?”  To that I responded that she was rambling and I thought it was a voicemail, to which she responded, “For Christ’s sakes Sean, you called me.”  And with that, Mags became totally awesome.

For some reason, Miss Margaret didn't appreciate being deleted.

Another time, I arrived to visit the team. I had this little sweatbox of an office where the temperature hovered somewhere between Sahara and Hell. I arrived at work tired, and not at my best. My first order of business was a meeting in the sweatbox with Mags and two other team leaders. It took about 8 minutes of all the nattering, together with the crazy heat, and the lack of sleep the night before to lull me into slumberville. I put my head back, closed my eyes, and I was out. Not just in my happy place, but in dreamland. Gonzo. I haven’t the foggiest idea how long I was out, but at some point the three team leaders noticed I was sleeping and decided to make me pay.

Margaret, the most petite of all of them, hopped up on my desk, crawled across, got right in my face and clapped her hands like she was killing a fly in midair. It was a tiny office so I was wedged between my desk and the wall, and that’s a good thing, because I was so startled that if I had jumped up, I would likely have killed poor Margaret. Mags and the two other team leaders were on the floor, tears rolling down their cheeks, in hysterics over me being about 8 seconds away from a coronary. I would love to say I learned my lesson, but later that day, when I was out for lunch with the three musketeers, I nodded off at the restaurant. I still haven’t lived it down.

Months later, I got a call from Margaret’s husband. He was calling to say that Margaret wouldn’t be in for a couple of days, and when I asked why, his response:  “She fell in a hole”. Now imagine my response. Remember that I’m not well known for my diplomacy. I was in full roar before I even thought to take a minute to find out if she was really hurt. Turns out she was hurt, and it took a while for Mags to get back to work. Apparently she opened some hole in her floor to access a crawlspace, and forgot it was open, and backed up, falling ass over tea-kettle into this hole. The whole thought of Mags stuck in a hole makes me laugh even to this day. That is if I don’t think about her injuries. (She recovered fully, by the way, I’m not that heinous.)

I'm sure it's not nice to laugh when people fall in holes, but I laughed.

I’ve gotta laugh. That’s my motto. Work is serious, but you don’t always have to be serious at work. Luckily, I’ve got a bunch of Margaret-types in my work life today (although nobody has fallen into a hole, at least that I know of), and they are why I jump out of bed ready to rock and roll every day. But there is only one Mags. I miss working with her, but when I really think about it, if we would have kept it up, we very well may have hurt each other.

Working Virtually? Yahoo!

This week, Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo decreed that all her employees would begin working from the office later this year, and that the work from home experiment was over and that it wasn’t working out too well for Yahoo. Interesting, but I’m not sure it’s really the news story that it’s become. A CEO made a decision for her company that she feels is the right thing to do. Good for her. Who cares?  I don’t get why it’s such big news.

Marissa, all smiles...Before the entire world decided to voice their opinion

But it has made me think of my own work-from-home experience. In the past 15 years, I’ve gone through many phases of virtual work. I don’t love working from home. It’s not my thing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the flexibility, but the thought of getting up every morning and retreating to the basement isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. Let’s just say that on a couple of occasions, one as recent as last week, 4pm arrived, I was still in my lounge-wear (read: pajamas) and I wasn’t at all sure whether I had brushed my teeth that day. The experience doesn’t motivate me.

In my early work from home days I spent a lot of time on the phone with my colleagues in the US and the UK. Lots of conference calls. Listen, conference calls are not my favourite thing on my best day, so add to that the inherent distractions of your own home. I have the attention span of a gnat, so I’m not exactly an engaged conference call participant when conditions are optimal. Now imagine me, cordless phone propped between my ear and my shoulder, trying to participate while taking out the garbage. Some people just shouldn’t work from home. In addition to finding my own ways to distract myself while on conference calls at home, my lovely daughters absolutely loved to pick up the extension and introduce themselves to my ‘friends’ in the UK and the US. That’s cute the first time. Mildly humourous the second time, and by the third time, career limiting. I now pay for a second line for my home office.

As my children have grown, they’ve become yellers. My lovely wife and my beautiful daughters communicate with each other at a volume that approaches that of a ZZ Top concert. If I’m working from home, I now make sure that there is no way that I am on a call at 3:30 when the masses arrive home from school, because I’m sure for the people on the other end, it sounds like I’ve just been invaded by North Korea. I now have a sign that I post up for all to see that says “I’m on the phone”. It doesn’t work. Turns out that screaming kids and howling dogs don’t take time to read.

Dogs don't read?  What?

We also had some operational challenges to overcome when I began to work at home. In the beginning, I’d be working, and Laura would call down to the basement to advise me that she was running out and that she’d be gone for a couple of hours. That left me in charge of the kids, who in those days, couldn’t really fend for themselves. Before I’d have a chance to object, I heard the minivan exit the driveway. On the bright side, I’ve had the benefit of a tremendous amount of 5-year old input into my strategic planning documents and sales presentations.

She also expected that I would be responsible for some daytime chores, like laundry. It was bad enough that my desk was jammed in a dark corner adjacent to the laundry room, which has no door, and I had to deal with the sounds of the laundry all day, but now there was an expectation that I was going to become an active participant in the process as well. I got so frustrated that I did what any normal work from home dad would do…I outsourced. I found somebody that would pick up five laundry bags from us every week (one for each of us), wash, fold, put it back in the bag it came out of, and return it to us the next day. The best $50.00 a week I ever spent. That went on for almost one blissful-laundry free year. I don’t know what happened, but it ended. I think I went back to work in the office.

Outsourcing the laundry.  It's a good thing.

In the course of my working from home career, Laura has gone from one end of the spectrum, where I’ve been an additional set of hands to help her, to the opposite end of the same spectrum where I simply don’t exist, and as such, she doesn’t offer to make me lunch or even tell me when she’s coming and going. The pendulum has now settled somewhere in the middle, and it’s working great. We even go out for lunch together sometimes. I’m still not wild about the idea of working from home everyday. I need the office, and the contact with the folks I work with. I think, though, that sometimes the office wishes I would just work from home.