Friday, July 11, 2008

Men, sizing matters

Again, a do's and don'ts of workplace fashion focused strongly on (young) women. Complete with slide show including cleavage. Ok, I agree that people could dress a little more professionally. (Not that I will, but you know about advice: love to give it, don't follow it.) But I hate how most of this advice is focused on women. Men, too, take liberties with the dress code: it just happens that their faux pas usually have to do with improper sizing while they are still within the dress code confines. How about these:
  • The fuzzy-bear belly. Yes, men with muffin tops and popped buttons showing up for work. Or growing increasingly deshabille as the day goes on. These are the guys who aren't allowed to be skins on the court.
  • Chafe-y underwear so they're always rearranging their clappers. Or that scissors move when they slouch down in the chair and think no one is watching. YUCK. Just buy some knickers that fit already.
  • Tight clothing.You need a size thirty-six waist. You are not the same size you were in college, get over it.
  • Overhanging gut that ate the belt. Steve McQueen is looking for you and he has a fire extinguisher.
  • No waist man. Pants hiked up to the armpits and scary camel toe. If your nipples are that cold, put on a sweater.
  • I don't want to see your ankles. Ever. Your legs have stopped growing, just measure and commit. (That Nicolas Sarkozy thing was an April Fool's Day joke.)
  • Plumber's crack. Need I say more?
Clearly, if you actually listened to the adage, measure twice, cut once, we'd have some better dressed men and perfectly fitted baseboards. Beyond sizing, but purely fashion stricken
  • Track pants. Jay Z wants you to get out of his closet.
  • Ungroomed facial hair. Yes, you, the one that ate that soup for lunch. Or was it yesterday's lunch?
  • Men wear flip-flops, too. A far greater crime: brown sandals with black socks. Or mismatched tube socks. So shut up about it.
Feel the love? Now you know why women hate fashion do's and don'ts.

Should you dress "younger"?

I like the guy who gives a nod to confidence. I would also go with common sense, but you can fake it til you make it. Notice that they are pretty hard on older women and their appearance: sometimes it is hard to dress "appropriately" when stores don't sell anything appropriate.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Do we need weekends?

Do we need weekends? I think that we do, though they can be mid-week, and you can separate them sometimes but I would prefer to have two together. Most librarians, especially new ones, don't get traditional weekends, but many libraries do try to give a break, and if they can't they are short-staffed. I think many beginning librarians could agree that they have too few hours packed with too much work--and a weekend becomes more important.

This essay also seems to forget that many people need one day that they don't have to pay for child care: Saturday and Sunday when the kids are off, terrorizing the parks. Or, really, home on the Wii, but someone has to watch them. School schedules have a huge impact on the lives of parents--especially single ones--and those schedules certainly structure our work lives. You don't have to have children to have additional family responsibilities: a family member, of any age, could need your care and assistance, forcing changes at work.

People who have just graduated from college are probably scoffing, weekends, that's when I worked my job. And yes, that's true for many college students, but what you did do was something else. Occasionally boring and sometimes fulfilling but you did something other than study. And be honest: some of those days were spent beer drinking or napping during the afternoon.

And notice in the article, it isn't about weekends, it's about work hours and constant access to wage slaves. The article talks about how Gen-Y is so frustrated that they can't be in constant contact all the time and just meet when they need to--which means after hours, and on Saturdays, or Sundays after hours. So instead of eight hours a day, we become Blackberry Minions, answering all types of queries until the wee hours.

But two days a week, if we can afford it, we should be allowed to work on separate projects and be with our families and friends. Sleep in, eat pancakes. Church, or another religious service, if we are so inclined. That's what the weekend is for.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

DIY Yahoo! Pipes

You can make your own personal search engine using Yahoo! Pipes. Yahoo! Pipes uses drag and drop modules into a sandbox that you can use to remix your RSS feeds, searches from Yahoo! Local and the Google Base. You can also add a filter to sort by job title (didn't work so well in the one that I created for library jobs) and sort by publication date (field needs to be filled in the original RSS to really work).


I also used some RSS fields from some vertical search engines (Eluta, WowJobs and Indeed Canada) to give it some power. You can tinker even more with their feeds by adding the province or state that you would like to work in and get a better geographical fix when you run your searches.

Now, you don't have to cobble together your own pipe: you can use the pre-existing pipes (there are about 10 for library jobs). You can also easily clone one that you like and make some changes, provided that you have a Yahoo! account.

I did notice something weird looking for library jobs as my keyword: I got lots of pipes for lesbian (oh, yes, the first thing I think of when I hear librarian, so easy to confuse the two). Trying to remove the erotic search engines just didn't seem to work (maybe they use librarian or library as a tag?). I found lots of erotic pipes (ha ha!) on the Yahoo! Pipes service, so you may not be able to get results from the pipes service if you are running a family friendly search or are behind a finicky filter.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

What was the most difficult course you've taken?


This is a good question for a person who is fresh out of school, usually asked if the employer expects the candidate to apply their classroom knowledge to the real world.

You have to pay attention to the question though: this class was difficult, meaning that it was a hardship in some way. You can answer it by saying the subject matter didn't interest you--but if you mention your cataloging course and you're interviewing to become a cataloger, you're could be in trouble. Some people are a bit too forthcoming and describe their clashes with their prof (too difficult/obscure/hidebound/whatever), which could be a legitimate reason, but makes you seem like a maverick--great on film, but we don't want to work with you. So here's a strategy: tell the truth.

We don't always like all of the stuff that we have to do, but we persevere or we find a part of the task that we like and we do it well. You persevere because you have to pass the class to become a librarian. To pass, you need to find some aspect of the dreaded class that you can understand so you can either crack the code of the rest of the subject matter, or to finish enough components of the class well enough to pass.

For example, the research methods class that we had to take included statistics which are not my favorite subject--there are stronger words I normally use for statistics but I won't use them here. But students could focus on qualitative methods and that is what I used to pass the class--and do pretty well. It also helped that I had a kick ass prof who wanted everyone to do well in the class. I'm still not happy with statistics, but because I took the class and did extra reading, I was able to pass (better than pass) and I can still deal with them now. I have to: they're part of my job.

So pick the class that you found difficult--and hope it isn't 90% of the duties of the job that you are interviewing for--and describe what you found difficult, why and how you dealt with it. Stay focused on your difficulties--not problems real or imagined caused by others (difficult professor, dog ate my homework)--and how you manage yourself and your resources to overcome obstacles.

Follow-ups to this question could include what do you like least or best about your current job? or what do you do to overcome obstacles?

Monday, July 7, 2008

Common Craft explains LinkedIn


What is LinkedIn? from LinkedIn Marketing on Vimeo.

Spotted on iLibrarian.

I think this can give you an idea and even explain networking. But the true benefit to LinkedIn, for job seekers, is that there are many human resource professionals on the site. Many of them are LIONs--many of them are not, and hate the idea. They pay a lot of attention to the Answers section, so you should be in there answering and asking questions, when relevant to your expertise. I have gotten recommendations from strangers, but LinkedIn connections, that I have been able to use in my work. You can use it in your job search, but you need a bigger network than other librarians and your college pals, so you have to make connections to people, usually by answering and asking questions.

That is the power of LinkedIn: you can expand your current network, which is limited by geography, and connect with people, linked to you by others or who ask to be introduced to you. But sitting passively on LinkedIn is not going to get you anywhere.