by mayberry on April 10, 2008
As of two months ago at work, I was part of a small group that also included an editor-in-chief, a managing editor, a web producer, and a production assistant (a full-time, long-term temp).
Mid-February: My boss resigns.
Monday: The managing editor has surgery, goes out on medical leave for 3-5 weeks.
Today: I learn that the producer has resigned.
My team is now me and a temp.
This can NOT be good.
Turnover bites. And what also bites is that everyone knows how to prevent it, but isn’t willing to follow through. Another producer in the department, the mother of a one-year-old, quit recently after trying for months to negotiate some kind of flexible work arrangement. Come on, managers. Give people a little freedom and a little credit, and 98% of the time you’ll be richly rewarded.
by mayberry on February 26, 2008
I am looking for good food/mom blogs. Not so much for myself, but for a work project. Can you recommend any that you love — not too gourmet; more about everyday cooking with/for kids who may or may not only eat their pasta without sauce, their apples peeled, their yogurt character-ized, and their pizza only is “someone else bakes it.”
Merci bien.
Oh, and any grandmothers and mothers of middle schoolers would be magnifique as well.
by mayberry on February 13, 2008
Some of you know that I have another blog on the site I work on. I don’t link it here because, you know, I feel that I am the second coming of Dooce. My mother is the most faithful reader of that blog (probably the only reader. Even I am usually bored with it, and it’s all about my kids). She checks compulsively for updates, never fails to mention what she’s read, and even suggests topics.
So today, when I felt a bit of bloggers’ block, I emailed my #1 fan. I usually can’t keep track of where she is because she travels all the time, but she does check her Crackberry constantly. Sure enough, she called me from her cell phone within a half hour and reeled off four ideas.
Write about everything you have to prepare before you go out of town.
Too stressful. NEXT!
Write about how you embrace the winter season with the kids.
Ha. Ha ha ha ha. I only embrace the sturgeon-spearing. Pucker up, dino-fish. NEXT!
Write about Valentine’s Day and all the learning opportunities that go with it [a lifetime ago Mom was a first-grade teacher].
Reasonable possibility. After Jo rejected my idea for homemade valentines (red construction paper hearts with cut-out pictures from other cards glued on top, and the text “You’re cut out to be my valentine”), we bought a couple of packages of licensed-character goodness. She sat right down and addressed and signed them all in one fell swoop. No nagging, bribing, or even coaching. I was very proud. But: If I do this, I’ll save it until after the school party, in case that yields any good stories. NEXT!
Write about how you cook with the kids, what they like about it, what they are learning from it.
Ding! I think we have a winner. Yes, I may be a kitchen lame-o but I am raising a boy who has an entire wardrobe of aprons and his very own whisk. Tonight: “Now you can help me mix up this stuff and make meatballs.” “I can use my whisk?”
Next time, though, I may just hire Grandma as a ghost-blogger. I can pay her a percentage of my lucrative salary of $0.
by mayberry on February 5, 2008
My boss just called to tell me she resigned.
My reaction is unprintable here (because I checked off “no profanity” for my BlogHer ads).
Picture a long string of expletives and you will get the idea. I love my boss. I have been reporting to her since I came back from my maternity leave after Jo was born. (I probably wouldn’t have even come back if I still had to report to my previous boss, a single man and pompous ass.) A working mom of three herself, she has been my champion while I transitioned back to work, got the hang of pumping, asked to work at home two days a week, moved away, had another baby.
She embraced my proposal to continue to work for her as a telecommuter after we moved to Mayberry, an arrangement we’ve had now for almost four years. Personally and professionally, she is extremely supportive and protective of her staff. Hands down, she is the best boss I’ve ever had. She’s also a lot of fun–literally someone you’d want to sit down and have a beer with, which I’ve done often. She’s a straight-talking Italian from Jersey and I will miss her very much.
For the foreseeable future I’ll be reporting to her boss. She told him to keep me and let me continue what I’ve been doing, but who knows if he will (or if I’ll be able to deal with him). I knew this wouldn’t last forever but it still sucks to see it come to an end.
by mayberry on September 30, 2007
1. Work: Eh. Lovely catching up with coworkers and demonstrating that I am, indeed, more than just a voice wafting through the speakerphone. Much slower pace than last visit. Project that I went to launch didn’t launch, thanks to no help at all from other parts of our group. Blah blah story of our little team’s life blah blah.
2. Opie: excellent companion. Befriended many fellow travelers. Dug the subway (except when it was “too woud”). Can demonstrate Statue of Liberty pose. Wants to be a “stick guy” for Halloween.
3. Neighbor child doting on Opie: Largely annoying (mostly because he riled Opie up so that it took me an average of one hour each night to get him to fall asleep). All forgiven when I learned he’d written in his school journal that “the best part of this week is taking care of the Baby Opie.”
4. Celeb sightings: No Clooney, but Opie saw Chris Noth and Eric Bogosian and we both saw John McCain.
5. This weekend, aka The Return:
Guess whose is whose?
The lost tooth, by the way, is literally lost, somewhere in the depths of Home Depot. I only hope the next person rummaging through one of those drawers full of nuts and bolts doesn’t find a small, bloody incisor instead. Jo wrote the following note to the fairy (punctuation emphatically hers):
Jo! lost! my! Tooth!
Look! for! it! at!
Home!
Depot!
[signed]
Jo!
Bye!
by mayberry on March 8, 2007
Let’s say I worked for a website devoted to kids’ reading and learning, which was part of a major media/publishing company. And let’s say that company wanted to create a newsletter especially for bloggers, pointing out fun, interesting, new stuff on the site. Would you want to read it? How often? What would you want it to include? What would make you say “enough of this damn spam?”
I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you want a copy of such a thing if and when it does materialize, please leave me your email address in the comments or at mayberrymom2006 at yahoo dot com.
