Work, Dogs, and TV

I havent been doing much this past week except the usual going to work, walking the dogs, and watching TV.

Work - Man, I have to say that my job totally rocks. I know I am always going on about it to people but I have really been fortunate to land here. My co-workers rock. The bosses rock. I get treated well all the time. I am generally good at what I do but I have found out that even if I make a big mistake, I get treated a lot differently at this job than at my other one. I still have days where I wake up and dont feel like going into work but they are much fewer and far between than before. All in all, in that area, things are going well.

Dogs - they sure are fun. Last week we had lots of snow and it is so funny to see how differently each of my two dogs deals with snow. Brooke LOVES it. She always runs out and dives right in. She gets her whole head under the snow, she runs around in it, she makes snow angels, and generally just has a blast with it. Tasha on the other hand will walk outside and then will turn around and try to walk back in the house as soon as she realizes that there is snow on the ground. I have to make her go out to pee. It is hilarious!

We have been having some really unseasonably warm days for the past couple of days. I think it got up to 64F yesterday which was a record high. There has been a lot of rain too which combined with the melting of all the snow from last week has meant a lot of mud. There is so much water and mud down at the park that the paved path is mushy. That is too bad since I am pretty sure that the city doesnt have money to replace it. They did replace the lighting down there though but, so far, they havent turned them on. Oh well. I went down there yesterday and there were lots of people with dogs there. It was cool. Tasha LOVES meeting people and other dogs. Brooke likes it too but with less gusto than this yellow lab.

TV - I have just discovered Friday Night Lights. NBC.com has full episodes all the way back to the pilot on their web site. I have watched the entire first season in a week and a half! When I first heard of it, my thought was "A show about high school football in Texas? It sounds perfectly awful" But it turns out that it is well written and quite interesting. Even the football parts are decent. I would even go so far as to say that this show's fake, staged football games are much better than real live football games. For one thing, they only last a few minutes and they just show the "good parts" ;) I am learning things about football from watching the show though.

Guilty Pleasures

Tonight, what I would be doing instead of blogging and what I will be doing as soon as I am done blogging, is to engage in some guilty pleasures of mine.

1. Naturally, no guilty pleasure list would be complete without food. And tonight for dinner, I am having a great big giant "everything" bagel. It will be toasted and will have lots of cream cheese on it. YUM!
   
2. I am going to watch Meerkat Manor. A show that I stumbled on over the summer while hanging out at my parents house. They have cable. I dont. But I have Netflix and Netflix has Meerkat Manor. So I have two DVD's of the cute little buggers to watch.
   
3. Booze. Let's just say that I have a bottle of wine and I dont need to drive anywhere tonight.
   
4. Pajamas. I LOVE pajamas.
   

Well, now that I think about it, that is a pretty lame list. In my younger days, I would have been dropping acid and staying up all night with my friends causing trouble. Although I sometimes miss those days too, there is something to be said for the life of a boring middle class middle aged lady too.

Jennifer Granholm's BadAss Twin

I rented Stargate SG1 on DVD and watched a couple of episodes over the weekend. Truthfully, I dont think it is all that great of a show but it is kind of fun in an "A-Team" or "MacGyver" sort of way. But this show has one thing about it that I just LOVE: It stars a Jennifer Granholm look-a-like! No, REALLY! Check out the two photos below. One is Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm and the other is Amanda Tapping, the actress on SG1.





So far the very best part of the show has been imagining that it is Jennifer Granholm in all the action on the TV show and I confess to sitting in my living room yelling "Go Jenny G! Shoot the aliens! They're Republicans, I know it!" ;)

The Weather Outside is Frightful

It was ten degrees below zero this morning. And ok, I have a hard time getting out of my warm bed *every* monday but today it was nearly impossible. I did it though. Still, it is snot freezing weather out there. BRRRR

Otherwise, I have spent the last few days pretty much at home. I have had some interesting discussions about how gay employees at public institutions such as the UofM (this area's largest employer) are going to lose their benefits because a bunch of jerks voted to amend the state constitution to define marriage as being between only a man and a woman. Does anyone remember the people supporting this amendment specifically saying that no one's benefits would be taken away? What a bunch of liars.

I have watched a bunch of episodes of The Sopranos. I think one of the reasons I like that show is that the characters are so complex. Most of them are total dirtbags but often there is something sympathetic about them too. I like how the writers can make me start to think, 'that guy isnt soooo bad' only to have the character turn around and do something really horrible. Oh yeah, that guy IS so bad!

So that has pretty much been my life for the last week or so.

Meme which exposes me as a TV Junkie

Bold all of the following TV shows which you've ever seen 3 or more episodes of in your lifetime. Bold and Italicize a show if you're positive you've seen every episode of it. If you want, add up to 3 additional shows (keep the list in alphabetical order).




Type your cut contents here.
24
3rd Rock from the Sun
7th Heaven
Adam-12
Aeon Flux
ALF
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Alias
Allo Allo
American Idol /Pop Idol/Canadian Idol/Australian Idol
America's Next Top Model/Germany's Next Top Model
Angel
Arrested Development
Babylon 5
Babylon 5: Crusade
Battlestar Galactica (the old one)
Battlestar Galactica (the new one)
Baywatch
Beavis & Butthead
Beverly Hills 90210
Bewitched
Bonanza
Bones
Bosom Buddies
Boston Legal
Boy Meets World
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Bug Juice
Chappelle's Show
Charlie's Angels
Charmed
Cheers
Columbo
Commander in Chief
Coupling
Cowboy Bebop
Crossing Jordan
CSI
CSI: Miami
CSI: NY
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Dancing with the Stars
Danny Phantom
Dark Angel
Dark Skies
Davinci's Inquest
Dawson's Creek
Dead Like Me
Deadliest Catch
Deadwood
Degrassi: The Next Generation
Designing Women
Desperate Housewives
Dharma & Greg
Different Strokes
Doctor Who (new Who)
Doctor Who (series 1-26)
Dragnet
Due South
Dungeons and Dragons (old cartoon)
Earth 2
Emergency!
Entourage
ER
Everwood
Everybody Loves Raymond
Facts of Life
Family Guy
Family Ties
Fantasy Island
Farscape
Fawlty Towers
Felicity
Firefly
Frasier
Friends
Futurama
Get Smart
Gilligan's Island
Gilmore Girls
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
Green Wing
Grey's Anatomy
Growing Pains
Gunsmoke
Happy Days
Head of the Class (!!!where I fell in love with Billy Connolly!!!)
Highlander
Hill Street Blues
Hogan's Heroes
Home Improvement
Homicide: Life on the Street
House
I Dream of Jeannie
I Love Lucy
Invader Zim
Invasion
Iron Chef (Japan)
Iron Chef (USA)
Hell's Kitchen
JAG
Jackass
Joey
John Doe
Kath and Kim
LA Law
Laverne and Shirley
Law and Order
Little House on the Prairie
Lizzie McGuire
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
Lost
Lost in Space
Love, American Style
M*A*S*H
MacGyver
Magnum P.I.
Malcolm in the Middle
Married... With Children
Melrose Place
Miami Vice
Mission: Impossible
Monk
Moonlighting
Mork & Mindy
Murphy Brown
My Family
My Life as a Dog
My So-Called Life
My Three Sons
My Two Dads
Mysterious Cities of Gold
NCIS
Night Court
Nip/Tuck
Northern Exposure
Numb3rs
One Tree Hill
Oz
Perry Mason
Picket Fences
Pirates of Darkwater
Pokemon
Power Rangers
Prison Break
Profiler
Project Runway
Psyche
Quantum Leap
Queer As Folk (US)
Queer as Folk (British)
ReGenesis
Remington Steele
Rescue Me
Road Rules
ROME
Roseanne
Roswell
Saved by the Bell
Scarecrow and Mrs. King
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
Scrubs
Seinfeld
Sex and the City
Six Feet Under
Slings and Arrows
Smallville
So Weird
South Park
Spaced
Spongebob Squarepants
Sports Night
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek: Enterprise
Stargate Atlantis -- New season!!!!
Stargate SG-1 -- New season!!
Superman
Supernatural
Surface
Survivor
Taxi
Teen Titans
That 70's Show
That's So Raven
The 4400
The Addams Family
The Andy Griffith Show
The A-Team
The Avengers
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Bionic Woman
The Brady Bunch
The Cosby Show
The Daily Show
The Dead Zone
The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Flintstones
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
The Golden Girls
The Jetsons
The L Word
The Love Boat
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Mighty Boosh
The Monkees
The Munsters
The Mythbusters
The O.C.
The Office (UK)
The Office (US)
The Pretender
The Prisoner
The Real World
ROAR
The Shield
The Simpsons
The Six Million Dollar Man
The Sopranos
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
The Twilight Zone
The Waltons
The West Wing
The Wonder Years
The X-Files
Third Watch
Three's Company
Top Gear
Twin Peaks
Twitch City
Upstairs, Downstairs
Veronica Mars
Wings
What Not To Wear (US)
What Not To Wear (UK)
Whose Line is it Anyway? (US)
Whose Line is it Anyway? (UK)
Witchblade
Will and Grace
Wonderfalls
Young Hercules


I added: Fantasy Island; Upstairs, Downstairs; and Wonderfalls

Texas Ranch House (post 2) *warning spoilers*

I finished watching Texas Ranch House and have a few things to say about the series as a whole. I was really impressed with how it showed real people in real management situations. I wish I could make the managers where I work watch the show although I am not entirely sure they would be able to see why Mr and Mrs Cooke were bad managers and even if they did, I dont think they would see where they have similar faults (eerily similar actually). But of course, there is no way for me to get the managers to watch the show other than saying “Hey, instead of watching the basketball playoffs, you should watch Texas Ranch House on PBS” To say that didn’t go over well would be something of an understatement at least judging from the uproarious laughter that occurred directly after my suggestion. Oh well. I tried. But, since I think it is fun to critique others, especially when they are managers, I’ll give a quick critique of what I saw on Texas Ranch House.

The very first thing I think that Mr Cooke did that was wrong was that he never made it very clear to the ranch hands that he and Mrs Cooke were running the ranch together. This led to all kinds of very sexist behavior both on the part of Mr Cooke and on the part of the ranch hands. I found myself seething every time I heard the ranch hands make remarks about how Mr Cooke needed to stop letting Mrs Cooke influence his decisions because they were essentially saying that Mr Cooke should stop being so pussy whipped. The whole concept that if a man allows a woman to influence his decisions is really terrible. But I think I can understand some of the frustration. Because they had a situation where they were told that Mr Cooke was in charge and they were to talk to him. It was apparently clear between Mr and Mrs Cooke that they were making decisions together and to Mrs Cooke’s credit, whenever Mr Cooke seemed to forget that, she let him know right quick! But even so, it was Mrs Cooke who was making some of the really bad decisions and the ranch hands never really had a chance to address anything to her directly or even indirectly.

This was because one of Mr Cooke’s big “rules” was that he would not tolerate disrespect. Then, he actually did fire someone because that person was ranting about Mrs Cooke. What made that particular firing really bad was that it was the cook, Nacho, who was fired. Nacho, as it happens, was a really bad cook. He wasn’t hygienic enough and might have been making the ranch hands sick. The Cooke family never seemed appropriately concerned about this but did try minimally to get the cook to cook healthy meals. I think they could have tried harder and then failing that, perhaps fired him for bad cooking. But no, he was fired for talking trash about the WomenFolk. Had I been a hand on that ranch, the message would have been that I was so unimportant that a person who was making me sick was not fired but a person who verbally said something insulting about Mrs Cooke that was *accidently* overheard was fired. Yeah, not a very good feeling and not one that would make me give a shit if the business was successful.

So while I think it was a bad idea for Mr Cooke not to make it clear that Mrs Cooke was essentially a “co-manager” , I think I could sort of understand the ranch hands’ frustration about the situation. Because as bad of a manager as Mr Cooke was, Mrs Cooke was much much worse. Most of the really bad decisions were either her decision solely or generally her idea. She really reminded me of one of those managers who seriously get on a power trip. She seemed to have no idea that the ranch *needed* the hands. She wanted them working hard from sun up to sun down. She did not like it when they had fun and I believe she was behind the decision to take away the ranch hands whiskey when she believed they were having too much fun. This wasn’t a decision based on work performance but on the noise coming from the bunkhouse. Mrs Cooke said several times that she didn’t feel that the ranch hands gave her the proper respect and maybe they didn’t but she never seemed to have any clue about the concept that respect is really more of something a person earns rather than something someone is due because of their rank or position in society.

There was one scene where Mr and Mrs Cooke had a meeting with all of the ranch hands about their bad metrics. In their case, they hadn’t claimed enough cattle. In our case, we were off target of some other metrics (since I don’t happen to work on a cattle ranch). This meeting seemed to be called when the Cooke’s noticed that the ranch hands were starting to sleep in and were coming back in the middle of the afternoon for naps. This is one of those hard calls because they were trying to be historically accurate and in those days, hands would work 12+ hours a day. So it in this context, it wasn’t unreasonable for the Cooke’s to have high expectations of the hands. The way they handled it though was just wrong. Basically, they gathered everyone and read them the riot act. IMHO, they really drove a wedge between management and labor right there. In fact, I thought the Cooke’s were very lucky because the reaction of the hands was to simply ignore them and to keep working at the same rate they had been working at while a lot of people might have tried to be very passive aggressive by doing as little work as possible while appearing to be busy. Oddly, the Cooke’s felt this meeting was a great success even though it cemented an action by the hands that happened later that probably would ultimately doom the ranch to failure.

At the end of the show, Mr Cooke ended up firing yet another of the Ranch Hands. He had made a deal with that particular hand that the hand could buy a horse for $25 out of his wages. Earlier in the show, that hand along with the horse in question had been kidnapped by Native Americans. Mr Cook refused to pay ransom for the hand but did agree to give the Native Americans some cattle in exchange for four horses. Unfortunately, Mr Cooke only got three horses because they counted the horse the ranch hand was riding as one of theirs (since they had rightfully taken it according to their custom). They let the hand go for free.

Mr Cooke decided that the horse belonged to the ranch hand at that time and therefore he had bought it back in the transaction. But I think that horse didn’t belong to the hand at that time and that Mr Cooke was being pretty sleazy to expect that hand to assume that kind of risk. It is the business owner in most cases who assumes the risks of the business. In cases where employees do, it is usually made clear up front (i.e. that some of their compensation will be in the form of profit sharing or stock options or whatever).

The hand was understandably angry when Mr Cooke pulled this business of not selling him the horse at the price originally agreed and the hand pretty much said that he was leaving the ranch on the horse anyways. Mrs Cooke insisted that this hand be fired because of his disrespect (familiar theme with her as it happens). So Mr Cooke fired the hand. However, because of his earlier actions and because this hand was the sort to earn real respect from his fellow employees and because the foreman was a good enough manager to get all of the hands to form a very cohesive team, all of the other hands decided to quit too. Every last one of them walked out. And that doomed the ranch. Because you see, the Cooke’s apparently thought that getting a whole new crew would be easy but skilled labor apparently wasn’t quite that available in 1867 Texas. Without their labor to do the work, the business would be sunk.

That seems to be a common attitude even among modern managers. I know that I have often felt that I, and my fellow employees, have not been treated as if we are valued. In fact, I sometimes think that the managers here believe that if they ever were to treat us like we have value, it would make them less powerful. But that isn’t so in my opinion. I think that it is possible to get employees invested in the success of the business. Employees who care about the success of the business tend to work harder and also tend to get more satisfaction from a job well done. The Cooke’s could have done a lot to foster that sort of thinking among the hands but they didn’t. I think that it would have been really easy to do it in their case too. Instead of constantly giving out the message, “you have to work harder because we are the bosses and we say so”, they should have been saying “we all need to work harder so we can meet our numbers and have a successful ranch because then we will all be successful”

Texas Ranch House *warning spoilers*

I generally do not like reality TV shows. I seldom can stand them for more than one or two episodes. That is unless they are the history based ones they show on PBS!

I am currently watching the latest in these which is airing this week on PBS. This one is called Texas Ranch House and the premise is that there is a ranch family and their hired hands in the year 1867. They have to herd and then eventually sell enough cattle to pay the mortgage and everyone’s wages. It is really quite an interesting show.

One of the first things I noticed is how bad a manager the ranch owner is. He is TERRIBLE. He reminds me a lot of my own managers where I work and it is interesting watching him walk the line of utter failure and limited success. I mean, it is only half way through the show and he has already fired two people (one of whom he fired for “disrespecting his family”). A third left and others seem on the verge of throwing in the towel but seem to be staying because this is really such a great opportunity to learn about what life might have been like on a west Texas ranch just after the Civil War. As I watch this show, I cant help wondering if other management techniques might be better.

Another thing I noticed is how a bunch of 20th century men can become so blatantly chauvinistic when put into a situation where there are highly defined gender roles. The cowboys are down three people and they absolutely refuse to accept help from a woman who is willing and able to do the whole cowboy thing. They keep talking about how they don’t want her on their team because “she has something to prove.” At least one of them has mentioned that it isn’t “woman’s work” to herd cattle. Amazing!

So now I am hooked and I cant wait to see the second half of this series. Will the ranch be successful? Will that woman from the house get play “cowboy”? I sure hope so! Will the ranch owner stop being such a dick? Will his wife chill out?