Bee’s Musings

As promised, there are pictures of the snow available now online! Just click on the picture below to see the gallery. If we get more snow tonight, I’ll update the gallery with more pictures later on. Enjoy - and if you’re someplace sunny, be thankful!

Holiday Blizzard - Pt 2

Consider this about an 8 hour work day:

You spend about 4 hours in listening activities;
You hear about 2 hours worth;
You actually listen to an hour’s worth;
You understand 30 minutes of that hour;
You believe only 15 minutes’ worth; and
You remember just under 8 minute’s worth.

Crazy, I know… and when I actually start thinking about it, I believe that to be true. Over the last few days, I’ve had the opportunity to just talk more with a few of my co-workers. Some of this is because of the slower time of year, and some is because we were saying our goodbyes as I transitioned away from the division I’ve been working in for the last 2 years. I am starting to wonder how much I will remember. Based on the above calculation - you actually only remember 3% of what you “listen” to. That mean’s I’ll only remember ~22 days worth of what I’ve done.

In 2007, I hope to listen more - pay attention more. I want to be quieter to understand more. I think we could all use a few more people listening, and society could use a little less noise.

So much has changed since the last time I wrote a blog. And there are so many ways to write this one…

I’m going to start with Things Not To Say
1 - When someone tells you that they don’t want to see you anymore, you should not say “Okay.” You should at least try to come up with something more interesting, like “If you think that’s best” or “I’ll miss seeing you” or at least “I wish you the best!” But no, just “okay” is not acceptable.
2 - If your employee tells you that they’ve applied for a new job in a different division, you should not say “That’s great! I’m so excited for you!” as your first reaction. You should at least try to convince them to stay before you encourage them to leave.
3 - When you are trying to convince an employee to stay, maybe you should avoid saying “We don’t want to invest in you.” If you dont want to invest in your employee, chances are, they won’t want to invest in you either.

So, that probably gave you some clues over what’s been happening. First, I stopped seeing the guy I’d been seeing since this summer. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him (I did), or that we didn’t have fun together (we did). We just rarely saw each other, and just didn’t have any of the same interests.

Second, I applied for a new job - and the exciting part is - I got it! Starting in January, I’ll be the emedia project manager for a group of electronic engineering magazines. If I thought the group I worked for now had a “geek” audience, this one is 10x geekier. I’m very excited about the new job.

That’s about it for now - the snow is finally starting to melt (I’ve been stuck at the house as part of the Holiday blizzard 2006), so I may try to venture out for a while. Once the sun goes down all of the melting is going to turn into pure ice - which is going to be even less fun than the snow. We’ll see if I can make it to yoga class tonight, or if I just wait until after Christmas.