A while back I was on a morning radio show out of Grand Rapids, MI, called Barnaby and Friends; something I do every other week or so. I thought I did great and was patting myself on the back after it was done until my husband, who was working from our home office that day and overheard the interview, deflated my big head.

“You were speaking too fast,” he said, adding that I sounded nervous or like I had too much coffee.

Yikes! I thought I was sounding like Suze Orman or something but it turned out it was more like one of the Chipmunks.

I share this story because many of you have been writing me lately about interviews you thought you nailed but didn’t get the job. Alas, we are not our own worst critics so it’s time to get an interview reality check. (more…)

UPDATE BELOW
It’s hard not to read an email with the subject line: “Beer=Fired.”

Dave M., an alcoholic, sent me an urgent question this week asking about his rights.

“I went to detox for an alcohol relapse, and while I was in rehab I was fired. Is this legal?? I called out for the days missed, but they canned me for violating the callout procedure. I did provide a letter from the hospital, emergency room, etc, but they refused to give me my job back.”

I really felt for this guy because I’ve seen first hand how alcoholism can destroy a person’s life even when they try hard to stop drinking.

Clearly, being an alcoholic is a debilitating affliction but is it considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and as such, protected under the law? (more…)

Today, yet another CEO will be going before Congress to explain himself.

This time it’s Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’ big cheese.

Basically the mega financial firm is charged with profiting from the housing market’s collapse and actually betting against their own clients. Blankfein, along with other Goldman bigwigs, will be testifying before a Senate subcommittee today.

The whole thing has me sort of bummed out.

It’s getting to feel like a never-ending CEO parade on the Hill. Enron’s CEO. Toyota’s CEO. Countrywide’s CEO.

They all testified that they knew nothing, did nothing, and frankly were “immensely proud of what we accomplished.” That last line came from former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling during his Congressional grilling.

Are all these powerful guys just bald-faced liars? Is the old adage, power corrupts true after all? According to one study, the answer may be yes. (more…)

Moms don’t give themselves enough credit.

I recently got a letter from a reader asking how she can find a mentor for her young daughter to help her navigate the testosterone-heavy tech profession. She wanted advice on how to find a “cheering section” for her daughter.

Well, honey, look in the mirror!!

Yes it’s great to find people who can help your daughters make it in our male-dominated work world, but moms also need to get off their asses.

So many moms have given up on their career dreams, opted to let their husbands support them, spend hours volunteering at schools and doing homework, all in the name of their kids. But when it comes to finally needing them when it matters most, some moms want to leave the self-esteem building only up to strangers. (more…)

I’m all about protecting a worker’s privacy and freedom of speech, but if you’re surfing and downloading porn for eight hours a day at work you may have gone too far.

Wondering why the government hasn’t been able to reign in Wall Street? It turns out that some top employees at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the government agency that’s supposed to be keeping an eye on Wall Street, were surfing dirty photos instead of dirty dealings.

This from the Associated Press:

The SEC’s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained late Thursday by The Associated Press.

The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

In one instance:

A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

People like this make it harder for the rest of us. News of these bozos comes at a critical time because the Supreme Court just took up a case involving worker privacy. Such extreme abuse of employer equipment and time as seen at the SEC isn’t going to help. (more…)

If you want a job as a print production specialist at Progressive Medical Inc. in Westerville, OH, one of the required skills is “critical thinker.”

And “the successful candidate,” applying to be a business reporter with Associated Press in New York, also “must be a critical thinker.”

This skill is sought after by pretty much every employer looking to fill a position. It’s hard to find a job posting that doesn’t include this requirement.

I feel bad for all those poor saps out there that are not critical thinkers but just plain old thinkers. (Critical-thinker cheat sheet below.) Especially since a new study finds more and more businesses are on the hunt for critical thinkers right now. (more…)

You know the labor movement is in real trouble when one of the only major media outlets that seriously covers a big union protest where bigwigs get arrested is “E!”

Yes E!, the entertainment channel.

We should all give them props for caring about working conditions for the down trodden. (Tone of sarcasm here.)

Well, the main focus of the story was the arrest of one of my favorite actors, Danny Glover. He was protesting outside the headquarters of food-service company Sodexo in Maryland. The demonstration was part of a series of national protests organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) at 10 Sodexo locations to fight what they say are poor working conditions and union busting.

It makes you wonder how much hope those workers have if Glover, a Hollywood movie star and long-time worker advocate, is put behind bars and few take notice. Worker rights just don’t sell today.

By contrast, if Angelina Jolie got thrown in the clinker for protesting conditions in Ethiopia or Sean Penn got hand cuffed for rallying for more Haitian earth quake help it would have been a top story. (CNN’s Anderson Cooper can’t get enough of Penn these days.) (more…)

In this economy, the last thing any of us want to do is make a major screw up at work.

Alas, a young aspiring computer engineer from Apple, makers of the iPhone and iPad, is probably crying in his beer this morning.

Apple is crazy secretive about all it’s new products, guarding each invention with a zeal that would make the folks over at Fort Knox envious. And that’s why it’s even more upsetting that the engineer left a prototype for the new iPhone at a bar last month and that prototype ended up in a media explosion begun by tech cyber bible Gizmodo.

This from the website:

It’s a simple, honest mistake. Something that anyone, from Steve Jobs to Jonathan Ive, could have done. Knowing how ferocious and ruthless Apple is about product leaks, those beers may have turned out to be the bitterest of his life.

Indeed, the poor guy may lose his job over this and potentially face serious career damage. But is there a way he could save his butt and his job? If not, will he survive this trauma? (more…)

“How much did they first pay you to give up on your dreams?”

That question is asked by Ryan Bingham — a smooth-talking, layoff expert played by George Clooney in the movie “Up in the Air” — of Bob, a man he just fired played by J.K. Simmons.

Bob is just another corporate minion with two cute young kids. They look under 14 from the photos he shows Bingham, in an attempt to gain some sympathy. Alas, Ryan has to give Bob the boot no matter what Bob says and of course Bob is pissed off.

In an attempt to mitigate the layoff fall out, Ryan launches into a soliloquy on how Bob, based on his resume, let go of his dream of going into the culinary arts long ago in exchange for this job he never liked. At least that’s Ryan’s premise, and Bob eats it up hook, line and sinker.

Is this just the simplistic, elitist, Hollywood view of the realities of work? (more…)

This lovely, serene photo of a happy family on vacation is not my family. (I just found this by Googling “family vacation.”)

At some point during our vacation last week I turned to my husband and asked: “Can working parents really have a relaxing vacation with their kids?”

“No,” he yelled so quickly I barely got all the words out.

Maybe it was the hours of constant joyful yelling by our two kids while at the pool.

Or maybe it was the prepubescent Martin and Lewis act they seemed to be doing over and over again.

I’m not sure what got me questioning whether we would ever relax, but we were in desperate need of R&R because of our recent tough work schedules and we didn’t seem to get it.

So, can working parents really get R&R with their kids around? (more…)