Letters to the Editor
Argiri
Published Letters: 30 Editor's Choice: 5
-
Very sound advice
[Read the article: The workers I supervise are out of control]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would add: try to get away from the idea that they are crazy and unmanageable. They may be okay individually but not work well as a group. Also, look at the dynamic among them. Are there people who simply don't like each other or are hopelessly incompatible, and are they being forced to work closely together? You can fix that by giving them some serious distance from one another. Also consider the idea that there may be one bad apple in the mix, a person who is causing disequilibrium in the group. If things have rocked along decently until recent times, take a careful look at any new person who has authority over the others or who, by virtue of his or her role, can readily inconvenience or distress the others. If so, think about how you can quarantine that person. Don't just look at whoever is appearing dysfunctional. Actually, scrutinize whoever is looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in a situation that's grinding the others down. The person prospering amidst adversity may be the villain in the situation.
Above all, don't try to act like work is kindergarten and you're the teacher and you've got to teach all these people to get along. These people are past that malleable stage, and the mission is getting work done, not making people who don't like each other or fit well together get along. Reconfigure the work flow for the maximum human harmony and see how it goes.
-
Right on target...
[Read the article: How can I ditch my bitchy friend now that she has cancer?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This LW's situation is one in which bending to accommodate someone is appropriate. She does not have to be heroic, just decent, in order to come out of this relationship with a clean conscience. She can decide what she is going to offer and offer it kindly and consistently to her sick friend.
Her situation is in stark contrast to that of the too-kind man who had taken in a roommate, then the roommate's girlfriend, who then got pregnant, and the apartment then got crowded...and the roommate had the hubris to ask his benefactor to move. Let's have an update on that LW, if possible: has he had the balls to rake his interlopers out of his living space and change the locks?
-
And...?
[Read the article: "I only dread one day at a time!"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Truthfully, I was never much interested in "Peanuts" because it seemed to depict a children's world unbelievably benign and forgiving even in its mischiefs. The strip seemed to be about a clueless adult's concept of children. Most children are beastly unless the adults in their lives put in the hard work necessary to train them out of feral narcissism and into empathy and civlization, and most adults don't have the energy to do that. Same old same old.
But...what's the surprise expressed in this article all about? That something charming was created by an unhappy depressive? In my experience, most creative work, charming or not, is created by depressives. Naturally happy people are off doing whatever it is they do in their spare time; if the advertisement industry is correct, that would seem to involve a lot of riding around in cars, doing sports, making recreational purchases, and drinking soda. Depressives, at least those with strong creative talent, are trying to use it to wring some redemption out of life on earth.
Untreated depressives are, by definition, not happy people. Some of them are remote and difficult. Some of them are clingy and needy. Schultz's wife was luckier than poor Ted Hughes, my second-favorite poet, who had a big chunk of his adult life harrowed by Sylvia Plath, my favorite poet, whom I'm perfectly happy not to have known personally, because she was apparently a perfect terror, a radical version of the clingy/needy/jealous depressive model. I would take remote-and-difficult over that any day. I have always wondered why the unhappy spouse linked to someone of the remote-and-difficult type doesn't find business of her/his own to do and do it rather than protesting the other partner's temperament, which surely wasn't invisible during the courtship period.
We would all benefit by jettisoning the cult of personality; personality is mainly genetic, subject to some modest modification from psychotropic drugs. I find it rather strange that so much contemporary contemplation goes to an attribute that is inborn, like physique. We should judge each other on our works, not the dead end of an inborn attribute. We muddle up temperament and production as if they were both voluntary outputs. How many articles and school papers,after all, contrast an artist and the artist's work? Their numbers are legion.
This article doesn't do so any worse than many, but it is typical of a line of thought that is very prevalent and not all that productive.