So I took this quiz offered by the Center for American Liberals Progress and my score is 149/400, making me "very conservative"; the "average score" (meaning I suppose the average score of people who have visited this liberal site) being 209.5.

In fact, according to them I am off the chart.





Quelle suprise. I will cry all the rest of the day.

(Edited to add: Look where Obama voters land on this thing. I suppose that progressives are cool with making fun of the disabled.)

(Edited to fix "quelle".)

Went to an American Chemical Society meeting last night. The local group is totally academic, except for me. I don't know how it happened that the Memphis group got such a good mix of academia and industry.

The speaker is retired from University of Washington, Seattle. He was here with his wife, which is not unusual for speakers, and usually the spouses are very interested and engaged people. After the meeting, he and his wife, and Carmen who is the professor at the local school who sponsors the ACS group, and I had dinner. And we talked about all the usual things - jobs, families, places we've lived.

Carmen asked if I would speak to her students some time about life after college. I said I would. I've had a different career trajectory than I would have had I gone to school past getting my bachelor's. One of the kids I met yesterday is a senior, she's having cold feet about what will happen after graduation (tell F about it), and I gave her a 45-second overview of my career path. The speaker told her she needs to hear stories like that from all kinds of people. Actually, all of the kids do. I've long thought it is very strange how we do education, although I don't know if we could really do it differently. It's as if kids get on a train in preschool, and the track runs through kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, at least into college and hopefully up to getting that bachelor's degree, and then the track comes to an abrupt stop and the kids suddenly have to get off the train and find a direction and a motive force. Some know what they want to do, of course, and they get off that train and onto the next one. Some don't make it to the end of the line, and of those, some do OK without their B.S. and some don't. But we expect 17-year-olds to make decisions about how they're going to spend the rest of their lives - and how do they know? How do they know what they even want to do? They don't know what all there is, or what they themselves are really like yet. Easier and safer to just stay on the train.

Anyway, Carmen is going to contact me about this and I suppose we'll talk about what I'll talk to her students about. I can think of several possible topics. In fact, I could probably talk their ears off, as F knows very well.

And I told Carmen my idea about teaching control charting; how I would do it if I taught a science course. I would set up a titration station to measure the chlorine in tap water. It's an easy sodium thiosulfate titration with a starch-iodine endpoint. The chlorine will vary a bit from day to day, hopefully within some reasonable range. I would have someone in each chemistry lab measure whatever the chlorine content is that day. The students would all cycle through doing that. They would plot their results on an Excel spreadsheet set up with date on the X axis and ppm Cl₂ on the Y axis, and with horizontal lines showing the average, plus and minus 1 standard deviation, and plus and minus 2 standard deviations. It's not hard to set the spreadsheet up to do that; in fact, since you need about 20 data points before you start getting any decent stats, I'd probably let the students see if they could set that up themselves for extra credit. Then you could talk about upper and lower warning limits and control limits, and revisit what you learned if you took statistics (I never did, sadly) about how in a normal distribution, 68% of the data points fall within 1 standard deviation of the mean and 95% within 2 standard deviations; and confidence limits; and how many significant figures you can reasonably report; and how you'd do an investigation of out-of-spec results. Could the sodium thiosulfate have gone bad - can you restandardize it? (You can.) Could the amount of water taken for titration have been measured improperly? Did the tap need to run longer before the sample was taken? Is the starch solution still good? And so forth. It would be a good exercise and give them a running start, and help them stand out among their entry-level coworkers. Or probably even their experienced coworkers.

I have long seen, and continue to see, articles about self-esteem.

Here's one: Self-esteem not a good teaching tool

Turns out children are feeling pretty good about themselves lately. Maybe a little too good.

A recent study by researchers at San Diego State University found that high school seniors are bursting with more self-esteem than a generation or two ago. For example, in 1975, 49 percent of them believed they would be successful at their jobs.

Today 65 percent do.

Instilling that "world, here I come!" attitude is a great thing. Instilling baseless self-congratulation? Less so. Yet I have to admit that I have a hard time figuring out when to say, "What a wonderful letter you wrote for grandma!" and when to go, "Do you think you could possibly put one ounce of effort into your thank-you note?"

There have been various proponents of self-esteem over the years, ranging from Nathaniel Branden, onetime close friend and "intellectual heir" of Ayn Rand, to James Dobson, who wrote Hide or Seek in the early 1970's. Somewhere along the way, the idea of self-esteem became subsumed into the kinds of you're-so-wonderful-just-because-you're-you statements we associate with Mr. Rogers, and then, in that simplistic form, worked into education theory for kids through high school age - that is, if you believe articles like the above mentioned.

Count me as one of those people who think that self-esteem is very important. I think you can figure out what a person's self-image is by inviting them to complete this statement: "I am the kind of person who...." And I think it's important that the person's self-image, while moderately realistic, is generally positive. "I'm the kind of person who gets the job done." "I'm the kind of person who is compulsive about getting all my schoolwork finished and turned in on time." "I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm the kind of person who worries at my math homework until I understand it, no matter how long it takes." Why only moderately realistic? I don't think it hurts for people to stretch themselves. If a person of average intelligence thinks "I'm pretty smart", she will probably challenge herself by taking the more difficult courses in school. She may not make grades better than C, but she'll definitely get to the limit of her natural ability; she'll learn a lot of stuff, possibly surprise her teachers, and if nothing else, be an interesting and engaged person.

I have read and absorbed some of the caveats about the kind of general praising you're not supposed to do. So I've tried to be both accurate and specific about the positive feedback I've given my daughter. "I'm proud of your hard work and the way you stuck with that tedious project until you got it finished," for instance. (There are those who say I shouldn't have said "I'm proud" because I wasn't letting her have ownership; shoot me.) This is the answer to Ms. Skenazy's dilemma about the letter to Grandma, by the way, and one might incorporate one of the things I learned in management training: say "and" instead of "but". "I see that you've written a thank-you note to Grandma. She'll be happy to get that. It looks very nice. And maybe you could add a sentence about how you love the color and you can't wait to wear it to school." Now you haven't griped or carped and you've expressed to the kid exactly what you'd like to see (which you can't depend upon the kid reading your mind to figure out; "put more effort" is basically meaningless).

I'll add that there is a time and a place for unconditional love. Your kid does something immature or even dishonest, he comes to you about it dreading the consequences, and the first words out of your mouth are, "We'll get through this." Dr. Dobson said somewhere, possibly in Hide or Seek, that in his practice he saw parents who put a lot of pressure on their kids to excel academically and sometimes the kids just simply didn't have the raw brain power to do it. He imagined parents at the sidelines of a footrace, screaming "You can do it! You're just not trying hard enough! I think you want to embarrass us!" to their kid struggling behind all of his peers with leg braces from having polio. Dobson said that if he had a little boy or girl who couldn't excel in school, he'd help them find a field where they could excel. The movie "Dead Poets Society" has a protagonist who commits suicide because his father can't accept him unless he is fulfilling his father's own self-image of having a son who is like this and like that. Unconditional love means that you want the kid to be who he or she is, to be the best he can be, and you love him for who he is, not what he does for you. If the parents of my hypothetical C-student in the previous paragraph love her unconditionally, they'll appreciate and enjoy her can-do spirit and encourage her to continue to value learning over her grade-point average.

So self-esteem is important. I think people are sometimes prevented from doing stupid, dishonest, or immoral things because their self-respect is more important than whatever they would have gained. And I don't see how it could be wrong to bolster that kind of thing in a person, by pointing out positive character traits when possible.

I also think that one of the unwanted outcomes of the War on Poverty is that some people got the self-image that they couldn't make it on their own like other people; they had to be supported by the government. Then you had multiple generations born on welfare and that same pernicious self-image passed down. This is one of the reasons why welfare reform, undoubtedly frightening and painful as it has been for some people, was sorely needed. What would the pioneers have said? "I am the kind of person who finds a way to provide for myself and my family, no matter what. I can stand on my own two feet in any situation. We may not be rich but we'll get along." Except for people who are disabled to the point that they can't survive without help, it's un-American for adults to be allowed or even encouraged to think that in the field of making a living, putting a roof over their heads and food on the table and paying their bills, they just can't cut it. They've lost an important part of their heritage, IMO.

I also have to wonder about that 51% of kids in 1975 who didn't think they'd be successful on their jobs. What in the world is that about?

Here is a better article:

The most awful, stupid parenting advice

Maybe a good parenting question is: When to help and when to leave them alone? A better formulation would be: How do you know when the child/person should know what to do so you should leave him/her alone and how do you know when that person is in over his or her head?

It's a good, thoughtful, useful article that doesn't rehash the same stuff we've seen over and over. It's true that kids aren't born knowing everything about getting along in the world and acting like a civilized person. Some pick up things like social cues very easily and others need explicit explanations about how to act. Individual kids need different levels of parental guidance at different ages, too. Parenting books and articles are useful for getting ideas about how to handle things, and what might be going on in your kid's head, but you have to know your own child and run all that stuff past your common sense. (I am the kind of person who pays attention to my kid and thinks about the long-term consequences of the way I help her grow as a person.) Some people, like John Rosemond, think parents over-think. It's my view that parenting done right requires some thought.

And that really is the answer to the self-esteem thing. Think about your kid. Think about what's going on with him and what direction you'd like him to develop in, and how you can help him go there. Getting more patience, or being more persistent, or slowing down and being more thoughtful, or being more forceful with his peers, whatever it is. Nurture a positive, healthy, moderately realistic self-image by verbally holding up a mirror to reflect back to the kid those traits you want to encourage.

Disclaimer regarding parenting advice from me: Once again, the definition of "expert" is "parent of one child". It's possible that if I'd had two I wouldn't have dared open my mouth on the subject.

I think sometimes people make a distinction between "legal" and "moral" that simply isn't there. They tell you that you can't legislate morality. Well, of course you can. Murder is immoral, isn't it? Isn't it also illegal? It's wrong to steal. It's even wrong to cheat on your taxes, because you're making other people pay your share as well as their own.

I don't think law-abiding people refrain from acts like murder and theft solely because they happen to be illegal. I think they refrain because they're wrong.

What you can't legislate, sadly, is intelligence. But you can go a little way toward that, for example, by making it unlawful to transport a baby in a car unless it is in a carseat.

Erin says she thinks that Heather MacDonald, who suggests that the supposed pandemic of rape on college campuses could be drastically reduced if it were explained to girls that they should refrain from stupid behavior, is a pragmatist rather than a moralist. I think morals originate from pragmatism, actually.

Monnie asked her readers if God is a vengeful God.

I had a conversation with a Muslim coworker once. He was contemplating an interest-only loan for a house. This was before the housing crisis and I'd never heard of such a thing. It took me a moment to realize he was asking my opinion about the moral rightness rather than the financial advisability. I had never thought a Muslim would ask a non-Muslim's opinion about things like that - prejudice on my part, I admit. Anyway, he had almost enough money saved up to buy the house outright and what he wanted to do was to lock in the price of the house, pay this interest-only thing but regard it as rent, and then when he was ready, just pay cash and buy the house. Because Muslims aren't supposed to take loans that pay interest. He wanted to know what I thought about that

My first thought was that you can't fool God. He knows your heart.

"I know that," Mustapha said. "I'm not trying to fool God."

Then, I said, you should ask yourself what the point is here. Is God trying to keep you from getting in over your head? A loan that piles up interest too fast can be impossible to pay off and it can be a real bondage. Is this the issue? If so, and if you have every reason to believe that you can handle this thing and it will work out the way you think, then you should probably go ahead, I told him.

Because I don't think the rules are about God setting us up so he can smite us when we deviate from the path. I think the rules are there to keep us from getting hurt. It's the same with morals. People who refrain from casual sex with multiple partners can cross all kinds of unpleasant experiences off their list. People who refrain from gossip don't have workplace and family drama blow up in their faces - or at least, not from things they've said behind people's backs that got out. There's a reason for all those "thou shalt nots". One can heed them, or one can learn the hard way. Why re-invent the wheel over and over and over?

I remember that when F was very small she had a horrifying habit of running headlong through the house with her arms thrown behind her. Of course she fell and hurt herself all the time. I asked her repeatedly not to run in the house. Go outside and run. Still she did it, and she came to me howling with her bumps and bruises. One day I kind of lost my temper.

"Do you see me falling down all the time and hurting myself?"

"No," she bawled.

"What about Daddy? Do you see him falling down and hurting himself all the time?"

"No."

"Why do you suppose that is? Do you think it's because WE DON'T RUN IN THE HOUSE?"

Sniff.

"One of these days you are going to figure out for yourself why it is that I keep asking you not to run in the house. And that will be a happy day, because I won't have to listen to you crying because you fell down and hurt yourself."

Epiphany. The running in the house stopped forthwith.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and do not forsake your mother's teaching; indeed, they are a graceful wreath to your head, and ornaments about your neck." Proverbs 1:7-9

I had occasion today to remember one of the owners of a company I used to work for. It was a chemical company and the lab/engineering group owned by it did environmental work - hazardous waste site remediations, effluent monitoring and so forth.

When a sample is taken for environmental sampling, the clock starts ticking on the holding time. This is the amount of time you have to get the analysis done, and it varies by matrix (soil or water) and by analyte. If you miss the holding time, and the sample exceeds the cleanup criteria, that's not usually a big deal. But if the sample is clean, you can't use the results because it has expired, so to speak, and you can't say the concentration of your analytes didn't decrease over time. Typically, if holding times are missed because of negligence in the lab, the lab has to pay for resampling. If bulldozers and things have to be mobilized, this can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Shortly after I went to work for this company, one of the owners had a meeting with all of us. He passed out copies of an article for us to read, that described how upper-level people with an environmental lab somewhere faced criminal charges and jail time because they'd missed holding times on samples from a Superfund site and falsified dates to cover that up. Some people had left that lab and gone to work elsewhere, but the feds went after them. He passed that article out to tell us this:

"DON'T HELP ME. If you miss holding times and we have to pay for resampling, that's bad. But if you miss holding times and lie about it, and I go to jail, that's real bad. Don't miss holding times! But if you do, don't lie about it!"

He went on to tell us that no one in that company would ever ask us to lie about anything, and if we thought they had, we were mistaken.

Some time after this I happened to be at work on the weekend, and he was too. He saw that I was there and asked me to come to his office. It seemed that the city had asked us to start checking the effluent of the plant there in town for carbon tetrachloride, and there was a surprising amount; the company was having to pay fines. The chemist who did volatiles had just turned in some results, and there would be more fines. The owner asked me to check the data and I said I would. But as I put my hand on the door handle, he stopped me and said, "I have to say something."

"No, you don't," I thought, but I stopped and let him say it.

"I'm not asking you to help me here. I don't want you to 'fix' anything. If the number is in error I don't want to pay a fine. But if it's right, it's right."

"I understand," I said, and I went to the volatile lab.

I found the chromatogram and the calibration data, checked the peak integration and the spectrum, went all the way back to the preparation of the calibration standards, recalculated the curve, recalculated the data against a single point, even found the sample and reran it on the chance that the chemist had run the wrong sample. Finally I went back to the owner's office.

"I'm sorry," I said, "I can't find an error."

"Okay, thanks!" he said brightly.

Subsequently they found out where the carbon tet was coming from and fixed the problem.

And subsequent to all of that, this same owner promoted me, twice. He put me forward to be in the pilot group for the in-house management training program we had, and to be in some process development teams at the plant, which was extremely cool. If the chemical industry had not had a downturn in the '90's, and at the same time we had not finished the remediation of those hazardous waste sites, so that they had to cut the lab loose, I would happily have worked there forever.

The point is that this man set a standard for integrity that none of his employees had any excuse for not understanding. When people try to duck responsibility for what their underlings do I think about him, and about the fact that anybody who falsified anything at that workplace did it in direct, explicit violation of the standard he set. I've also thought about the importance of telling the truth, being aboveboard and transparent and all those inconvenient things. There is no job, and certainly there is no audit, accreditation, or anything else, that is worth more to me than my integrity. Jobs come and go but I'll always have myself. You have to watch that slippery slope because every boss is not as principled as this one. If your boss sees you let this little thing and that little thing slide, you have only yourself to blame if he puts you on the spot by asking you to do something you really don't think is right. If your boss sees you being compulsive about doing everything exactly right and by the book, redoing work if necessary, painstakingly investigating when things don't go right, telling the salesman the material just can't go out because the specifications aren't met, he knows better than to ask. So setting high standards for yourself and sticking to them makes everything easier in the long run. (I will say that I can't see my current boss asking me or anyone to do anything that's not right.)

Tsiporah is turning 30. She has not met some of the goals she set for herself.

I wrote about setting S.M.A.R.T. goals here.

But I also think about a semi-autobiographical book I read once, that was set in a small town in Mississippi during the Depression. The family in the story, parents and two boys, were dirt-poor. The mom had two standards that she set for herself: She had to give her family biscuits, not cornbread, for breakfast each morning, and she had to iron their shirts and overalls before they wore them. (Ironing was done with metal flatirons that you heated on the stove, of course.) As long as she could do these things she felt that she could hold up her head. I think it was smart of this woman to attach her self-esteem to these things, which were mostly in her control, rather than to set her sights on things she couldn't have or do. And naturally, she was civilized in other ways: her sons had to be polite and respectful and use proper English, and so forth.

I don't know how possible it is to re-wire one's inner promptings. I am naturally a glass-half-full kind of person. I get down in the dumps every now and then but my spirit usually bobs back up like a piece of cork. Our income is a bit unsettled right now, although my job looks to be OK for the foreseeable future, i.e. the next few months at least. But every night that I lie down in my own bed, with food in my belly, my family OK, the cats OK, the bills paid, I think it was a good day. And we deliberately plan fun things to do, to make good memories and have something to talk about besides work and other grim stuff.

Anyway, happy birthday, Tsiporah. I think you'll look back on this time in your life and see that it was a time of personal growth and that you really were making progress toward your goals; slower than you would like, maybe, but unslacking and undeterred. And I hope you have lots of silly, happy memories of moments with your son and your friends.

I saw F this weekend. Spent the night on the floor in her dorm room. (She offered her bed, but she has the top bunk and I didn't want to risk having to climb over her roommate if I had to go to the bathroom in the night.) We had a good visit. She's really looking forward to the semester being over and coming home the first week of May.

We talked about the Virginia Tech thing, of course. F said there was a lot of discussion about it on campus. I had sent this article (via Lady-Light) and she had passed it around to her friends, and they to theirs.

And I reminded F of a study that was done some time ago, don't remember where. Some people volunteered for this thing. They were walked down a hallway past a maintenance worker on a ladder, into a classroom, and put in front of a computer to take a test. The computer test wasn't the study, though. While they were taking the test, they heard a sound as of someone falling from a ladder, and then a single cry for help. The subject of the study was to see how they reacted to this.

The people who were alone in the room when they heard the sound looked up - the camera caught a blank look on their faces as they internally processed the sounds they had heard and the probable cause - and then they abandoned their computer tests and went out into the hall to check on the maintenance man. But the people who were put into the room with others, who were in on the real subject of the study and had been instructed to go on with the test as if nothing had happened, looked at those other people and saw that they did not react, so they went on with their tests too.

I could see how all that would happen, and I made up my mind right then that I would not be a sheep.

In thinking about the whippersnapper I posted about below, I remember another young man I worked with at the job I just left. His name is Jason. Jason is about the same age, but was raised to be a Southern gentleman: courteous and soft-spoken, pleasant and respectful to everyone, while still very smart and hard-working.

Jason graduated from Ole Miss not necessarily knowing what he wanted to do, and applied to dental school. He didn't do a lot of preparation for the standardized test or the interview, and didn't do well on either. After this he decided he really did want to be a dentist, so he bought some practice books and re-took the test, and did very well. He also called to schedule a redo on the interview.

The person Jason talked to about the interview didn't want to schedule a redo because (without checking his notes) he was sure Jason did just fine. Jason tried to insist on redoing the interview but he didn't push hard enough or maybe the person he talked to dug his heels in, and the interview was not scheduled.

When Jason's "sorry you didn't make the cut letter" arrived, he asked and found out that it was because of that lackluster interview. He called the person who wouldn't schedule a redo and complained bitterly, but it was too late b/c the class had been filled. His dad, he said, was furious, but when your kid is grown you can't fix things like that. (Frequently you can't fix them when your kid isn't grown, but you can at least try.) Jason was manly about it but we all felt terrible for him. Another coworker planned a "Jason appreciation day" for which we all brought special snacks for the morning break and were extra-nice to him. He laughed about it but I think it really did make him feel better.

Shortly after it was announced that the company was closing, Jason came to me to give notice. It seemed that his mother had showed his resume around to some people she knew, and some of them took it a little farther, and then he had a job interview in Jackson, MS, I think, for a pharmaceutical company, and he got the job. From what he described it sounded like a fantastic opportunity and one he is well suited to.

When he left I heard yet another coworker remark enviously that Jason got all the luck. Everything just magically worked out for him. Whatever.

I'm seeing some things in the plant that fortunately I and my direct reports are not immediately involved in. All I do is observe, and judiciously offer advice in mostly an indirect, non-judgemental or pushy way. To you, my readers, I will spell a few things out.

When you're a 25-year-old whippersnapper, there are a few things you should not do.

1 - Don't order your boss around. I PROMISE you that will get on his nerves.

Me: [Boss's name], I need to talk to you when you get a minute, please.
Boss: I'll be right there.

Whippersnapper: [Boss's name], come to the control room.
Boss: [grrr.]

Actually, you should treat everyone with courtesy and respect, from the CEO to the person who sweeps the floor and cleans the toilet. Give it out and you get it back.

2 - When the boss has told other people to do things, don't contradict him and get them all confused about what they're supposed to do. If you think your boss is in error, you can call him at home and discuss the issue. He would actually like that. But don't go behind his back and change stuff he thought was happening after he leaves.

3 - Do not EVER give the impression that you think you are too good to do something. If your boss tells you to go out into the plant and take a sample, don't pick up your radio and call one of the operators or, for pete's sake, the shift supervisor who is twice your age, and tell them to do it, and then continue to stand there. The boss actually does what I do, which is to do those menial things himself when appropriate. He takes samples every day and does a whole lot of other stuff too. This can backfire if people take advantage of it, but then you know you have the wrong people in your group. My peeps know there is nothing I ask them to do that I don't or won't do myself. I have talked to the whippersnapper about this one when he complained to me about being a "glorified sampler" and he is unreceptive. He's going to hit the wall on this one.

4 - Most important: if you have a problem with your boss, and it's not a legal issue or some kind of gross unfairness, work it out with him, seek advice from someone you trust, put out your resume, but for heaven's sake, SHUT UP. Don't complain to the other employees. DO NOT GO OVER HIS HEAD AND COMPLAIN TO HIS BOSS. And if you do, DON'T TELL THE SHIFT WORKERS ABOUT IT because they'll commiserate with you to your face and then run straight and tell your boss about it. Which is how I know. And he is not pleased. This is people-knowledge 101. Anybody who went through middle school ought to know it.

The whipper-snapper will be a fine engineer one day but he has a lot of seasoning to get first.

My advice to the boss in the situation? Be the grownup.

Another brown-bag job-search lunch yesterday. One of my coworkers asked how long we are going to have these - "Until everybody has a job?" I thought, until I have a job, but I said "yes". I still might end up going to Michigan and if that's the case I'll be there for several months. And of course they can go on without me. I asked the branch manager to talk about resume formats, what to put and what not to put on there, and so forth. People still have the idea that there are RULES. "I can't get everything on one page." I don't think anybody over the age of 35 ought to have a one-page resume. It looks like you haven't done anything. I used to have a boss who questioned "ten years of experience" - is that ten years, or one year of experience ten times? So even if you've worked at the same place since you were a baby, hopefully you didn't do the exact same thing all that time. Unless you did. But still you ought to be able to flesh that out a little bit. One coworker fretted that if she only goes back 10 years in any detail, that leaves out her human resources experience, which would be relevant if she wants an HR job. Put it in, we told her. Put in whatever you want (as long as it's true). You could have a resume for applying for HR jobs that's different from your other resumes.

There are jobs out there but most seem to want biology lab experience. This is a big change from a few years ago, when labs I worked in hired biology majors because they couldn't find work except in a chemistry lab. I could do quality. That would mean cGMP stuff, writing IQs and OQs and PQs and other kinds of protocols, charting things and writing investigations and so forth. This irritates me in my current job, but I think maybe that's because I'm wearing too many hats. If I'm doing quality I'm not supervising in the department and things start going to heck, and if I'm taking care of things in the department then the quality tasks pile up. I don't ever feel like I'm taking care of anything the way it deserves. At the lab in Michigan they split the supervisory functions so that there are quality supervisors and people supervisors. That makes much more sense.

We had our second job-search brown bag lunch yesterday. I'd hoped to talk about resume formats, but a whole lot of people were out (taking a very long weekend) so we did more sentences and then practiced nutshell autobiographies.

There are differing schools of thought as to what a person should answer to the interviewer's prompt of "tell me about yourself". My boss thinks you should stick to "X years of HPLC experience" and so on. My thinking is that they don't ask that just to hear your resume read out to them. I know that's not what I want when I ask that question. But since she says that, and presumably that's what she wants, there must be interviewers who view it that way.

Which leads me to mention that there are no laws about resumes or cover letters or job interviews. The resume police will not take you away because you didn't have bullet points. People say "you aren't supposed to" this and that, and sometimes that's true, but it's nothing to panic about and there is no one right way to do any of this stuff.

What we practiced yesterday was giving just a brief overview of personal history starting with college. If possible you want to account for your time so that there aren't large gaps leaving the interviewer to wonder if you did jail time for embezzlement or couldn't work because you were being treated for murderous psychosis or something. If you do have gaps for unattractive reasons you need to give some thought to how you are going to explain or get around having to explain those things. For instance, you wouldn't want to say that you quit a job and moved back home because you were allergic to work, but eventually your parents kicked you out so you were forced to find something to do. Also you want to bring out positive things that you wouldn't put on your resume or that people don't want to ask. For instance, I married right after graduation, so R and I are approaching our 24th anniversary. Interviewers that I've talked to have reacted positively to this b/c it makes me look steady and possible to get along with, and without complicating drama in my life. One coworker worries because she was out of the workforce for a few years when her daughter was born; she wanted to be a SAHM. We assured her that this should not hurt her at all in job interviews. Besides, who would want to work for a person who viewed this as a reason not to hire her?

But it was surprising to me that many people could not remember what they had done in any kind of chronological order. Really. Some were younger than me, even. How could you not know where you have worked and what you have done in your life? After all, you were there. One person left out two very important things that he had done; I knew about them because he had mentioned random experiences over the months I've known him. Others could not remember the names of companies they had worked for. They act like they have just stepped into a life that someone else has lived up until now. This is very puzzling to me. In my post about the meaning of success I mentioned the importance of taking stock periodically to see if I'm on track. To do that I have to think about what I've done and how that relates to where I am now. Am I really that much more introspective than other people?

So we are all to take a walk down memory lane this weekend, at some point when we can have some time alone, and try to think about all these things. Some folks are going to consult tax records and so forth to try to reconstruct their job histories. We're going to practice some more "tell me about yourself"s. No one likes the stress of knowing that their job they thought they could count on forever is ending. But really if you have any sense you already knew you couldn't count on your job forever, or anything else for that matter. Maybe this will end up being a positive thing for some folks, jolting them out of their ruts and helping them take charge of their lives again.

I have to say that some people are reluctant to take that walk down memory lane because of trauma that they have endured. I'm pretty sure of that in at least one case. It's understandable that people who have been through really bad times in their personal life would forget details about their jobs too. I don't have any training in counseling. I have to try to be discreet about pushing people to remember things they may have very good reason for forgetting. Some people who have been through some very bad things are able to look back on them with a certain amount of objectivity, realizing that all the experiences they have had have shaped them into the person they are today. (Bad sentence, sorry.) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings comes to mind. To be that way you have to be a strong person and you have to like yourself. You have to think you turned out OK. I do try to affirm people and tell them they have a lot to offer. Beyond that I am fairly squeamish about probing too much.

Poor F has had to submit to Lectures from me all her life. If I had had a blog while she was growing up I would have posted them too, because they are always about things I feel strongly about. The meaning of success, which I posted about earlier, was the subject of one of those lectures.

F said something the other day that reminded me of a screed that I subjected her to when she was in the 9th grade. She had to read several books for English, among them Jane Eyre and The Good Earth. Her English teacher, who I think had no sense at all (ask me sometime about the research paper assignment) asked this question about The Good Earth: Was Wang Lung a moral person? She asked this on a test, and the only acceptable answer was "Yes". I blew my stack when F told me this, and I told her that Wang Lung was not a moral person!

F thought that it was because he kept concubines in his later life. It turned out that she thought morals always have to do with sex, a notion I was glad to find out that she had so I could disabuse her of it. Morals have to do with judging that a particular behavior is right or wrong, independently of how we feel about it, whether we want to engage in it or not, what other people will think of it, or whether or not we will benefit from it. A moral person will not always do the right thing. He may try to find ways to rationalize what he does and convince himself that he's not in the wrong. But mostly he'll feel remorse when he leaves the path, and he'll try to straighten up, make restitution if possible, and resolve never to repeat the error.

Wang Lung, if you recall, had a daughter who was profoundly retarded. This was possibly due to the wretched famine that his family had to endure while she was in the womb and in the months following her birth. Wang Lung loved his daughter and felt compassion for her, so he made sure that she was taken care of. No one else cared whether she lived or died, not even her mother or her brothers, and certainly not the servants whose job it was to look after her physical needs. It's clear throughout the book that Wang Lung is a nice person who cares about others' feelings. He's obviously a warm-hearted, loving man. But if he had not loved his daughter, he would not have thought twice about letting her die from neglect. He regretted his family's lack of concern for her, but he didn't think they were bad people because they would have let this helpless innocent suffer. Right and wrong just didn't enter into it.

In contrast, Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre hated his wife. He felt that he had been tricked into marrying her and that she had ruined his life. He began hating her even before her descent into madness. But he continued to see that she was cared for because it was the right thing to do. He made sure little Adele was taken care of for the same reason - he didn't spend a lot of time with her, so it was clear that he took little pleasure from her company, but he saw to it that she was well-clothed and fed and educated by people who were kind to her because he felt a sense of responsibility toward her. It was wrong of him to try to marry Jane without her knowing that it couldn't have been a legal marriage, and he knew that. But the thing is, no one would have known if he had walked away from his responsibilities. No one knew about his wife (except his brother-in-law) or would have known about Adele, who IIRC wasn't even his child. He didn't come across as a particularly religious person, so he didn't do what he did from fear of hellfire. So there wasn't a single reason for him to do these responsible things, up to and including risking his life in an attempt to save his wife when his house burned up, except that he felt that he should. And that makes Mr. Rochester a moral person.

I talked to a few people at work about the feasibility of offering brown-bag lunches on Fridays with a job-search theme. Everyone was favorable so I'll bring it up at the supervisor meeting tomorrow. The idea is that this is not company-sponsored, so we won't put up notices and hourly people will have to clock out for lunch as usual. And of course it will be strictly voluntary. The reason for doing this is that some people get a frightened look on their faces if you even ask about their resume, and I'll bet they haven't done one in years, if at all. I'm thinking that as the clock ticks closer to the company closing (some time next year) the stress levels are going to get unbearable. If people feel that they are making at least some progress toward replacing their job, maybe it won't be so awful, for them and for the rest of us.

I think putting pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, and starting to create a resume from scratch is probably a daunting task for some folks. Scary to even start, because what if you end up with something so lame that nobody would ever hire you. So I think on the first Friday we'll just write sentences about what we are doing and have done on the job. The branch manager gave me a list of "action words", verbs like "train" and "implement" that might help a person remember job functions and achievements and also help word them. Then we'll pass our lists to our coworkers so they can remind us and be reminded themselves of things that are left out. This will be a nonthreatening way of dipping our toes in the water, and hopefully somewhat confidence-building. (I, of course, already have a kick-butt resume but I'll still go through the exercise.) Next week maybe we'll talk about resume formats, what personal information to put and where to put it, and so forth. After that people ought to be able to put something together. I thought one Friday we could have a panel discussion with those of us who conduct job interviews talking about specific things that interviewees have said or done that have turned us on or off. We can go through the list of questions that you can expect to be asked at one place or another, like "what are your weaknesses" and so forth. How to research a prospective employer so you can ask intelligent questions, and how to customize a cover letter. The branch manager gave me some material also on how to figure out what you really want in a job. I know at least one person who has decided on a complete career change. For people who have drifted into these jobs, this could be a very positive thing.

So we'll probably kick this off on Friday and see what kind of response we get from the employees.

A word to the wise.

Never tell your boss that you don't make mistakes. Never. Your boss knows that everybody makes mistakes. If you tell your boss that you don't, your boss will fear that your pride, or lack of self-confidence, or fear of looking stupid, or fundamental dishonesty, will cause you not to confess to errors that you will inevitably make. That cannot be tolerated.

Obviously, you have to try not to make mistakes. You can ask somebody to check behind you. You can leave your glassware out, so you can go back and make sure that you did the dilutions you thought you did. It's fine to tell your boss, if she questions your dilutions, that you wondered about them too and checked your glassware to confirm them. You can offer to re-do your work just to make sure. Check your calculations for the 42,753rd time. Ask someone else to check them. Keep a list, mental or on paper, of things to check for so you don't repeat the same mistake. If you find that you are prone to a particular error, find a way to not make it anymore - that's your responsibility, not your boss's.

And that's really the main thing. Own your work. Look over it before you pass it on, to make sure it's correct and complete. If you don't know how to do something, find out. Own your successes and own your mistakes.

Still with the Duke case. Which brings up echoes of Kobe Bryant, Mike Tyson, etc.

Some people wonder whether it is possible for a prostitute or a girl of lax morals to be raped. I have a couple of thoughts.

First, the personal responsibility thing is a real stumbling-block for some. Let's consider this scenario: I park my car in a public lot, leave an expensive laptop on the seat, and go off without locking my car doors. When I come back several hours later, the laptop is gone. Was I foolish in leaving the laptop unguarded? Absolutely. Was the thief wrong to take it? Amazingly, some would say that since I didn't lock the thing up, it was fair game and I have no grievance. Compare this to a different scenario, in which I lock the laptop in the car trunk when I think no one is looking, and the thief has to break into the trunk to take the laptop. In the second scenario I would deserve more sympathy and probably get more consideration from the police, but I don't think there is a difference in culpability for the thief. In both cases, he knew he was taking something that didn't belong to him. The fact of the matter is, that while theft is wrong and people shouldn't engage in it, if your laptop is stolen you won't have it anymore, so it behooves you to lock the thing up. And locking up your laptop isn't controversial or counterculture like acting like you have some morals is so most of us just secure our property without thinking much about it.

So consider a case in which a woman goes to a man's hotel room in the middle of the night, or contracts to strip at a party for money. Maybe she has it in the back of her mind that anything might happen, and maybe she's OK with that. Then if sex occurs, is it possible that it was rape? People say, what did she go there for? I've heard that over and over.

Here's an analogy that I find useful. Suppose that you decide that you want to do something to help the homeless. There's a homeless shelter down the street from your workplace, and you arrange to go there one afternoon and take a tour. If you like what you see, you're prepared to make a large donation. The people who run the shelter meet you at the door. They know what you're there for, and they very nicely start showing you around. Once you get well inside, though, they push you up against the wall, go through your pockets and take your wallet and your cell and PDA, grab the watch off your wrist, and then hustle you over to the front door and push you out into the street. Were you robbed? Well, what did you go in there for? You were probably going to give them some money anyway, right?

Not that I think this scenario describes the Duke case. If the reports are true that there's no DNA match and the timeline doesn't add up, I'm thinking this one was a false accusation. We'll see what happens when (if) it goes to trial.

It seems to me that with a little prudent behavior, one can cross entire catagories of horrifying experiences off one's list.

A man who eschews drunken parties with a stripper who is a stranger to him, and whose propensity for extortion he doesn't know, doesn't have to worry about false accusations of raping that stripper.

A woman who turns down the offer to mimic sexual availability in a very explicit way to a bunch of 20-year-old men at a drunken party, with no one to protect her if they find her act convincing, doesn't have to worry about being raped at that party.

In the Duke Lacross team case, as with the Kobe Bryant case and a whole bunch of others that we've seen in recent years, it looks like one party is criminal and the other is all but criminally stupid.

"There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - One of Ronald Reagan's favorite sayings.

F is on spring break. I took her to lunch today and, as usual, talked her ears off. She's very indulgent. I don't know whether she's interested or just very respectful, which is appropriate, I suppose, for a well-mannered young lady.

Besides the babysitting that I had to do that I mentioned here, wherein I had to put in a lot of (unpaid) overtime making sure one of my coworkers got his work done, there was another episode with a different coworker in which I had to do virtually the same thing. He had to use purge-and-trap technology, which he was familiar with and at that time I was not, together with a Hall detector which neither of us had any experience with, and the data collection software was the package I was using for my humble pesticides rather than what he was familiar with for GC/MS. This coworker had more get-up-and-go than the other one and neither of us understood why I had to be there, except that I had more familiarity with the software and perhaps the boss thought he had a tendency to give up too easily. We did have a lot of problems with the detector, getting a decent baseline, and so on. One evening I was working late on his dadgum project; he was there, and the boss was there, and I had bronchitis and was so tired that I kept coughing until I lost my breath. I wondered what kind of idiot I was, to risk pneumonia like that. Both of these men were paid considerably more than me, as was the boss, naturally.

But later, when that boss left and I was promoted to a supervisory spot (another story) one of those men's pay was cut and both of them had salary freezes for several years because the big boss thought they were overpaid. Meanwhile I had nice increases every year until I caught up and passed them.

So what I told F is that sometimes you have to pay your dues and not worry too much about getting credit for all your hard work in the immediate future.

THE PROBLEM COMES IN when you have a boss who is very willing to let you work your butt off and has no intention of ever paying you what you're really worth. Sad to say, this probably happens a lot more often with black people and women. Some folks have it in the back of their minds (or even at the front) that black people and women ought not to expect to be paid like white men. Even some black people and women think that and won't stand up for their rights. Plenty of white men are overworked and underpaid too, of course. It's an individual decision that a person has to make, what he or she is willing to put up with and how long to wait to see if things are going to be made right. If you demand too much up front you tick people off. Bosses want to see consistent effort over a period of time. But if you hang around too long not getting paid enough, not only are you not getting money, but it looks bad on your resume. From my experience, mom-and-pops, meaning any really small company with only one or two owners, are the worst. They'll tell you how wonderful you are and how much they love you and couldn't do without you, but as long as your last name isn't theirs, you will never, ever get anywhere. A person might decide to work for a mom-and-pop for a short period of time, say 2 or 3 years, if doing so will allow him to gain some skills and experience that make him more marketable. Longer than that is probably a bad idea.

Received my own PE today. I haven't discussed it with my boss but it's very nice. I told her so and she was surprised because she thought there might be too many negative statements. Well, there are some, but they're fairly accurate. I get flustered when I'm trying to multitask and my priorities get changed. I need to work on getting paperwork done in a timely fashion. Overall it is very positive. She notes that I am "aggressive" in improving efficiency in my department using new technology as it becomes available, and that's true, and it's the thing I hoped she would mention.

There's a thing that happened with another boss at another company about 15 years ago.

My job at that company was to analyze environmental samples (soil and water) for pesticides by GC/ECD. Another chemist analyzed environmental samples for semivolatiles by GC/MS, which is more complex and sophisticated. (And nothing like what one might see on CSI.) His instrument went kablooey, and while it was being repaired the boss elected to lease an instrument from a different manufacturer, one that had different mass spec technology and whose software was still in beta-test stage. And he asked me to oversee this other chemist (who was older and much better paid than I) in his task of getting his work caught up on this thing, because he was the most scattered and unfocused person you can imagine when faced with a bunch of work. So I did. He and I worked 11- or 12-hour days, 6 days a week, for about a month, and got his stuff caught up. Actually, frequently I was working while he napped, but whatever. F was only a toddler then, and she acted out a bit because she wasn't seeing enough of her mommy. I felt very bad about that. But we got it done and got back to a regular schedule.

A couple of months later, F got sick. She had pneumonia, and I stayed at home with her for one week. When I got back, my boss told me that I didn't have a week's worth of vacation, having only been there a year and having taken a day here and there, and that I would have to make up my time. What about all that time I spent running an analysis that wasn't even my analysis? That didn't count, because it was before. This had to be after. Maybe I could come in and work with the midnight-shift techs on their extraction techniques or something. Well, I did that already as needed, it was part of my job. But no one kept track of my time, because I was exempt. It seemed to me that when the company needed me, the clock never ticked, but when I needed something, suddenly that clock started ticking away.

I went home that afternoon and I was so angry that I walked past my husband and daughter, straight upstairs, and lay facedown on the bed. I was like that cartoon of the angriest dog in the world. I couldn't even think, I was so mad. Finally I did start thinking, and I thought that I needed to find some way of dealing with the situation that wouldn't make me feel like I was being exploited. I needed to satisfy my boss that my time was made up, but it needed to benefit me, career-wise. Otherwise I would be so angry and resentful that it would make me sick. Working with the midnight-shift techs wouldn't do that because it was already my job. I thought, lying facedown there on the bed, about trying to work with the engineers, or the finance people, but I couldn't think of a way to initiate that.

Finally I thought about our lab manager, Dr. Marks. He didn't actually manage very much; he was kind of a chemist emeritus. He did a lot of special projects for the parent company. I knew he was in the midst of one project that wasn't going very well. Lying on the bed facedown, I thought about that project. Dr. Marks was trying to analyze benzyl chloride for benzene contamination. The problem he was having was due to the fact that benzyl chloride is very corrosive, so that he couldn't analyze it by purge-and-trap like one normally would. It ate the sparge needle. He was trying to analyze it using neat injections on GC/FID and not having much luck. I wondered if Dr. Marks had thought about codistillation, and lying facedown on the bed, I reviewed how that would work and thought about whether we had the glassware. I thought we did.

I got up off the bed and went downstairs. My husband eyed me cautiously because he knew something was wrong. He was appropriately indignant when I told him what my boss had said, but I was OK by then because I had a plan.

So the next morning after I found the glassware and looked up some boiling points I went into Dr. Marks' office and asked him how his project was going. He happily told me that he was having a lot of problems getting it to work. I asked him if he'd thought of trying codistillation. He was intrigued, so I told him how I thought it would work. Benzene boils below the boiling point of water, and benzyl chloride boils above the boiling point of water. So you would put some water in a boiling flask and a measured amount of benzyl chloride, and a measured amount (10 mL) of some solvent that boils above the boiling point of benzene but below that of water. Ideally this would be a solvent that doesn't respond well on FID, like a chlorinated solvent. You heat the this mixture until it starts to boil. The condenser directs the condensate into a graduated tube with a stopcock at the bottom. As the temperature in the boiling flask rises, the benzene evaporates first, and then the solvent, and then the water. The vapor goes into the condenser and condenses, and the solvent washes the benzene into the collection tube. When you've collected the whole 10 mL of solvent and a few drops of water for good measure, you drain the condensate. The benzyl chloride should all stay behind in the boiling flask. The condensate, which consists of the solvent you picked out with whatever benzene was in the sample dissolved in it, is what you analyze by GC/FID. I ended up telling him that my boss wanted me to make up my time that I was out with F, that he wanted me to work with the midnight crew, but I would rather work with him. Dr. Marks was cool with that. When the boss got there I was still so irritated that I could barely look at him. I told him I was going to work with Dr. Marks. In a friendly way, he asked me to sit down and tell him about it. He thought it sounded fine and just asked me to keep up with my hours.

Dr. Marks had about 30 samples of benzyl chloride, stored in a hood because the stuff actually ate the phenolic caps off the bottles. It was pretty nasty but I set my apparatus up next to the hood at the end of the day and went to work. And my method worked like a dream. I ran some reagent blanks and spikes, and some benzyl chloride replicates and spikes, and got perfect recoveries and great reproducibility. Once I had validated my method, I ran all the samples. I tabulated my data and put my name on it, which a former boss had told me one should always do, and organized all my stuff, gave it to Dr. Marks, and put the glassware away. And then my boss told me that I didn't have to turn in my hours, that I had been keeping track of. Nobody cared about that. He certainly didn't. Then what was that all about?

I thought all of that was over, but a few weeks later my boss called me into his office. It seemed that the corporate people had some kind of crisis, they were in a big hurry for some analytical work, and they needed Dr. Marks to do it right away. My boss told him that Dr. Marks was out, sick. Then have Laura do it, they said. My boss was fairly startled because I was actually the newest chemist and there were people with lots more seniority than me. But Dr. Marks had credited me when he used my data to report to them about the benzyl chloride. "You did yourself a favor when you worked with him on that benzyl chloride project," he said. Fortunately, what they wanted was very easy to do. They wanted Dr. Marks to repeat my work when he got back, and he told me that he got the very same results.

So when Dr. Marks retired, and subsequently my boss left the company, I was promoted to supervisor in the department. And I got to do lots of fun and interesting projects over the years. I'd still be happily working for that company except that after we remediated all of their hazardous waste sites, and with the worldwide downturn in the chemical industry in the 1990's they weren't making money, they had to cut the lab loose.

But that's my story about how I was the angriest dog in the world about a situation that I thought was very unfair and not nice at all, and it became a positive thing for me.

When is what one person does another person's business?

Around here, kids are taught very early not to be tattle-tales. I remember that when I was kindergarten-aged, in Sunday School, we were supposed to bow our heads and close our eyes during prayer. Frequently some kid would rat on another kid, that he had had his eyes open during the prayer. The teacher always told the tattler that the only way he could know that was to have his own eyes open, and that he needed to concentrate on doing what he was supposed to do and not what everybody else was doing.

It was appropriate for us to learn that at Sunday School, because the New Testament is full of that idea. Don't try to get the speck out of someone else's eye while you have a 2X4 in your own. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. No man judges another man's servant. There's the story of the rich man who went to temple and thanked God that he was not a wretch like the tax collector in the corner; the tax collector only prayed for mercy for himself because he knew he was a sinner, and he was the one who found favor.

Even after being raised in that culture, plenty of grown folks still feel like they have to tell on each other and get each other into trouble. Where I used to work, the people I supervised complained about each other all the time. I had to have a meeting one day, and tell them that I needed to know if there was a safety issue, a quality issue, or somebody was preventing them from doing their job. Otherwise, I didn't want to hear it.

On the other hand, nobody lives in a vacuum. What one person does inevitably affects other people, especially in a city where there are a lot of people living in close proximity. We have noise ordinances, and rules about keeping the grass mowed, and so forth, so that we don't get on each other's nerves too much.

For some issues, it's fairly obvious that you have to mind somebody else's business. I called the child abuse hotline once to report a neighbor who let her two-year-old play in the street. I took him home the first time I saw him, and told his mother where he was and that it was dangerous (duh). When I saw him in the street again, I dropped a dime. That situation is a no-brainer, to me anyway.

What about noisy neighbors - how do you deal with that? What if your neighbor smokes dope occasionally but doesn't cause you any problems? What if your neighbor smokes dope and has scary-looking visitors come to his house at various times? What if your child tells you his friend has taken to carrying a weapon to school because he's had threats made against him? What if your child tells you his diabetic friend trades his lunch for sugary snacks every day?

How much responsibility do we have for public morals, for lack of a better expression? I used to drive past truly disgusting billboards and bus stop ads that advertised a radio morning show. You can turn off the TV, or not buy a magazine, but you can't help looking at a billboard that's in your face. They set a tone for the city that I didn't appreciate. Some other people didn't appreciate it either, and complained bitterly in letters to the editor of the local newspaper. The ads have disappeared; hopefully they were found to be ineffective and there won't be any more. But who gets to say what kinds of ads and signs and billboards are to be tolerated? Should we pick an arbiter of morals? Should we resign ourselves to the lowest common denominator?

I guess it's time to think about New Year's resolutions. F has one resolution that she makes every year: she resolves not to throw rocks at the Loch Ness monster, and so far she has demonstrated 100% compliance. While I am impressed by her record, I have to say that as a goal her resolution doesn't quite come up to S.M.A.R.T. standards: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and with a Time factor. It is all those things except relevant, although if F were to visit Scotland at some point in the coming year I suppose her goal could become that. (Or she might rethink it.)

As I have mentioned before, New Year's resolutions are a good time for examining one's life goals to make sure they are appropriate and on track. I usually try to think about mine in catagories: health, home, spiritual, personal development, finances, family. And I don't worry about finalizing my resolutions until February or so.

So I hope my readers (both of you) will have, or have had, a good New Year's celebration: a little bit serious, a little bit silly, and a good beginning to 2006.