4 stars
Ironically, I don't remember this book very well. The setup is that the protagonist has a particularly (weird) kind of amnesia: she has lost her memory of her life since her early 20s (though on bad days, she forgets everything past childhood) and wakes up every day expecting to be very much younger and in a different place in her life. Every morning, she, with the help of her husband Ben (who is a total stranger to her), figures out that she's married, middle-aged, and an amnesiac. During the day, her memory functions like normal (this is not like other books/movies in which characters are unable to create new memories and thus live their days in confusing 30-second chunks or whatever), but something about sleeping at night resets her memory again. Fortunately, she's keeping a (secret) diary, which gives her (and us) information about her recent past. The book is marketed as a psychological thriller, but I found it much more psychological than I did thriller. However, that worked for me.
What to Wear to the Most Awkward Work Meeting of Your Life -- Wednesday, 10/22/14
My group met with some people from the technology department, including their top dog, about a big project that the two groups are working on and it was super awkward. Up until this point, I'd been sort of astonished by how nice, professional, collaborative, etc. everyone I'd met at my workplace is -- how can everybody be so easy to work with? Then I met the boss of the technology department and it was immediately like, Oh, OK, this guy is a jerk. A particular kind of calm, rational-seeming, manipulative jerk. There's a lot I could say about it, but I will just make two observations:
(1) It was one of the most blatant "yep, I'm obviously operating from a position of male leadership privilege and so you [our department head, who is a woman] are just fucked in this situation" displays I've seen in real life. For example, he could make totally rude statements, in his calm, matter-of-fact way, and she could not respond with any kind of appropriate annoyance, anger, etc., without seeming like an "emotional female." And if she were to make any kind of similar comments, she would be at risk of moving into the "bitch" category. (One of the stylized facts of organizational behavior research on leadership is that men can be successful if they are seen as competent, but women have to be both competent and nice.)
(2) When there is nobody in the technology department who knows XML, he describes this as "We don't support that." When there are only a few people in our department who know SQL, he describes this as "Your people do not have the basic skill set they need to have" and says that her people are too deficient in technical skills for his people to be expected to talk to us or explain anything to us.
Blue tie-neck shirt (Lands End)
Navy pants (Dockers)
Blue pointy-toed flats (Nordstrom)
Blue sparkle necklace (Kohls)
2 comments:
Ugh, that guy does sound like a jerk. I know the realities of the double standards with men and women, but I think women can get away with being more direct than we may realize. When attacks come out of nowhere, it can be hard to know how to react though for sure. Smells like someone is just trying to keep negative attention off his own team by throwing it on others, which is simply unprofessional.
Jen, yeah, it was really weird how much he deflected. The meeting ended on a really odd note when our department head was like, I would just like to end this meeting with us confirming our commitment to work together on this, and he refused. Bizarro.
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