It Takes Strength to Succeed

Over the holiday break, I received an email from the University of Phoenix. It reminded me of the holy truth of academia: dropouts don't pay tuition.



The email started out innocently enough:

In a season of celebrations, you're attending holiday parties, class and work—not to mention being there for your friends and family.

Translation: You're being painfully reminded of how bad it sucks not to have any free time.



The text went on:

As you experience this season of high demands, remember—you'll be entering the new year with additional coursework completed and you'll be that much closer to receiving your diploma.

Translation: We know you want to quit. Please don't!



The entreaty ensued:

You wouldn't get off a plane or train before reaching your destination, so stay focused on your arrival.

Translation: We'll abandon subtlety if it keeps you on board.



The final plea:

If you need support to keep going, please call your academic counselor. We are here to help you. You've made a commitment to earn your degree. We are committed to assisting you in completing your program of study.

Translation: We'll do just about anything to keep your tuition money around. Anything!



Helping students stay on track, particularly when they are tempted to quit, is a laudable goal. But given the lackadaisical attitude Phoenix apparently has towards blatant plagiarism in the online classrooms, I am given to view this email with a more cynical eye.



I have my own message for the bottom third of my fellow students in my master's course of study: writing three sentences a week doesn't cut it. You are wasting precious time and a good deal of money on a degree that will get you nowhere. You will be exposed for the fraud you are if you try to leverage your dubiously earned education. Do us all a favor, and don't come back in 2009. Your prose is giving me headaches every week as I try to make sense of your many misspellings, typos, grammatical errors, and convoluted logic. There is no shame in admitting your limits.

Hey, somebody has to clean the toilets at McDonald's.

Top Ten Stress Relievers

One of the topics that invariably comes up in discussions of organizational behavior is stress. Coping with change is an important part of applying the knowledge gleaned from HR classes, and stress is an inevitable consequence of change. In the wake of so many recent layoffs, stress has only increased in the workplace. Unfortunately, my textbook did not give any serious consideration to some of the more creative - and effective - ways to deal with stress. Among those I recommend are:

1. Swearing. Nothing gives instant relief quite like the well-placed expletive.
2. Violence. Blow off some steam after work by picking on the small guy at the local bar. No need to feel bad afterwards - he's used to getting beat up.
3. Sex. A nooner with the wife really improves your mood when you return to work after the lunch hour.
4. Sex. A nooner with the girlfriend . . . well, ditto the above, obviously.
5. Sex. A nooner with the wife and the girlfriend is really the king of all stress relievers.

My post title promised ten stress relievers, so in times of extreme stress, just use each tip twice.

It's no mystery why I didn't elect to earn an MBA - I'm clearly ahead of the curve on current thinking in the business world. Stay tuned for my cutting-edge online MBA in a nutshell.

The End of the World?

One might wonder if the disappearance of my regular blog posts is a harbinger of things to come.

If you, my fair and loyal reader(s), have come to this conclusion, it probably isn't without some corroborating evidence. Even the Discovery channel is jumping on the apocalyptic bandwagon, airing television shows about Nostradamus's predictions about the end of the world - coming to a planet near you in 2012.

Evidently other cultures have come to the same conclusion. What is more disturbing to a dedicated skeptic, however, is the very recent news that, beginning in - you guessed it - 2012, solar storms are expected to wipe out entire power grids.

Just to add insult to injury, the Ulysses space probe has relayed data indicating that the sun is hitting a new low, its life ebbing; the heliosphere is contracting dangerously, reducing our planet's protection from cosmic rays. Unfortunately, Ulysses will soon reach the end of its useful life, depriving us of data just as apparent crisis looms.

Is the end near? I doubt it. Like any good doomsday advocate, I've conveniently ignored certain facts, such as the little tidbit that the contraction of the heliosphere is cyclical. More importantly, given that we have been surveying the sun for only the tiniest fraction of the billions of years the solar system has been in existence, we have little basis for comparison to determine what is normative and what is not. Lastly, and most tellingly, the coming solar storms will counteract the current contraction of the heliosphere.

None of this can offer concrete reassurance that the world is not coming to an end as we know it. Many scenarios are possible, and the world most certainly will end - eventually. But in our lifetime? Unlikely. Yes, it flies in the face of our desire to be important - our inability to accept that life goes on when we face the inevitable termination of our own individual lives - but plod on life does, with no consideration for our individual egos.

So will my blog continue, when I find the time to write. Current events are ripe for skewering, such as the apparent need of CEOs to have large salaries and bonuses to remain motivated. While I believe in the free market system, we have pretty unassailable evidence that, for many of these executives, the salaries are horribly inflated. Why, I could run a corporation into bankruptcy for a mere tenth of what these guys are fleecing their companies for. Any takers?

There is a point at which no salary raise will increase performance, and many grateful and talented folks could more than satisfactorily substitute for these CEOs that can no longer see past their own oversized egos - and for far more reasonable compensation. Although, in the spirit of inquiry, I am perfectly willing to accept a tenfold increase in salary from my employer to see if my production raises commensurately.

And speaking of my employer, you could do no better than regularly visiting his advice on fitness and his well-argued rhetoric from the conservative viewpoint. Sure, I like to occasionally poke fun at him, as well as everybody else on the planet (well, it beats poking fun at myself all the time), but the truth is he probably has the quickest wit of anybody I've met in my entire life. Not to mention an unusually adept way with the English language.

On the subject of workplace bloggers, you would be hard-pressed to do better than reading yet another of my exterminating compatriots' musings, in this instance largely on matters financial. I really don't know anybody with the same level of knowledge on all manner of profitable investing, as well as an unparalleled ability to perform both the quantitative and qualitative analysis of an investment. If you like money - and who doesn't? - then bookmark his URL. It's a keeper.

So you've got something worthwhile to read while my blog languishes. In the interest of better readability, I will begin taking down many of my blog posts and repatriating them to a more appropriate home. When I finally get around to completing this task, I will post links to the new blogs, dedicated separately to pest control, accounting, and spirituality (astonishingly, they don't appear to be related subjects, so I've barely broken 1,000 unique visitors on my blog in its current form). Soon, I will begin industriously blogging on multiple subjects. This particular page will remain as the peculiar eclectic mix it currently is, with my areas of more regular expertise and/or interest residing on their own special corner of the blogosphere.

But don't hold your breath in the meantime - or you will almost certainly end before the world does.

Sound as the Pound: Currency, Nationlism, and Our Tribal Tendencies

One of my fellow MSA students made the observation that "it would probably be easier to just use one international or world wide monetary unit." I agreed. Unfortunately, people attach an inordinate value to symbols of their affiliation, such as flags, high school mascots, and yes, even currency. It is quite idiotic, but we are tribal creatures; it requires no more effort on our part to be born to any ethnic group than it does to be born in any country. No status is earned, thus none should accrue. Bigotry comes in many flavors, but if I should make such an accusation of patriotism in this post-September 11th world, I would immediately be branded with a variety of unsavory labels. But why should I love my fellow man more or less because of where he was born - or where I was?

Is this rhetoric too high-flown to be of interest to the accounting profession? I don't think so. Accountants deal with numbers, which know no loyalty, owe no fealty, and brag of no nationality. Introduce currency, and things become complicated. Not because conversion is difficult - it isn't - but because currency valuations fluctuate with factors such as supply, thus the conversion factor never remains the same.

This problem has been addressed elsewhere with the introduction of the euro. Europeans don't enjoy the same level of self-absorption that Americans do, having long since realized that economics is not a zero-sum game (Smith, 1904), and the erection of tit-for-tat trade barriers only results in an economic holocaust ("Protectionism," n.d.). Fifteen European nations have adopted the euro, helping to create a more predictable economic environment for business, and eliminating a heap of headaches for European accountants. While the British have resisted the push to the euro, the pound continues to lose ground in currency trading, as reported in tomorrow's news (Errington, 2008). (Yes, tomorrow's news; the report was posted at 12:02 am, Saturday, December 13, in the U.K. Love those time zones.) Brits are now plagued with parity problems, most notably expats but prospective vacationers as well. Additionally, the dollar hasn't been able to buy a euro for some time, and American currency continues to weaken.

References

Errington, U. (2008, December 13). Pound won't even buy single euro. Retrieved December 12, 2008, from Sky News Web site: http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Business/Sky-News-Analysis-The-Winners-And-Losers-As-Pound-Crashes-To-Record-Low-Against-Euro/Article/200812215178645

Protectionism in the interwar period. (n.d.) Retrieved December 12, 2008, from the U.S. Department of State Web site: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/id/17606.htm

Smith, A. (1904). An inquiry into the wealth and fate of nations (5th ed.). London: Methuen and Co., Ltd.

Note on Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Wealth and Fate of Nations, Fifth Edition: although Smith's final edition was originally published in 1789, the version edited by Edwin Cannan and published in 1904 is one of the most readily versions available today.

COM 530: Finally Over

Winding up my sixth and final week of COM 530 at the University of Phoenix online, I am now puzzling over the somewhat horrid example of communications presented by the syllabus, which instructs the students that the individual assignment for the week is a "PR Communication Memo." However, further down in the text of the syllabus, it tells the student to "Write a press release [. . .] Then write an accompanying internal memo." Well, that sounds like two different assignments to me.

Don't even get me started on the confusingly random use of bullet points in the syllabus.

This may not be a faux pas that I can pin on the curriculum design team, however. UoP allows its facilitators to change all but the first week's assignment, and given that our facilitator for this course has asked a student on the forum this week, which I will quote here in all its ungrammatical glory, "Do you think that yourself possess all the personal qualities required to work in ethically-challenging environments," I suppose I shouldn't expect anything in the way of competent communications in this class.

The previous week was made highly entertaining by the students who insisted in arguing that those who speak in foreign languages in the immediate vicinity of said students are clearly talking about them. While I'm sure these students are fascinating people, I found it hard to believe that these foreigners had nothing better to talk about than these easily offended students. The level of paranoia it requires to sustain this illusion every time somebody speaks a foreign language in my immediate vicinity is far too high for me to sustain, so I have never been under the impression that I am the topic of conversation among the few foreigners I run into. I can only imagine how comical Europeans, who are far more accustomed to traveling to foreign countries, would find this attitude among Americans. I suppose the general impression among the rest of the world - that we Americans are entirely too self-absorbed - isn't so far off the mark.

Well. I should go.

Somebody out there is probably talking about me - and I intend to add the voice of authority to the conversation.