Under this legislation, the states received thousands of acres of land (or ’scrip’ for federal lands in other states – New York’s scrip was, believe it or not, forest land in Wisconsin), to be used/managed/sold for the purpose of the establishment of land grant colleges. “The purpose of the land-grant colleges was:
…without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”

For a list of land-grant colleges and universities, go: Land Grant Universities

The system of Cooperative Extension (basically to have agents bring the wonders of all of this research being done at the land grant universities to farmers and housewives everywhere) was added in 1914 by the Smith-Lever Act. And county cooperative extensions have been growing and adapting to their roles every since, harnessing research to help community development, business development, youth development (the umbrella under which 4-H resides) and so on. Cooperative Extension and land-grant universities are not just for agriculture anymore.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that land grant universities and county cooperative extensions might just be the doorway that entrepreneurs need in order to get their ideas and products out there.

Cornell University, for example, has a Food Venture Center, in Geneva, New York (the main campus of Cornell is in Ithaca, but it has other locations as well). Food Venture Center
They literally can take a New York State entrepreneur who has an idea for a food product all the way from a pot full of whatever this is, all the way through the testing, commercial recipe creation, partnering with processors, getting products inspected and licensed, to marketing and partnering with retailers. This is huge help for someone at the beginning of their business. Now, in Cornell’s case, their Food Venture Center has worked with everyone from Tropicana and V-8 all the way to the New York State Apple Growers Association, all the way down to a lady who showed up with a pot full of her family’s favorite barbecue sauce.

I’m not saying that every land-grant college has a food venture center, but if you have an idea for a product of any sort, it just might be a good idea to contact your county cooperative extension to ask them who might be able to help you at the land-grant institution that they are associated with, and take it from there.

There just might be a business in it.
(photo of Cornell courtesy of Matt Hintsa)

But I digress. As many of Aunt Toby’s readers recall, I have a keen interest in small business, in entrepreneurship, in plain old ‘following your passion’. Although long after the 2010 Winter Olympics has faded from the collective memory, in the chronicles of international curling, I am sure that the growth of interest in the sport is going to be tagged to the pants worn by the Norwegian team this year. But my interest in this story actually is in the company which designed and makes these pants, which are technically golf clothing, Loudmouth Golf.

Brown Alumni magazine

Scott Woodworth, “a graphic designer who lives in Sonoma, California, with his wife, Cathy, and sons, Robert, 13, and Bailey, 14, turned his passion for audacious attire and brightly colored geometric designs into a men’s clothing business targeting a particular subspecies of golfer. “Loud mouth guys may be a little obnoxious,” he says, “but deep down they are good guys. You put those pants on, you are going out to tell jokes and have fun.”

“..After he moved to California, he noticed that golfers there dressed in muted tones. That would have to change. So in 2000 he went to the fabric store, bought a bolt of powder-blue stuff that depicted Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck riding in golf carts, and had a local seamstress make him a pair of pants to wear at a charity golf tourney. “They were horrible looking pants,” he says, “and I loved them. Guys kept asking me all day where I got them.”

He found a clothing manufacturer and ordered seventy-two pairs for his newly formed company, Loudmouth Golf. Six weeks after placing a classified ad in Golf Digest, he’d sold half his inventory. He doubled the next order, and before long he’d drafted his children into helping him pack merchandise from his garage. It was good-bye graphic design and hello clothing business.”

The international interest in the pants crashed Woodward’s server and he is scrambling to restock this particular model, with delivery scheduled for April.

For people who dream of having their own business and who feel that all the ‘needs’ that need to be filled are gone, I’d like to mention that crazy pants for golfers are not necessarily something that screams ‘a need needing to be filled’. What Woodward did, by wearing crazy pants to the tournament and getting comments was actually an unconscious form of focus group testing – on the fly, certainly, but testing nonetheless. Woodward’s advantage was that he also realized that there was a market there (the need) that no one else was doing anything about and that he could fulfill (filling it).

A lot of people would like to start a business, but many times they allow their fears of risk or lack of knowledge to stop them. Woodward was a graphic designer – it is not as if he grew up in the garment business (as Isaac Mizrahi did – Mizrahi’s father owned a dress design and manufacturing business). The difference is that Woodward got on the phone, called around, asked questions, found more people who could answer more questions, found more people who could help him, direct him, show him resources for fabric, sewing, manufacturing and so on. And that’s how he started and has grown his business.

Now, you can be sure that there are people already out there, already in the sports clothing business, who are riffing changes on the Norwegian Curling Team’s pants. Maybe they called up some curlers and asked them if they liked the pants or perhaps what they wanted in pants to curl in? Maybe they are producing them in water repellant fabrics for skiers or snow boarders. Maybe they are producing them with bibs. Or matching jackets. Or matching shirts. or with zippers down the legs. Or glow in the dark? Maybe someone has decided that the whole curling pants thing is a fluke – in Canada, the big deal in curling clothing from what I have heard is colorful sweaters. Maybe someone is going to try to reproduce the diamond motif in a heavyweight sweater. A heavyweight sweater with a zip in the front.

Gad. The opportunities are endless.

It has been Aunt Toby’s great good luck in life that there were periods when I had jobs at the winter holiday season (or, as we call it here at Chez Siberia, “The Big Darkness”) in at one time a daily newspaper, and at another time, in the laboratory of a community hospital.

And today’s offering is in tribute to all of those good and dutiful souls (yes, I realize that most of them are getting some sort of ‘holiday time and a whatever” but they are NOT at home, with fam, sucking up ‘White Christmas’ on the tube) who are, depending on their jobs, watching the weather, watching the roads, watching out for us, watching out for bad guys, watching the patients, serving the needs of millions of people everywhere while the rest of us are snuggled up at home, doing whatever we do today, in the blind confidence of their service.

For several Winter breaks when I was in college (lo these many many years ago), I was able (and I admit to having pulled a few family strings) to get a job in the bacteriology lab of our community hospital. It was a very small laboratory, in the basement and we handled all sorts of specimens that Aunt Toby is NOT going to describe here (I do have the sensitive feelings of my readers’ stomachs at heart after all). There was a front hemotology lab, where the phlebotomists (isn’t that a lovely word?) would take the blood specimens, put them through the analyzer and also read the smears under the microscopes, clicking off the reds, whites, and so on with little keyboards next to them, while they did the ‘fields’ on the plates. There was also a chemistry department where they had an entirely different machine which took up most of the hallway in the back, and they would do the blood chemistries for people who’d had heart attacks, gall bladder disease, and so on. There was also, in the front, a department for the director of the laboratory, who was a pathologist with a staff person of his own who handled making all the slides for his studies. He was a big, bluff, crusty guy and his assistant was a big, bluff, crusty former nurse who was about 6′2″ tall, who used to dye her hair a ferocious shade of purplish brunette and who was devoted to the doctor.

This was truly a no-nonsense place, with a routine that was punctuated with crackling announcements of “code five” which would empty the place like a three alarm fire while the most experienced of the techs would rush down the halls with their equipment and trays to the emergency room. The first break I worked in the laboratory, there was a horrible snow storm through Christmas Eve night and I arrived for my shift at 7:30 a.m. to find the place abandoned except for the receptionist and the chemistry techs in the back getting ready for the onslaught of specimens that they knew would be flying into the laboratory from patients brought in from several multi-car accidents just before. I was assigned to get equipment, plates and record keeping materials set up in the other departments so that when the techs came back, we were ready.

That morning was a fever of activity. No chitchat. No questions about the kids. Just hard, grinding, careful work. No one got a chance to go to the cafeteria for any sort of lunch; we were making do with stale peanut butter crackers that one of the techs had stored in a desk drawer. By 2 p.m., the pace had slowed enough so that we could start to clean up.

At this point, magically, the pathologist and his assistant showed up, armed with a lab tray of specimen beakers and a bottle of scotch. The assistant poured a bit into each glass – the rest of the staff crowded into the bacteriolgy laboratory, leaning against the stone tables while the drinks were handed around. The pathologist saluted everyone.

“Merry Christmas,” he said, knocking it back. He waited a moment to see the rest of us join him (some of us coughing and spluttering a bit).

“Back to work,” he said.

So, for all of you out there who do the same on Christmas, who work, and watch, and care and do your duty for the rest of us. Thank you.
(photo courtesy ofJim Frazer)

Mobile Electronics Repair

The DH heard this story on NPR this week and told me about it – he was fascinated by the major aspect of the story: A guy turning a personal need into a business that is growing like crazy – a mobile ‘small personal electronics repair’ business. From the description above, of people coming up to his van to ask for help when they see the advertising on the side, another thought comes through.

This is the 21st Century version of a hot dog cart. Or the late 19th or early 20th century pushcart guys found in every major city. “Strawberries!!” “Rags..Rags..we buy Rags!!” “Pots and Pans – we fix pots and pans!”

The other thought is this: In the midst of what some economists claim to be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, some people have found a way to build a small business based on repairs, which is a very ancient profession indeed.

People who can repair stuff have a skill that is very useful when times are bad because – people are not in the financial situation where they feel comfortable just throwing something away and buying new. Before the ‘throw away economy’ was produced by the Wal-Martization of manufactured goods (and Wal-Mart is not the only ‘villain’ of the piece here – I fully admit that), there were a lot of things that due to the way they were designed and manufactured and the amount of their cost, people would have them fixed. Electronics such as television sets and stereos, shoes, clothing, electronic appliances, small engine goods such as mowers were all the basis of a thriving sector of the economy: Service and Repair.

The cheapening of practically all goods basically put that out of people’s minds. When it costs almost as much (or perhaps even more) to repair than what the item could be purchased for, then it made no monetary sense (we won’t discuss the whole issue of ‘life time cost’ which includes disposal and landfilling) to have something repaired – it only made sense to throw it away and buy something new..whether it was a pair of shoes, a tee shirt, a pair of blue jeans, a toaster, or a laptop.

What Leontaris (and others who are doing the same thing) has found out is that there are a lot of broken small electronics around with owners who actually just want the damn thing repaired. People have become so dependent on their personal electronics that having the item out of their possession for even a couple of days causes upset(how many people do you know who actually wear a wrist watch now? How many people do you know who turn off their cell phones to go on vacation? How many people do you know who have repetitive motion disorder from using their PDA? How many people do you know who refer to their PDA as ‘a Crackberry’).

The other thing is this: The prices of some of these items new have now become high enough that having to replace it now is going to cause a certain amount of ‘wallet pain’.

Enough so that repairing an Iphone makes sense. Even when repairing a cracked screen will set the person back – 10 minutes of time…and $99.00 for parts and service (which is what Leontaris charges). Enough so that Leontaris not only has this mobile business, but a shop where techs repair other items such as laptops and so on that he can’t keep the parts in his van.

I’ve talked before about businesses that got their start or got really growing in the Great Depression. One of the biggest and most famous is HP – Hewlett Packard, which got its start in the Depression in Mr. Hewlett’s garage. In my local area, a safety pin business which was struggling even before the depression (basically because they were trying to compete in what had become a commodity market), took the opportunity to morph themselves into a tool and die manufacturer, which survived on holding the line on costs. They then evolved into an electronics ‘pick and place’ machinery and systems manufacturer and now they are all over the world. Their headquarters is still in my home town here.

Things are very bad right now – let’s not make any mistake. But for people who are interested in ‘finding a need and filling it’ – now is as good – or as bad – a time to start a business as any. Who knows, perhaps you could be someone who can be a success, help people with their needs, and make more jobs for others.

Now THAT’s a plan we can all get behind.

(Ipod clinic photo by Dan Theurer)

And that has not changed.

I don’t care what the economics pundits and MSNBC bozos wave around. “It’s over.” “It’s NOT over.” “Green shoots” “Turned a corner.”

I could not care less what some of these know-nothing self-interested gasbags say, actually, because I know that there are a lot of people in a world of hurt right now and a lot of them have been that way, frankly, for years. A lot of them used to be middle class and owned their own homes and had retirement. And then things happened..

Job transfers overseas. Outsourcing. And now the economy is in the crapper. For some people, their emergency happened 3-5 years ago – they lost their homes a long time ago and have been living with relatives, driving around the country looking for jobs that are no longer there, or working in places like WalMart (which is really pretty ironic given that the price pressure that companies such as WalMart put on American manufacturers combined with the changes in the laws during the Reagan Administration were the two engines that moved all those jobs out of the country overseas..but I digress).

To get back to my point: One of the things that makes what is going on right now WORSE than what happened in the Great Depression is this: In 1929, people were a lot closer, in terms of skills and knowledge to being able to provide for themselves and to being able to cope than people are now. People who lived in places such as New York City, or Chicago, or Atlanta or a lot of other places were not only within one generation of growing and raising their own food, but were also still doing things such as making and repairing their own clothing, doing their own carpentry, canning and drying food and so on.

Today? Even people who have a piece of ground that they can grow something on if they want to and need to are at a loss as to what to do and how to do it. Additionally, for the last 30 years, we’ve been encouraged to live in a ‘consume and throw away’ society fed by loose credit. That credit threw gasoline on the economic fire and we all went along for the ride, encouraging companies to produce throw-away goods, which fed the economy and the landfills.

Only now, we aren’t buying so much. The savings rate at the latest report is at 8% – a huge increase for US consumers. Doesn’t do squat for the retail sector, but for people who are concerned where their next paycheck is going to come from, socking away money is the only way they know of to have some feeling of control over what is happening.

Now, there is not a whole lot Aunt Toby can do – the president and the head of the Dept. of the Treasury have not picked up the phone to give me a call and ask MY advice. And the only way I know of to help people is to put some knowledge into people’s hands. The only question is: How to get that information into the hands of people who need it the most. If you are really hurting, how are you going to find out what you need to know?

Let’s put it this way – if you know someone who is hurting, who has lost their home and is in a shelter, who is dealing with this situation please help them to get information. Even if it is not here – there is all sorts of info out there, both at a local, regional and national/international level. And to get to it, they need to find where they can get access to it.

In our area, that is at the local public library. In some places, the state labor department has free access in their offices or in job training areas. In some local school districts, or community colleges, they have free local access for community residents.

If you want to do one thing (and you know Aunt Toby is very big on ‘doing one thing’) that will enable you to help someone who’s having trouble in this economy(and it might even be YOU), pick up the phone or go to the public library and talk to the reference librarians and ask them where free internet access is locally. At the same time, ask them if they do workshops there at the library on how to use the internet, what resources there on locally and regionally in terms of finding information on topics such as:

–Job training and apprenticeship programs
–What to do if your home is in foreclosure – any resources out there to help you stay in your house.
–Food pantries
–Programs where people can grown their own fruits and veggies – do such things exist locally?
– Clothing banks
– If you lose your housing, what programs are available to get you and your family into some sort of shelter as soon as possible.
– Free programs for your kids for the summer
– Home heating assistance (it’s summer now, but winter will be here before you know it)
– Home energy efficiency assistance (as in money and help to get your home more energy efficient, whether it’s to keep the heat out or the heat in).

And if you are finding out the answers to these questions for someone else – if you find that in your community, things are not as effective or efficient in terms of these issues, perhaps it is time for you to make some calls, let other people know what the situation is and organize to get some programs started. Yes, I know the economy is in the dumper – but I’ve got to tell you that no one wants to find out in January that there are people sleeping outdoors because they’ve lost their housing and there is no program or not enough spaces for them.

When times are good, it’s easy to hide the ‘worry gene’ – because we all think that somehow, everyone is taken care of — well, before this is over, a lot more people are NOT going to be taken care of and in order for us all to get through this, we are going to have to be a lot more generous with one another. But like the guy in the photo at the top has on his sign: What people want and need is not charity (though charity will get people through the immediate need). What people need are tool that will help them survive – in his case, it was a job. A lot of people need jobs too, but a lot of people can also make use of information right now — people know that there are things they can do for themselves and others.

But to help take care of the immediate and the long term, they need information. Help to be the conduit for that information; it’s the most charitable thing you might be able to do right now.
(photos courtesy of renny67 and merfam)

The best part of the job, though, was when we were able to place people into jobs. Most of what we did in those days was what was coyly referred to in the jargon of the agency business as ‘temp to perm’ (of course now, it’s more than likely ‘perma-temp’), so I knew that when I asked someone about their business and what was the one person I could find for them that would help them grow, that if I was able to find that person, I was doing a definite ‘good deed’ – I was getting that person a job.

A paycheck. A way to buy groceries and get health benefits for themselves and their family, pay the bills, pay their rent or mortgage. A way for someone to maybe even get a promotion and a raise in pay.

Despite the pay (which was actually not the greatest), I loved that job. I saw it as a homely combination of ‘good deed’ and ‘local economic development’. No matter how frustrating the cold calls or unanswered phone messages were, I always felt that what I was doing was good. At the end of the day, there were people who were genuinely better off for what I was doing.

Right now, there are a tremendous number of people in this country who are NOT better off than they were a year ago. For some of them, their bad times started several years ago and their jobs got offshored someplace or downsized out of existence. And they’ve had to take whatever they can get and it’s probably less than what they made before. And to pay the bills and the mortgage and the orthodonture, they’ve taken on huge levels of debt and whatever job they could find. And for a lot of them, an increasing number have lost their homes and are wandering the countryside, like high tech (and sometimes low tech) Tom Jodes.

And I know there are people out there who feel that it’s ‘all their own faults’ or ‘if they’d kept up they’d still have a job’ or ‘if they’d been smart…” or ‘if they’d worked harder’ or …and so on. And I can tell you, because I come from a place where our local economy was run on the fly-wheel of a huge high tech wonder..which decided one day that they no longer wanted to be in the business that they ran in our little place (and thereby causing over 20,000 people to lose their jobs), that for many many people in this country, they did work very hard, and were very educated and smart, and they did keep up with training, and they did the best they could for their families and their community.
And it didn’t make any difference because it was decisions made thousands of miles away by people who did not care about the families and the community – that is what caused them to lose their jobs.

And for many people at the top of the heap out there, that is an appropriate thing – free market competition, movement of capital and assets to the lowest cost areas and so on and so forth. But for the millions of people who are either now out of work or who have not been able to get a job in their fields for the last 5 years, it is not an appropriate thing.

It is bitter and it is demeaning and it sucks the very life out of the soul of people and of a community and out of the country.

And right now, we have an administration which really is struggling to do something right. It might not be what all of us admire or believe in or accept or agree with. But they really are trying to do the most good for the most people, because that is what is required now. But the economy is not responding, at least at the community and personal levels, the way people need. Because..people need jobs. There are millions of people out of work already..and this spring, there are millions more young people who are graduating from colleges and graduate schools..and they don’t have jobs either.

And maybe Aunt Toby’s readers do a lot of charity work already, and for that I thank you sincerely. But at the moment, charity is not just what we need. What we have the greatest need for right now are industrial and commercial patriots.

The greatest, most patriotic thing anyone who owns or manages a business can do right now is not to lay off workforce – ask your employees to find ways to save money, work smarter, to keep everyone working and paid. Additionally, if you can find a place in your operation, an even greater good would be to find one person who can help you grow and hire that person. Even if it is a young person with little experience but a lot of energy. Even if you are a plumber and all the young person could do would be to crouch next to you and learn. To give one additional person a job, teach them a skill, give them the opportunity to help you grow and be more productive and competitive – that would help your business..would help the economy…would help the country.

And all you bankers who got the bail outs – it’s time for you to step up and start lending to business. We all know that you are hoarding the money that the tax payers gave to you. Many of you are using it to buy up other distressed banks. The country needs you to be patriotic too – help business grow – give them credit.

A lot of talk out there about patriotism revolves around the phrase ‘love of country’ – we need to love the people in the country, too. And for that, we need to help business grow, so that they can hire people HERE so that payrolls flow out into the community and help other businesses in the communities. That is when people at the local level will honestly know..in their very bones..that the recession is over.
(photos courtesy of diP and Joan Thewlis)

Well, sometimes, Aunt Toby feels that way about KCE. I have to make sure to keep some of the ongoing things up in the air and revisiting them from time to time before they..well, they won’t go smash on the floor, but the story may not be fresh or interesting any longer and all of my little buggers might lose interest.

So, this post is a bit of a catch up.

Chicks: Well, as we saw last time, they stopped being chicks a very long time ago and are now pullets and cockerels and are now behaving a lot more chicken-y. The cockerels are getting quite annoying for the pullets now, and by the end of July, the pullets will have turned, magically, into hens and will start laying eggs, which means that they need places to lay those eggs IN..nesting boxes.

The DH, having gone through the experience of building the first chicken ‘tractor’ felt that he’d worked out the bugs from that and was now ready to build a ‘new and improved’ tractor complete with nesting boxes. No white wall tires, electric windows or automatic watering devices. In any case, no matter what, we would have two tractors and could theoretically pick and choose our way through our little flock to find the boys and the girls so that we could for sure get the girls into the ‘condo’ with the best roosters and leave the rest of the boys in the first tractor. You would think that knowing a boy chicken from a girl chicken would be the easiest thing going, and for the most aggressive and sexually mature cockerels, it is pretty easy: they are the biggest ones with the combs and wattles. It is a lot harder to select out the least mature cockerels, whose combs have not really started to develop and who do NOT have wattles. But we had to do it, if only for the space factor. There are all sorts of types of combs; our chickens because they were bred for cold northern winters, have what’s called a ‘pea comb’ which is teeny and lays close to the head. In the photograph, you have what people think of as a rooster with a comb – the farther south the chickens are, the better it is for them to have a big upstanding comb like this one because..combs radiate heat out of a chicken’s body. Those red things under the rooster’s chin are what are called ‘wattles’ and I have no idea what their function is, if anything.

As lonely as that sounds, it is not a whole lot of fun to be the cockerel who is NOT the biggest or best because that means that you are constantly being picked on, being shouldered away from the food, and being pecked. You are, as the saying goes, at the bottom of the ‘pecking order’. The ‘last guy’ as it were, is really in tough shape. So, by taking out the biggest (which turns out to be the most aggressive, most sexually mature, nastiest and so on) roosters out of the flock to put in with the pullets, it was as if we had completely reshuffled the deck for the rest of the roosters. They immediately got a lot more room than they had been able to occupy before, had less competition for the food, and a whole new pecking order had to be established. This did not, however, help the little guy at the bottom of the heap; frankly, he is still at the bottom of the heap but he will be able to avoid being pecked a bit more, be able to get a bit more food and will grow a little better and a little bit faster now.

It will also mean that he will probably be the last to go ‘a la Pepperoniville’ as we say at Chez Siberia. But I’m sure that being the last to ‘turn off the lights’ is not going to be much of a compensation for a lifetime of being the guy at the bottom of the totem pole.

The Garden: One of the things about gardening here in Upstate New York is the telescoping nature of time. We really do not get a very long spring, so keeping up with harvesting early things like lettuce and spinach becomes a race against the plants’ bolding as the days get longer and warmer. Needless to say, we have eaten spinach in as many permutations and combinations as I can think of, though I think I might just blanch and freeze the rest to use during the winter when I make my own pasta.

Pick Your Own: Aunt Toby and Elder Daughter will be returning tomorrow to the strawberry farm to pick…snap peas, actually. They are rushing in and are still nice and flat and not woody. My plan is to pick several pounds, blanch a little bit and freeze them in seal-a-meal pouches for use in asian dishes this winter.

The Economy: I don’t care what the pundits are saying – it’s still stinko.
And that is all you need to know.

Anyone who has a child who graduated from college this spring (as we did at Chez Siberia)knows that the overwhelming majority of these kids (unless they are engineers, computer programmers or accountants) are unemployed at the moment. My son’s estimate (backed up by a college intern we have at our office) is that only 1 of his friends had a job by the time he left school and that most of his friends opted to try to get into graduate school to sit out the recession. The Boy has a job for the summer but is looking…and competing with people with much more experience than he has.

We have assured him that Chez Siberia will not be going into the boarding house business any time soon and that he still has his bed to sleep in. However, by the end of the summer, we will no longer be able to cover him with our health insurance (hey people; write your Congressional Reps and Senators and DEMAND health care reform with a public offering). Luckily, New York State has a program that will allow him to buy his own insurance coverage at a not horrible rate.

If you have a child who graduated and is not going on to graduate school, you will need to check out what is available in your state to keep your kid covered — they are only covered for 90 days after their date of graduation. Trust me – for some reason, they can go through an entire four years of college with no more problems than an attack of acne…and as soon as their coverage lapses, something will happen and they will need major healthcare or dental work.

(rooster photo courtesy of nal in miami Juggler photo courtesy of Robbie Veldwijk)

And it reminded me that there are certain truths to life and one of them is the old saw about ‘Time is the currency of our lives’. All we have is time. All we sell, no matter what our skills are, is time. We only have 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week. And we only have a certain amount of that during which we not only want to work, but can physically work. So, therefore, time IS money. We even use the same sorts of language with regard to time as we do to money: Spending money…spending time. Saving money..saving time. Wasting money…wasting time. Investing money..investing time. Time really does, to a certain extent, equal money.

But the question comes back around to this: What if YOU were called in and told that the amount of time that they’d pay you for at your current job has now been cut by 20% — you now have a whole day to do anything you want to do. What would you do with that?

Now, a lot of people are so stressed in their work lives that if they were offered an official ‘three day weekend’ every single week, they’d dance a jig for joy. I’m not sure when they woke up the second or third time, though, if they’d know what to do with that time other than watch tv, mow the lawn or cruise the internet. But one day a week to do with as we wish – a real gift. What would I do with that?

If I worked in a place where the benefits included education or training – I’d use my time and take advantage of that benefit now. I still would have my job, albeit at a reduced salary or number of hours, but if I could still take advantage of the benefit, I’d look at the economy, my employer, my place at my employer and ask myself the following question: “What’s the one thing I can improve in my background or skills that when the economy turns around again(and it will do that, trust me), I will be in a position to be able to present myself as ‘the new and improved ME’?” No matter how bad the economy is, every company has (or should have) some forward plans – find the guardians of those plans and ask them where the company is going to be in the future – where are they going and what skills will be necessary for them to get there? It might be, believe it or not, foreign language skills. Or it might be certain computer programs. Or it might be more strength in the financial end of things. If it’s a manufacturer, it might be a computer program, or computer aided design, or computer programmed robots or some other technical skill. All of these are subjects that I can take advantage of at my local voc tech high school, community college or university and if I can take advantage of educational benefits and now use a more flexible working schedule, then I would definitely take that on.

But perhaps they don’t want me to come to work every day but just leave early (and there are some issues with this that I’ll discuss in a little bit)? What if they only want me to take a day off? Well, then, I’d take Fridays off and look for a program that works on weekends.

What else could I do with my time? What if I look at my company and the economy and feel that even with a turnaround in the economy, it and my place in the company is still a problem?

Well, then with a day a week at my disposal, I’d start looking at:

– Contacting people in other more likely industries and getting informational interviews (“I’m thinking about going into the xxxxx industry? Is there anyone who has a half hour to talk to me about opportunities?”)
— Contacting people and rebuilding my networking because no one is at the top of their game in terms of that.
— Contacting people and asking them about how their companies are doing. I still have a job, but it is always really good to know what is going on in my backyard and letting people know that I’m interested in what THEY are doing. You never know what direction a local company is going in – they might just have been bought by someone else; they might be going into new products or processes. Information is personal power. Don’t forget that.

Let’s suppose that I’m of an age that I’m not thinking particularly energetically. Perhaps I am thinking about using that time for more volunteer things. There is not one organization in my community that can’t use skills and time. If nothing else, I’d take the day and offer it to my local school district to help kids with their reading and elementary arithmetic skills, or I could arrange to take them on field biology walks. The schools butt up on a reservoir and I do have some field botany experience and knowledge – I’d be more than happy to take a group of kids out and do some collecting, plant pressing and drying, mounting, and so on.

But lastly, something I’d think about is this: Leave early every day (or the other side of it, coming in 1.5 hours later every day) or take a whole day?

I’ve had experiences ‘working half time’ and I can tell you this – first, I never actually got to work only half time. Invariably, I got a call just before I’d have to leave and I’d have to stay later. Or I’d have to go talk to someone. Or something else would happen. I have got to work a four hour day. Working more hours than half time and only getting paid for half time turns you into someone who is working for less and less on an hourly basis. That’s one of those ‘slit my throat when I look in the mirror’ things. Do not do that. Secondly, if you take the one day and smooth that over the entire five day workweek, you still have travel, clothing, eating, etc. costs on every day. So, YOU still have all the same expenses you had before; you just have less income to pay for them.

So, if you are offered this sort of thing (that is, we are cutting your hours) – take all of it as a lump – a half a day on Friday or a whole day of Friday (or, Monday – take your pick, but don’t take a day during the week).

And USE that time for YOU.
(photo courtesy of badboy69)

Such is the power of appearance; li’l Miz Scarlet understood that if she wanted to ask for what amounted to a huge chunk of change, she’d better look as if she did not need it. And logic means nothing under these circumstances, either – we’re talking right after the end of the ‘War between the states’ – and another one of her famous lines was ‘I’ll never be hungry again.” It’s not as if she felt she had a choice.

Hard times make for hard choices, and at times, that means making the decision to ‘keep up appearances’ can be really really important.

“The Wall Street type in suspenders, with his bulging briefcase; the woman in pearls, thumbing her BlackBerry; the builder in his work boots and tool belt — they could all be headed for the same coffee shop, or bar, for the day….
“I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine…..“If showing pride in these kinds of situations was always maladaptive, then why would people do it so often?” said David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “But people do, of course, and we are finding that pride is centrally important not just for surviving physical danger but for thriving in difficult social circumstances, in ways that are not at all obvious.”
When All You Have Left Is Pride

In the case above, it’s psychological, but there is also a basis in the ‘tooth and claw’ world as well. As someone who raised livestock for a long time, I can tell you that the whole issue of ‘pecking order’ (whether you are talking about sheep, goats or chickens) is not only an issue of who gets to harass whom, but also a matter of who gets to stand at the feeder and eat…and who gets their feed stolen. Yes, it is a case of bullying in the barn. Yes, it is a case of the smaller, weaker, and less able to defend themselves being bullied by the others – and that stress showing up as greater parasite loads, generally weakened conditions, more disease issues, and sometimes death (direct and indirect).

As relatively educated human beings, we know what can develop when something terrible happens to people – whether it is a death of a spouse or a child, the loss of a job, being harassed at work or school and so on. People can become depressed, setting them many times into a spiral from which they do not recover. It becomes very easy, especially if one spends a lot of time at home in front of the computer, even while looking for a job, to frankly be doing it in sweats, flip flops and a coffee cup with three day old coffee (hopefully without cigarette butts in it). Even if you got the call for an interview that very day, would you feel energetic enough to pull yourself together, grab your things and head out to face the questioning?

Even if I have the flu and am feeling frankly like ‘death warmed over’, I usually can make myself feel 100% better if I get up, take a shower, do my hair, put on a bit of makeup and dress in good clothing. I remember once reading a piece about the morale-lifting effect of a consignment of red lipstick that was delivered to the female inmates of Bergen-Belsen about a week after the Red Cross had paid a call there. Supposedly, the women eked out that color for a very long time, using it not only as lipstick, but also as rouge to make themselves look healthier.

I know it sounds like blathering to tell you that if you are out of work, you should be devoting time and energy to making yourself look and feel good, but believe me, it works. When I was caring for my mom, who was suffering from dementia, the only thing I could do for myself (because I was also working a full time job and would race from the office back to my mom’s house to take over for the home health care aid), was to lift weights while watching my mom’s door to make sure she did not make a break for it out of the house. It gave me a feeling of empowerment that I needed to deal with my own feelings of ineptitude and lack of control under that situation. Gaining a feeling that you have some control over aspects of your life is terribly important when you have lost what for most people is the central defining activity of their lives.

So. in terms of this economy (out of work, struggling to keep your job, struggling with finances or whatever), aunt Toby wants you to make sure when you wake up every morning, that you first of all take care of YOU. If you still have your job, dress every day as if your being at the job is really important to you. If you are out of work, take the time to dress and look the best you can, perhaps not as if you were going to get the interview call that day, but at least so that if you wanted to go out and network, or go to a meeting, go to the bank or whatever, that, as Scarlet said above, you ‘look like a queen’. Best foot and shoe forward. Even sitting at the computer, you’ll feel better, you’ll have more energy and it will help. You may have to make yourself do it – but trust me on this one; it’s worth doing.

(photo above courtesy of booboogbs)

Write down, in no particular order, your friends. They don’t have to be close friends, just all the people who you interact with on a regular basis: clubs, organizations, church, work, your kids’ school, etc. Get ‘em all down.

Then take out a different a marker or highlighter™ or a different color pen and somehow designate the people on that list that you currently work with or who perhaps you used to work with but who still work in the same company or organization that you do. Then take out a different marker and put a check mark next to all the people on that list who you do ‘other stuff’ with (go for coffee, movies, drinks, clubs, etc. ).

How many people on your list are people you work with AND also socialize or do ‘other stuff’ with? If more than half of them are, then you’ve got work to do….hard work…adult work…work you probably have not had to do in decades.

You’ve got to make some friends.

Don’t laugh. Making friends is hard work. Think of how kids make friends at school or in the neighborhood – there are delicate negotiations (would you like some of my cookie?), deal making (I’ll trade you this for that), and diplomacy. Most of us end up with most of our friends from work because – those friends don’t take any work on our parts – they are just there. And we become very comfortable in terms of making them part of our lives. I know people who have literally been friends with the same people at their work since they joined the company decades ago; they and their families do everything now as families: vacations; their kids go to camp together, date one another. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

Until there is a mass layoff. Then..it sucks..big time.

“After a major downsizing among municipal workers in Finland, the risk of death from a heart attack went up fivefold for those who lost their jobs….. evidence in the United States has been mixed, but research has found that people who lost a job in their 50s were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the next decade.
It’s not just those who lose their jobs who are at risk of serious health problems or premature death. In Finland, even those municipal workers who weren’t actually downsized were more likely to die sooner, says Hadler. In the United Kingdom, the “Whitehall studies” included a glimpse of a group of civil service workers whose jobs were threatened by a planned Thatcher-era privatization. The research found declines in both physical and mental health after the announcement, says Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London and the principal investigator for the studies. Research in the United States led by Sarah Burgard, a sociologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, has shown that job insecurity can be as bad for your longer-term health as a bout with a serious illness or even an actual job loss.

Job Loss and Health

Now, what these studies looked at was stress and job loss, but I know, because Aunt Toby has been through two swings on this job loss door, that one of the major stressors and depressors is ‘social loss’. If you lose your job and most of your friends are people you work with – they won’t be your friends any more. Instant Leprosy.

Trust me – it’s like getting a divorce; your spouse’s friends are not your friends any longer either. And if there is a mass layoff, then there are two factors going: you all will have lost your jobs, your social culture and will be under those stressors plus– there will be hundreds of you out there scrambling around, looking for a job. That does not make for charitable behaviors, believe me.

Which brings me back to friends.

When you lose your job or if you are in danger of losing your job, the people you need to consult with, talk with, ask for help from, get your resumes into the hands of, network with – should definitely NOT be the people you would have to compete with for jobs. This is not to say that joining a professional society in your local area is not a good idea – as a matter of fact, it is a great idea because you will meet people who do what you do up and down the scale and they are many times your best avenues to getting your resume into the right hands.

But the guy who you share cubical space with, who is married, with three kids, a mortgage, car payments and a three year orthodonture program for his 15 year old? He is definitely NOT going to call you up and say, “Hey, Fred; I heard about a job that I think you’d be more perfect for instead of me.” Trust me – survival of the fittest never included “love thy neighbor”.

So, look at that list. When was the last time you did something new? Joined a new organization? Joined a professional organization? Joined the local branch of your college alumni organization? Checked out Meetup.com? (no, it is not a hooking up site – it’s a way to meet people who are interested in the same stuff you do, whether it is college alumni, professional and technical groups, religious groups and so on – the DC area one, for example goes on for pages and pages and includes everything from knitting and sewing, to college alumni groups, people interested in getting jobs on the Hill, IT professionals interested in fraud investigations, etc. )

Remember what your mom used to tell you on your first day at school? Riiiight…”go make some friends.”

Great for your career – great for your health, too.

(photo courtesy of carf )

This posting can also be found at: Oxdown Gazette at Firedoglake.com