Office Politics

We’re offering one free Samsung SCX-4500 printer laser MFP to one lucky Office Freaks reader!

First a little about this gorgeous printer. The Samsung SCX-4500 printer laser MFP was designed to be small, sleek, and silent. Doesn’t sound like a lot of printers I’ve known in my life - large, clumbersome, and anything but silent.

The Samsung SCX-4500 printer laser MFP is actually the smallest laser MFP in the world. With it’s elegant black finish, buttonless soft-touch controls and blue LEDs, it wins the best looking category as well. As if that weren’t enough, at just 45 dBA, it’s the quietest laser MFP in existence. But that doesn’t mean it won’t do its job and do it well. It offers fast 17 ppm printing and copying and 4800 x 4800 enhanced resolution color scanning.

Ultra-Compact Laser MFP

• Smallest laser printer/copier/color scanner in the world
• High-style glossy piano black finish
• Buttonless soft-touch sensor panels with blue LED scan status indicators
• Easy jam clearing
• Quietest printer operation in the world (45 dBA)
• Soft, melodic low toner and low paper alert tones
• Semi-auto sliding paper tray
• Print and copy up to 17 ppm, up to 4800 x 4800 enhanced scanning

So, if you’re ready to work in style, lean in closely and see what you have to do to win one of these beauties:

To be eligible to win a Samsung SCX-4500 printer laser MFP, you have to share your wisdom, your wit, or a little of both. Simply submit your Office Story to Joi (that’s me) to be published on Office Freaks (you’re there). We will publish each “qualifying” entry we receieve - whether it’s 1 or 100.

The post should be connected to office life in some way - whether at home or away. You could tell how you solved a problem, decorated an office, or even tell a funny story about a co-worker. You could also, of course, give a review of a product you loved or even hated.

I’m not that great with following rules, myself, so I’m not going to throw many at you. Other than this: We will not print any words that are vulgar, inflammatory, insulting, or hateful. If we don’t publish an entry, it isn’t eligible, so tell your words to play nice.

If you have any questions, at all, please e-mail me (joisigers@aim.com) and I’ll do my level best to answer them.

So, how is the winner determined? We will have 13 people read the posts and vote on their favorite. The person who entered the winning post will be sent one of these fetching printers. If there is a tie, the entries that were chosen will be written on index cards and placed into a large bag. We’ll then have one of our daughters pull out a card…. ta da, we’ll have the winner of the Samsung SCX-4500 printer laser MFP.

Spread the word and e-mail me your entires asap - I look forward to reading all of them!

MSN/CareerBuilder had an article recently titled, “10 Habits of Highly Annoying Workers.” I know, for a fact, that none of you would fall under the “Annoying Workers” category - let alone the “Highly Annoying Workers” category. But I thought you might like reading about your co-workers.

As you know, I work from home, so my co-workers are my family and cats. They’re all perfectly charming, even on bad days, so I’m lucky. From what I’ve heard, some co-workers can border on the ridiculous. I’ve heard horror stories about people who snap and pop chewing gum (even while on the telephone), wear their cologne or perfume so strongly that it gives you a headache, and, of course, I’ve heard all about the serial eaters. Somone told me once about a woman who constantly ate at her desk - she had chips, cookies, and crackers stuffed in every available drawer and even kept a little stash of nuts in the file cabinet! Then, she’d complain about the maintenance department “letting” her work area get so crumb-y and messy.

Priceless.

Check out “10 Habits of Highly Annoying Workers” and see if you recognize anyone. For your sake, I hope you don’t!

If you have one or more assholes in your office, you might want to read this post by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a blogger for TIME/CNN.

The book she touts seems like agreat read too, but I may never get a chance to read it, unless they send a copy and I have the better half of this blogging duo do that for me.

Click thru and read this great post about office assholes.

Before I actually read the article linked below, I skimmed over the acronyms mentioned to see if I could guess any of them.

I got one right - WIIFM. At least it wasn’t a shut out.

Thanks be to God I work from home - otherwise I’d probably cause more trouble than I’d be worth. Seems I’m NVQ for Office life. Isn’t it nuts, we’re all starting to talk like we’re online. I wonder how long it’ll be before people start yelling LOL! rather than laughing. OMG, can you imagine?

Anyway, Take the leap and see if you’re already familiar with BHNC or CTD —- the two of those are, of course, A2O.

EOM. TTFN.

I read a good article several weeks ago in Psychology Today. It was titled, “When You’re Smarter Than Your Boss,” and I haven’t the foggiest idea why I even bothered - I don’t have a boss, aside from my oldest cat. Am I smarter than her? I pride myself in being able to say, “Sometimes.”

Anyway, the article points out a couple of facts:

1. Relationships are never strengthened when one person lets the other know that they believe themselves to be the smarter one.

2. You have to find a way to let your “smarts” shine through without becoming a threat to your boss. Funny thing about bosses - they hate threats like politicians hate promises and cast them aside just as easily.

The author, Judith Sills (author and psychologist), points out that there are may, indeed, be ways in which you are more inclined than your boss. Maybe you add figures faster than he does, maybe your vocabulary is richer, etc. The ego has a way of taking one or two advantages and declaring themselves the superior horse in the race.

Whether or not you actually are intellectually superior doesn’t really matter. What matters is the fact that you feel smarter, because your feelings have the potential to affect how you treat your boss….which has the potential to shorten your shelf life. You have to be on guard against overreacting to errors that your boss makes, because (if you feel that he/she is beneath your intellectual level) you’ll be watching for them.

If you start thinking, “These roles should be reversed…..these desks should be reversed…these parking spaces should be reversed….these paychecks should be reversed….Who do I have to see to put me in charge?!” —you’re skating on thin ice. And if the ice breaks, guess who’s going under. Not the big cheese. Big cheeses don’t get wet.

Advice from the author:

1. Never gossip about your boss or try to lessen his reputation to co-workers. Uncool at best. At worst, they could turn the tables on you one day.

2. Use your strengths to help his weaknesses - without wearing a sign announcing what you’re doing!

3. Watch that your vocabulary doesn’t become too big for its pants. No need for a $500 word when a 5 spot will do just fine.

“Diminishing your boss’s real strengths, overreacting to his errors and resisting or resenting his authority are self-inflicted career problems. In themselves, they may be small day-to-day irritants. But they can add up to big time job dissatisfaction. you DO need to be learning something in your job. You DO need to feel personally valued. When you distort your boss in a negative direction, you make both less likely.”

Thru the Evansville Courier Press Sunday edition, I found a contest that may interest some of you.

” A bad boss can drive you nuts ! Long hours, low pay. Hard work, no health insurance. The boss gets a golden parachute, you get no pension, no respect. You need a break. Tell us all about it and you could win a much-needed vacation. “

Want to enter ? Click HERE.

Glad to say I won’t be entering, as I have a wonderful boss, who also happens to be my wife !

I loves him dearly. Loves his squinky little eyes, his droopy little legs, his fat little fingers —

But an office ogre is anything but cute. He/She makes an already bad situation (which is being at work as opposed to being anyplace else) 10 times worse just by being there. They’re the sort of person that, when they have a sick day - it’s like a vacation day for everyone else.

We all know how to deal with ogres - AVOID them like a bad stink. But, alas, there are days when that just isn’t possible and they’re underfoot and underskin for hours.

A while back, Mayo Clinic put out a good guideline for getting along with co-workers. That guideline’s the basis for the following. It may give you a little inspiration for coping with ogres. More importantly, it’ll help you to not become one yourself - because if your ogre’s in your mirror, you’ll never escape him.

• Be positive. Smile, be upbeat, and greet everyone warmly. Not just the people you think can help you move up the ladder - be friendly to the ladder-holders as well.
• Learn to communicate effectively. Sometimes when we’re in a hurry, we only think we’re making ourselves clear. We think we’ve said exactly what was on our minds to say when, in reality, we only said half. Getting mad at people for not reading your mind is just ugly dumb.
• Be a team player. Come to company meetings and, by all means, come to work prepared and on time. Contribute to, but don’t hog, the discussion. Don’t try to always be right, and don’t try to always have the last word. Those are and ogre’s favorite tricks.
• Be modest. Don’t brag or take too much credit. If you did something particularly well, give yourself a chest bump in the mirror, brag to your spouse and then kind of keep it on the low. Act like you meant to do it - not like it so shocked you that you can’t quit talking about it!
• Respect confidences. If anyone tells you something in private, for crying out loud, don’t say it out loud. If the boss tells you you’re an assett to the office, there’s just little need to go to every person in the office and repeat it.
• Avoid bigotry. Never make suggestive comments or tell jokes that make fun of a co-worker’s sex, culture, sexual preference, race, or gender. That one should go without saying, but we all know there are plenty of barbarians running amok. One thing a lot of people don’t think of is this - if you’re in the presence of someone who is making these sorts of comments, their nasty is splattering all over you. Especially if you happen to laugh. Just vamose.
• Be thoughtful. Clean up after yourself. Knock before entering a co-worker’s office or cubicle. Treat basically everyone as though they were your equal - because, ummmm, they are.

The Office
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Who is this character, David Brent? Couldn’t tell you if my Starbuck’s parking space depended on it. (Make no mistake about it, I’d make something up - it just wouldn’t be correct.)

Actually, David Brent is a character on a British television series. But that’s all I know.

Anyway, below are some of the quotes attributed to the character, Mr. Brent, and at the end is a link to a website that’ll unravel the rest of his story, sould you wish to pull the thread:

“Eagles may soar high, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.”

“Every time you open your mouth you have this wonderful ability to continually confirm what I think.”

“I thought I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was just some b*stard with a torch, bringing me more work.”

“If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.”

“If work was so good, the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.”

“If you can keep your head when all around you have lost theirs, then you probably haven’t understood the seriousness of the situation.”

“If your boss is getting you down, look at him through the prongs of a fork and imagine him in jail.”

“If you’re gonna be late, then be late and not just 2 minutes - make it an hour and enjoy your breakfast.”

“Know your limitations and be content with them. Too much ambition results in promotion to a job you can’t do.”

“Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

“Process and Procedure are the last hiding place of people without the wit and wisdom to do their job properly.”

“A problem shared is a problem halved, so is your problem really yours or just half of someone else’s?”

“Put the key of despair into the lock of apathy. Turn the knob of mediocrity slowly and open the gates of despondency - welcome to a day in the average office.”

“Quitters never win, winners never quit. But those who never win and never quit are idiots.”

“Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a LOSER!”

“Statistics are like a lamp-post to a drunken man - more for leaning on than illumination.”

“There may be no ‘I’ in team, but there’s a ‘ME’ if you look hard enough.”

“What does a squirrel do in the summer? It buries nuts. Why? Cos then in winter time he’s got something to eat and he won’t die. So, collecting nuts in the summer is worthwhile work. Every task you do at work think, would a squirrel do that? Think squirrels. Think nuts.”

To learn about the character behind the madness, click HERE.

Joi

Think nuts?

Via LifeHack.org, I found this great post over at Slacker Manager. It’s locked and loaded with great advice on how to navigate the mine field known as office politics.

How about some of these bullet points to entice you to click thru :

~ Wear No Mask

~ Be Transparent

~ Flex And Bend

~ Listen To ‘Em

~ Park The Ego

~ Forget The Empire

~ No Gossip

Cruise or click on over to Slacker Manager and tell ‘em Mike sent you… and that he is a Freak… Office Freak, that is ! Maybe they’ll notice and send some of their 4334 RSS readers over here. If they read this post about linking and sharing, I’m sure they will !