#(professional-supervision-conversations. 'is this ethical?' conversations. just so you know)

[psycholojosh]

Road to RPsy: A master's student's guide for Filipino psychology graduates in making a career headway in the Philippines - Part 1

Let's paint this picture for a moment...

You get into your psychology program (or any other program) in a Filipino college or university. You study hard. And then, you achieve your well-deserved bachelor's degree. While you shake hands and celebrate for about a month (just as you should), you sooner realize and ask, "Now what?" Then, you ponder on how to get your career in clinical psychology started. Possibly, you got anxious, confused, or maybe even determined.

If this is (or was) you, don't worry! You're perfectly okay. Trust me, I've been there before... and we shouldn't feel ashamed for this.

Which is why I'd like to take this time to write about my personal and professional experiences as a college graduate of psychology in the Philippines, and how I managed to craft my own headway into getting clinical training and graduate studies for clinical psychology. I sincerely hope that this little article would help a fellow psychology graduate craft their own headway into clinical psychology (or any other field of the sort). I'd also like to share some tips from my past and present mentors, colleagues, coworkers, and professors that I find useful to take note of.

I separated this into a series of articles to keep reading concise and organized. For this part, I start off with discussing...

What psychology careers in the Philippines looks like

How goals can be set in order to get an RPsy; and

Selecting the postgraduate school or program for you

Keep reading to find out more!

Key Points (TL;DR)

There are many myths and misconceptions that narrow one's view about psychology and its careers; but there are actually a lot of opportunities.

Keep yourself open to opportunities, be it for training or career, that will help propel you to snatching an RPsy license.

Clinical experience is key. But, do not discount non-clinical experiences as well.

Practice 'SMART' (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goal setting for your career.

Choosing a school is dependent on your preferred training, scholastic interests, career goals, personal motivations, and (financial) resources.

Before I begin...

I'd like to first disclose what my biases and limits are, and what potentially could be a matter that you, dear reader, should consider before taking any advice from me. So, here's a little bit about myself...

Firstly, I am a young adult and pretty much novice to the field of psychology. I have gone through two years (and counting) of clinical experience as a licensed psychometrician. I do not declare myself an expert yet, nor do I pride myself as the most reliable person in the field of psychology. This article is written purely in my personal perspective and experiences. That said, I will do my best to offer you up-to-date information and objectivity that may support or criticize my views.

Secondly, I come from a very middle-class family. My parents made just about enough for us to pay the bills, to feed, clothe, and shelter us, and to give us a decent education. I firmly think this disclosure is very important since not everyone has the same privileges in terms of education, opportunity, and resources. There are some career decisions that I have made or experienced because I had the capacity to make them so despite certain critical tradeoffs (like, getting less pay). As of writing, I would say that our status is still the same, even if I make my own profit with my college degree. I will do my best to be considerate about the differing backgrounds among people, especially when it comes to privilege offered by social class.

Lastly, I'd like to emphasize that my word is not gospel and should not be taken easily by those who seek importance or utility to what I will share. The tone I will use will be very personal - as this is my personal blog. Plus, I will be largely biased towards clinical psychology, as it is the field I am in. You may find that some pieces of advice will resonate more with you than others. Conversely, you might find that some pieces of advice may be unhelpful for you. Hence, I welcome any criticism to my personal views and open myself to a healthy discussion. (Feel free to reach me through my Ask page here on my blog.) I highly encourage you, dear reader, to look for more opinions from more seasoned professionals in the field.

Now, on to the article...

The current scene of psychology careers in the Philippines

As I was graduating, it was important for me to look for information about careers in psychology in the country. After all, as you will see later, getting an idea of psychology's zeitgiest (a term used by historians to refer to the salient "mood" or "spirit" of ideas or beliefs of, say, an academic field) this country will inform you in your career goal setting and considering options that will lead you to where you want to be.

Psychology in the Philippines has a lot of stereotypes, myths, and misconceptions brought about by pop psychology spread across the masses. Here are some of the popular ones (and my personal favorites) which you may have already heard from people around you:

"Sa HR mapupunta ang isang Psych grad." ("Psych grads end up in HR [work].")

"Psych ka? Magme-med/Maglo-law ka ba?" ("You study Psych? Are you pursuing med/law?")

"Wala naman masyadong pera/future sa Psych." ("There's no money/future in Psych.")

"Psych? So yung mga baliw yung trabaho mo?" ("Psych? So you work on crazy people?")

And there's plenty more where that came from. Funnily enough, my college friends and I used to do a game where we take a shot of liquor for each myth said to us. (Drink responsibly, kids!) But, as psychology graduates, we know that these aren't completely true.

Now, let's take a look at how we can argue in psychology's defense and dignity and accept what the common person has gotten correctly.

Psychology practice in the Philippines

It's important to note that the term 'psychologist' or 'psychology practitioner' has different meanings in various contexts. Often, we think about psychologists as those who does therapy and plays around with psychological instruments. While this is somewhat true, a more academic language would refer to a 'psychologist' or 'practitioner' as someone who earned their degree in psychology - regardless of specialty - and has built their career in praxis of psychology. As I go along in this section, I'll refer to the 'psychologist' as the latter definition.

Clinical and counselling. In a 2004 article by Cristina Montiel and Lota Teh published in the International Handbook of Psychology, the authors enumerated on and expounded the most popular fields and specializations that psychology practitioners work in. Clinical or counselling practitioners lead in this list, often delving into psychotherapy, interventions, and assessment in various settings -- of which I have had experience on. I think this appears to be only partially true today, which I'll explain in a bit. You would find most practitioners doing their clinical practice in private clinics, hospitals, and schools. It's important to note, however, that most practitioners of this subfield have postgraduate degrees, and - since the year 2014, when Republic Act No. 10029 was enacted - a board license from Philippine Professional Regulation Commission (PRC). These licensed professionals have the names: 'RPsy' for psychologists.

However, bachelor's degree holders were also permitted to practice with their own little license: an 'RPm' or 'registered psychometrician' - which I have. These licensed professionals, get to practice assessment and several other supportive clinical functions - but not psychotherapy. The catch? You legally and ethically need to be supervised by a licensed psychologist. I'd like to get into the nitty-gritty differences and nuances of these two licenses, but I'll save that for another article. In the meantime, you must understand that these two have disparities in terms of their education attainment, clinical skills, and professional autonomy.

During my oath-taking ceremony as a psychometrician in 2018, Dr. Regina Hechanova-Alampay, a known Filipina in the fields of industrial-organizational and community psychology (and the mom of one of my dear friends), stated in her keynote address that the approximate ratio of each RPsy to each Filipino citizen is 1 to 100,000. A 2018 study has pointed this approximation to be accurate. Similarly, my former clinical supervisor approximated that the ratio of RPsy supervisors to RPm supervisees is 1 to 2,000. These numbers are quite a lot! Needless to say, there is a shortage of supply of clinical practitioners for the demand and a large influx of RPm's that have less clinical autonomy. And with an ever-growing relevance and awareness to the field of mental health in the country, these numbers are concerning. But -- hold on. If there are a lot of RPm's being produced yearly, where do they go?

Industrial-organizational and human resources. Montiel and Teh accounted that the second most abundant field in the country is in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology or human resources (HR). This is where I think most psychology graduates usually end up in after college these days. Daresay, this is the fastest way to earn money as a fresh college graduate. But does that mean that the stereotype is necessarily true? It really depends on the way an employer values the employee and how much one is capable of doing a job. Sometimes, you get paid more, just right, or less.

I/O psychologists or HR practitioners often deal in corporate or organizational settings, often concerned with their person-related matters. They have skills like recruiting talent or labor, assessing worker needs, evaluating individual performances, or developing workers of a company - just to name a few. Do they need a license like an RPsy or RPm? Not necessarily.

You would often find job postings for HR positions that would often "prefer" a psychology graduate with a license, but sometimes "require" it. Therein lies some grey areas about how the professional licenses' stipulations are interpreted. But, let's not get into that just yet. But in my opinion, if people saw the utility of getting a license (which has its own financial costs of acquiring) as a way to improve compensation or marketability in the workforce, then they should get it.

Not all industrial-organizational psychologists, however, delve into the office hours and paper works. Some others go into research - particularly on topics like employee behaviors, group dynamics, and so on. It's important to think that these types of practitioners are just as versatile as other subfields in psychology.

Academia and other niches of psychology. As per Montiel and Teh, another large chunk of practitioners often end up in the academe. They become educators in various levels, researchers, or expert consultants depending on their interest, skill, and reputation. For example, developmental psychologists (or those who specialize in child psychology) get hired in preschools or alternative modes of learning. It was also mentioned briefly that social psychologists often find themselves in the social development sector, like the National Economic Development Agency (NEDA) or the Department for Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). Other common settings for psychology graduates to work in includes government facilities and the military, where their knowledge about human behavior are often found useful.

Research skills are also found useful in areas like market research and analytics. Because psychology graduates have knowledge about fundamentals of statistics and psychological measurement, a lot of these businesses employ their help in order to understand their target market's consumer behaviors and make informed decisions to increase profit. Other information about making a career in business can come be read in a lot of psychoeducational websites, like in Verywell Mind.

Overall, there is a plethora of careers a psychology graduate can delve into, especially for a fresh graduate like yourself. Over time, you would find that certain subfields would resonate more with you than others. You may often wonder which one - or a combination of more - would lead you to your career or personal ambitions. Now that you know how vast a career in psychology can be, it's a matter of choice and planning ahead, which leads me to the next section.

Goal-setting: Which road to take and what to expect

Eyeing the precious RPsy license won't be an easy task. Then again, would the hardships matter if it's worth it anyway? It's important for you, dear reader, to think about how you want to get to that goal.

Should one want to take a straightforward path, she or he would have taken their master's or doctorate studies in clinical or counselling psychology for the following three to five years (with coursework, practicum, and perhaps thesis or dissertation), then take the board exam from the PRC. I have a couple of friends who have done so, and it works for them.

However, for the likes of many of us - myself included - we may not have the same luxury of time or resources to afford us this direct route. Because of many personal needs (ahem-- financial), we may need to find a way to secure these as we go along our road to the RPsy. And how could I forget the costs of postgraduate studies alone? Which is why we'll need to earn or find income.

The best job or experience that can afford you a good head start in clinical psychology is the one closest to it. As my former supervisor, Paula, once said, "Clinical experience is key." For example, you can find psychometricians assisting with psychological assessments in various settings. Others delved into social or community work -- sometimes as a volunteer. The likelihood for one to get accepted in clinical or counselling training programs, like a postgraduate degree or certification training, is increased when one has had a hand on a similar line of work. But this is not to say that any other job is unimportant -- no. There's growing research on the various applications of mental health practice on non-clinical settings, like schools, offices, and even micro-communities. The possibilities are actually numerous. That said, I cannot guarantee how abundant these opportunities are.

There are a few things to consider when looking for a job or a source of income:

In terms of career, what are your yes's, maybe's, and no's? Make individual lists of the occupations you can say these three answers to.

How soon are you planning to achieve an RPsy license? As soon as the next four years? Or, maybe you want to take it slow and say ten?

What job and/or study opportunities are available to you at the moment? How comfortable will the setup be for you?

How much resources and time are available to you for work, study, and personal matters? Which of these do you prioritize more?

How much are you willing or do you need to be compensated to afford such a lifestyle?

As you formulate answers to these questions (especially, the last two), keep in mind that a more effective goal setting follows a 'SMART' process. That is: it is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. (More info about this process right here.) Patterning our goals to these dimensions helps us look at ourselves objectively and find an integrated way to live our lives productively.

In my personal experience, after graduating college, I took a two month break to enjoy the fruits of my hard-earned college degree with a "vacation" (which mostly staying home, if I'm being honest). In my mind, I knew that getting a master's degree is a must for me; a ladderized doctorate program was also amenable but I wanted to get that training abroad. But, I wanted to make myself more immersed in the field before I can enter a graduate program. I applied to different jobs - a psychological services consultant (which I primarily wanted), a personal development teacher in senior high, and a research analyst. Luckily, I got the job that I wanted and reaped clinical experience. (I'll write more about my first experiences in the clinic in another post.) A year later, I applied and got into the clinical program of the University of the Philippines. And now, I've been taking coursework on clinical psychology while working as a research associate of a particular office in the same university.

I understand, however, that not everybody could find the "perfect" balance or ideal solution to all of these concerns. In fact, I don't think anyone can -- unless you were blessed with such a life. Why? This is where I reflectively talk about my privilege (as I did at the beginning). Awareness of your own opportunities makes us think fully or subconsciously about our own status in the social system. Whether we like it or not, it affects many of the career - and more broadly, life - decisions depending on where we stand in our lives. Which is why I advocate for practicality. We may not always select the ideal -- but the principle of survival is important, especially in an underdeveloped country like the Philippines. As Montiel and Teh pointed out, poverty and economics have affected psychology practice and it opportunities in the country.

Can goals or plans change? Short answer is 'yes'. There are many reasons why our plans change. It may be because we find ourselves being presented by new or better opportunities. Or perhaps, we discover more personal insights and realizations about the career we want and how to get it. Life can be complex to influence our decisions within or without our control. Whatever the reason is, it is important for one to be able to evaluate one's strengths and weaknesses, limits and boundaries, and our emotions and motivation to keep us going.

Choosing your school: Which one should I go to?

It's very common for a psychology graduate to ask: Where should I get my clinical training? Again, this is dependent on your resources, time, and preferences. Coupled with these is the opportunities (or as Bandura would put it - chance encounters and fortuitous events).

Locally, there are about 60% of schools that offer master's degrees in clinical or counselling psychology as per Commission of Higher Education (CHED). A fewer percentage offers Ph.D. or doctorate equivalent degrees in clinical or counselling psychology, the three most famous being (as per Montiel and Teh): the Ateneo de Manila University, the University of the Philippines, and University of Santo Tomas. However, there is a growing number of urban and rural schools that offer postgraduate studies and attract local aspirants to enroll in their programs. At the top of my mind, St. Louis' University in Baguio City has been regarded as one of the best in developmental psychology (currently considered as a viable alternative to clinical psychology). Likewise, the De La Salle University in Manila, a member of the colloquially regarded "Big Four Universities," is gaining traction for their clinical program very recently.

Focusing on a school's reputation is not enough, however. What, us, clinical psychology hopefuls often look over is the training itself. Circling back to my guide questions on goal setting, preferences often come into play when deciding your training. For most, who prefer a general track in clinical psychology, many schools offer a flexible education to ensure you get the wide knowledge of the field, without undermining the core or essentials. Others may teach clinical psychology in a more specific way, favoring practical experiences like internships over theorizing in the classroom. Factors like faculty composition and expertise, paradigm, and school culture often influence how these training programs are developed. What I find helpful to attain this information is to ask these departments and institutions directly. Another approach is asking a friend taking up a program in that school. No harm in inquiry! Ask away.

Of course, like what I have also emphasized in this article, is the sensitive yet important issue of money. To be specific, your tuition. Clinical training in the Philippines ranges from ₱10,000 to ₱50,000.00 a year. The trend (as I've observed from applying in different schools) is that the more privatized and more "complex" the education, the higher the cost. Public schools often come cheaper than private schools. Consider your capacities for funding your education (including where it comes from) and weigh it with your preferences to make an optimal choice of school or program.

A popular notion among graduate students, or those heading into graduate school, is that public schools, like where I study, often take longer to finish a master's degree than others. Well, there are many factors to this. One is faculty size, for example. How many qualified teachers does the school have that supplies a smooth progression for a graduate student to complete their degrees? Another factor - which many often forget to attribute as well - is the student's motivation. It is not uncommon for a graduate student to fluctuate in wanting to accomplish their degrees. It really depends on how determined one is to see things through (which takes a lot of doing, if I do say so myself).

Overall, choosing a school is much less of an issue when it comes to time, but more so when it comes to practicality. In my opinion, any school that gives you basic competencies, regardless of reputation, is enough. In fact, most of my supervisors did not even settle for their graduate training alone. The field of clinical psychology (much like the other fields) is ever changing and adapting to the times. You often find a lot of trainings, seminars, and specialization programs that practitioners study or enroll in order to keep their practice up to date and ethical. Learning and personal growth, especially as clinicians, should not stop after we receive our degrees and licenses. Again, this calls back to the point of keeping an open eye and open mind on the opportunities that come our way.

--

Now that we discussed the first three tips, I plan to take a break here and let you, dear reader, reflect on things that will help you make your headway to that RPsy license. Do more reading. Ask questions. Seek answers. And explore yourself and the world to get a better sense of the pathway ahead.

I do hope that this discussion helps! See you on the next one.

[prozach27]

So the director of my program does my weekly supervisions right now where I talk about job issues or ask for advice, etc, and while idk how I feel about my director, she definitely like ... is very observant? And very smart. And today we were having a chill conversation about my work over coffee and she was just like, “you immediately and without question always humble or efface yourself to the people around you when you take up space, but it wrecks you if they actually believe your words.” And she just like. Casually and calmly over coffee read for me like ten minutes. Full stop. She went over how accomplished and talented I am, my work ethic, etc., but how I have this habit of making myself smaller when I interact with other people, and when people begin to BELIEVE I’m smaller than I am because I always do that, I’m outraged by the disrespect of it all. And she gave, like, very specific examples from the workplace where I speak and try not to sound cocky, but it instead comes off as “ditzy new guy doesn’t know what he’s doing” because I’m playing off being young and new too much, and she can tell because my work is already great in a lot of ways. And like, damn. I feel like I need to just process that for a while.

Like she’s 100% completely right. I agree. I get really self conscious about showboating in a lot of ways, especially publicly, because even when I just talk about what I’m doing some people get irritated or offended because I’m “showing off” when I really just mean it as like “hey this is my life right now how are you.” And esp with my family I had to learn to make myself smaller because I’ve lived with 3 people with unchecked personality disorders and alcoholism, so if you’re not minimizing your presence, you’re confirming you’re a target.

But like??? I’m a professional now. I’ve worked my butt off, I live in my own place, I’ve accomplished a LOT by age 25, and I actually know a helluva lot about the workplace. Stop prefacing a question by like “sorry I should know this” or “I know I don’t get all of this work, but...” like nah, enough. Show up each day and own it. Embrace confidence. Be assertive. Take up space and refuse to apologize for doing so. Like, I feel as though this is the lesson I’ve needed for a really long time now, and it was always on the tip of my tongue, but no one ever called it out. It’s gonna be a rough transition, but it’s worth investing the time and energy in fixing this behavior cause at my core I’m a confident, 10/10 ass bitch and I deserve to own that energy again. It’s happening

[neuro-psych-faq]

Should Psychiatrists Disclose Their own Mental Illness?

Cancer was once considered a shameful disease—for example, back in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, one would never put ‘cancer' in an obituary as a cause of death because it was perceived as an illness a person brought upon him or herself as a result of weak moral fiber. 

Today, this is no longer the case. Look at how far we've come with cancer—for example, in the case of breast cancer, many women have told their stories, and everyone has joined in the fight against this disease. 

But by contrast, we are not anywhere near there with mental health, although there is more openness and more revelation than there once was.

It is not uncommon for people who work in mental health to also have prejudice. This prejudice "may come from the notion of 'us' vs 'them.' We are the healthy ones, the healers, while they are the patients who are ill and need to be healed. And if you are ill, you are not one of 'us,' you are one of 'them,' and not fit to be a practicing psychologist or psychiatrist."

In experience, there has been obviously a middle ground between saying that anyone can practice medicine, psychiatry, or psychology no matter what their mental state or, on the other hand, saying that you are automatically unfit to be a medical or mental health professional if you have a psychiatric disorder.

Licensure Concerns

Many physicians with mental health problems, including psychiatrists, do not self-disclose because they are afraid of being sanctioned by licensing bodies. A study of 2106 female physicians found that only 6% with formal diagnosis or treatment of mental illness had disclosed their condition to their state. Another study of 5829 physicians found that nearly 40% reported that they would be reluctant to seek formal medical care for treatment of a mental health condition because of concerns about repercussions to their medical licensure. However, these questions may be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The concerns of physicians reluctant to disclose are unfortunately well-founded. Steven Miles, MD, an internist, described his own 3-year battle with state licensing officials seeking his private psychiatric records after he self-disclosed a diagnosis of bipolar disorder on a routine relicensing questionnaire, despite no evidence of impairment or interruption in executing his clinical duties. The experience inspired him to coauthor a consensus statement on discrimination in medical boards against physicians with mental health disorders.

The American Medical Association's House of Delegates unanimously approved a Section Council on Psychiatry Resolution, requesting that medical licensing boards refrain from asking questions about a history of mental illness—largely because these questions may deter medical students and trainees from seeking mental health treatment.

Psychiatrist Kernan Manion, MD, a psychiatrist who lost his license under similar circumstances, founded an organization, the Center for Physician Rights, spurred by his own experience to "pursue necessary changes in the administrative legal arena to ensure fairness, prevent abuse of power and, where indicated, promote ethical and compassionate treatment." The organization offers peer support and other resources for physicians facing these and other issues with their state medical boards.

Disruption of Therapeutic Boundaries?

One reason many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals do not disclose their mental illness is out of concern that this type of self-disclosure is inappropriate and impedes the therapeutic process.

In the past, it would be thought that it would be countertherapeutic for the psychiatrist to disclose anything about him- or herself, much less a mental illness. However, we are in a different era of an array of therapies, and I think it is an open question as to how much a therapist should disclose.

The question, people suggest, is whether the disclosure will help or interfere with ongoing treatment. On the one hand, it may be inappropriate to disclose mental illness because it may place the client in a role of wanting to offer support to the therapist or speculate about the therapist's personal life or illness. On the other hand, thoughtful and timely disclosures might let the patient know he or she is not alone, mental illness is not infrequent, and even therapists can struggle with their own mental illness. It also directly models that mental illness should not be shrouded in silence and stigma.

John Draper, PhD, executive director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Executive Vice President of National Networks for Vibrant Emotional Health, told Psychiatry Advisor that the network of national and local crisis hotlines associated with Vibrant originally had a rule prohibiting hotline counselors from self-disclosure.

However, an evaluation of telephone conversations revealed high levels of self-disclosure on the part of these crisis workers, “which was effective in building understanding and rapport, and deterring callers from suicidal activity," he recounted.

The Lifeline's Standards, Training, and Practices Committee therefore revisited the issue of self-disclosure and arrived at 3 parameters.

“The first parameter is that the purpose [of self-disclosure] must be to help the caller feel understood and to build rapport. The second is to foster a spirit of collaboration, so that there is no ‘us' vs ‘them' but a ‘we' who are facing a common problem,” Dr Draper said.

The third parameter is that self-disclosure must “always focus on the needs of the patient or client, and be in the service of the caller rather than the counselor.”

Dr Hinshaw emphasized that the timing and context of self-disclosure are "critical" and advised therapists to "use a lot of self-scrutiny and bring up the issue in supervision" before making the decision.

A Human Face

The best way to reduce stigma is putting a human face on mental illness, not just showing that it is a biochemical disorder. When clinicians come forward with their stories, it goes a long way toward helping people chip away at the stigma.

[projectcubicle1]

Construction Skills You Need to Get a Construction Job

Construction Skills You Need to Get a Construction Job

If you’ve got the necessary expertise, then you might find yourself able to contribute to a construction site. And you will able to be paid handsomely for it. But your construction skills at your trade isn’t the only thing that’ll stand you in good stead. You’ll also need to work on a whole range of soft contruction skills to get the best from life onsite. Let’s run through a few of them to find construction jobs. Self-Management When you’re working onsite, you’ll often have to manage your own workload without supervision. This means that you’ll need to be self-motivated enough to manage your own tasks and get on with them. Problem Solving Life doesn’t always go according to plan – especially when you’re working on buildings. You might find that the wall you’re working on isn’t quite true, or that you can’t quite locate an underground pipe. Being able to work around these obstacles is critical to thriving in this kind of working environment. Teamwork Working as part of a team means being able to delegate, and have tasks delegated to you, and to have productive conversations. This is where social skills can be vitally important. Being able to socialise might also make your working life more enjoyable, as well as more productive.

Physical Strength and Endurance Your physical fitness will play a role in how you cope with the site. You might find yourself carrying heavy loads, or lifting objects overhead. If you’re physically fit, you’ll be able to do this without suffering later in life. Focusing / Concentration Your ability to focus and concentrate will determine how productive you can be over long stretches, and how likely you are to suffer injuries. Tools can be dangerous so it's essential to get brands like Dewalt angle grinders with safety features to prevent mishandling – so keep your wits about you! Dexterity and Hand-Eye Coordination General hand-eye coordination will allow you to wield your tools more precisely. You can protect your dexterity by keeping your fingers warm and protected – especially during bouts of cold weather. Naturally, you’ll also want to protect your body against hazards like vibrating tools – especially if you want to keep working late into life, and enjoy a happy and healthy retirement.

Memory Being able to remember where you’ve put things, and where the next job is, and what you need to do next, can make the difference between appearing professional and appearing sloppy. In most cases, getting this right is a question of developing a routine. You don’t need to remember things that you’re doing out of habit.

How to find construction jobs?

  1. Create a resume Make sure that your resume not only fits the requirements of the job you're interested in, but that it also showcases your individual capabilities and talents. Focus instead on any abilities that may be of use to the employer and the project, given that you do not have any formal experience working in the construction industry. For instance, you may emphasize your ability to pay close attention to detail, communicate effectively, or effectively manage your time. You might also highlight the fact that you are not just a quick learner but also someone who is willing to learn new things. In addition, you may discuss your work ethic as well as your general dependability, both of which are quite beneficial in the construction industry. 2. Inquire within your network Make some calls and ask around to see if anybody you know can point you in the right direction to get started in the construction industry. If you are honest about what you want to accomplish in your professional life, you may make better use of your time and increase the likelihood of landing the position you want. If you're fortunate, a connection you already have in your network will put you in touch with a person who needs assistance with carpentry, sheet metal work, or building and construction inspection. 3. Look for temporary job You may want to look into joining up with a temp agency for a job that is just temporary. Temporary employment agency provide to facilitate connections between businesses and individuals who are searching for work on a temporary basis. Finding a temp job gives you the opportunity to get useful and diversified experience in the construction industry thanks to the large range of occupations that are accessible with temp employment. In addition to this, you will have the opportunity to work closely with an industry veteran who is a seasoned professional. Having this kind of experience as well as supervision may be of tremendous use to you in terms of advancing your construction skills. And it can even pave the way for an apprenticeship or a job opportunity in the near future. 4. Select a certain domain After you have obtained some experience in the construction sector, you should decide which facet of the business you would want to concentrate on. As you gain experience in the industry, you should tailor your job search to the particular aspects of the construction industry that most interest you. By doing this, you will be able to get the experience that is most applicable to the professions that you desire in the future. Conclusion Getting hired  sometimes quite straightforward. But to get a second interview for more work will mean demonstrating that you’re better than the competition. And that means applying all of the construction skills we’ve mentioned consistently. Read the full article

[jerseydeanne]

Roseberrycupcakes, Forbidden Fruit

I originally wanted to keep this story to myself, as I would be opening myself up for accusations of hypocrisy and whatnot; but in short, I wanted to illustrate some several key points:

1. You can’t choose your feelings, but you can choose to act on them.

2. Everyone chooses to act on either one of the following fears: the fear of never meeting your soulmate or the fear of losing your soulmate by settling.

3. If your “best” option may not be God’s best, your “good enough” option is NEVER going to be God’s best.

4. Someone who genuinely respects you won’t compromise you–your reputation, your emotions, or your conscience. You can’t like someone without respecting them. You can’t love someone without liking them. You can’t marry someone without loving them.

Some time ago, I was dispatched as a temporary substitute for my colleague. As different hospitals use different systems–from cabinet organizations to medical records system–I greatly disliked the idea of working at another hospital; but I wasn’t in any position to argue. Despite my negative first impression of the very short-staffed outpost ER, my interaction with my supervising physician–I’ll call him Dr. F for the sake of conversation–made this experience the one I will never forget.

I found Dr. F to be very attractive the moment I laid my eyes on him. I waived off a pang of disappointment I felt when I learned that he was married, and I was able to keep things absolutely professional during my entire stay. It was only on the last day of my job that I realized that the attraction has been mutual all along; both of us just chose not to act on it.

As he’s walked in my footsteps years before, I knew he knew how exhausting I must get; but unlike my previous supervisors, he never once commented on it; he just chose to show his empathy through his actions. For instance, Dr. F always sent me out for a dinner break–something he wasn’t obligated to do. I appreciated the gesture, but didn’t think much of it until I skipped dinner one day after snacking with the nurses earlier: it turns out the dinner break he always gave me coincided with the rush hour. Because we were the only ER doctors (only two doctors at any given shift) and he gave ME a break, he was skipping dinner whenever he worked with me. I’ve just been assuming that he grabbed something before I came back and was having a midnight snack everyday; I didn’t realize that the microwaved dinner every shift at 10 PM was his dinner.

Just because he was mindful of what I was going through didn’t mean he was treating me any less than a fellow physician, either; he trusted my abilities and always treated me with respect despite having more clinical experience. He never once stopped addressing me by my title when he could have used my first name like many other attendings often do. He never belittled me in front of patients when I was learning new techniques; he would just quietly pull me aside; or he would patiently show it to me again. Such gentleness didn’t mean he wasn’t critical; indeed, he never mollycoddled me with empty compliments or tried to soften the blow; he just made sure his critiques were delivered in such a way that was constructive and displayed confidence in me. In short, we had a smooth professional dynamic; and in an environment where we wear hygiene masks for protection against infections, we were soon able to read each other’s mind with just a glance.

Because he earned my trust on a professional level, I trusted his advice on some difficult situations I’ve been facing. I’ve never told anyone–not JD, not my friends, not even my family–of what I’ve been facing on a personal level from work: since med school, I’ve received some very uncomfortable date requests from higher-ups, colleagues, patients, and patients’ family/friends. I knew the kind of responses I would get if I told any of them: my family would try to find source of blame in me, my friends wouldn’t take it too seriously, and JD and I always had more important matters to discuss; I simply couldn’t tell anyone.

But when a former patient kept trying to contact me during a shared shift, Dr. F noticed it right away and cut straight through the nonsense. I knew then that I can finally talk about what’s been going on. He understood how frustrating it is when patients and/or family/friends contact or visit under the guise of “medical reasons” only for the conversation to turn to private topics; I can always talk of “ethics” and “rules,” but it will only get so far. He gave me some sound advice on the matter; and I followed it.

Then I was able to tell him what I’ve been facing from the superiors: calling me in the middle of the night several nights to tell me to come to their office because they have something to give me (I don’t know what that “something” is, and I don’t want to know), baking cakes (yes…cakes) for me (I politely turned it down), speaking ill of his subordinate (who happens to be my superior) when the rumor spread that he asked me out (he did ask me out but I turned him down), taking me out for dinner dates under the guise of “mentoring” (I can only make excuses some of the time), etc. I’m not even going to touch on the comments like “I don’t know why someone who looks like you ever bothered to become a doctor” (what does looks have to do with anything), “I’ve done enough plastic surgeries to tell, but I’ve never seen a natural beauty like you. You’re going to have beautiful children with those genes.” (I’m natural, but not a beauty. Ask Dee. And MY genes are not the only thing that matters), “I’ve been looking for a woman who will be beautiful even when she’s old, and from studying bone structures, I know you’re the one” (yes, this one was definitely crazy. No wonder he’s been single for years despite being a bilingual dermatologist), etc.

When I first told Dr. F of these incidents and more, I was scared he might laugh at me, not believe me, or call me names. Instead, he believed it all. He didn’t try to force me to report them; he knew that I can’t report it all without compromising my career, coming across as a delusional who thinks highly of herself, and/or jeopardizing the career of those “honorable” men (some of whom are married). He just shook his head and scoffed at those ridiculous comments; he heard me out and that’s all I needed.

On my last shift, Dr. F and I had a discussion about non-medical/hospital matters for the first time. Despite our similarities in multiple fronts, our differences couldn’t have been more apparent than when it came to love. When he asked me, I told him that I believed in soulmates. I told him that I believe that you should marry that one person you KNOW you would choose no matter when, no matter where, no matter how you meet them. Dr. F laughed at my naive attitude and dared me to cherish it as long as I could.

Then, he told me that he used to have such sentiments too. He remembered walking down the street one day and realizing the frustration at the fact that his soulmate can be anywhere. He figured if he dated 1000 women before settling down, he must come across his soulmate. So he dated dozens and dozens of them (I’m not surprised), but after a while, he realized that all of them were the same. As long as they meet the “basic” requirements, there wasn’t much difference between them. He understood there HAS to be love, but there wasn’t going to be a person who’s “perfect” for him. So instead of waiting for his “ideal” soulmate, he married his “second best” option.

When I raised my eyebrows at his choice of words, he said I needed to understand that there IS such a thing as “good enough.” He said, “It doesn’t matter if there is a person who fits 100% of your needs. If he’s in Germany and you’re in South Korea, how are you two EVER going to meet? Haven’t you realized that proximity is the most determining factor in relationships? You’re going to have to learn to compromise on your ideals or you won’t find anyone who can satisfy you.”

I was tempted to fire back that there was no such thing as “good enough” in romance, but what was the point of raising a doubt in a married man’s heart? I really wanted to ask him if he wasn’t scared of meeting his true soulmate after he got married, but I didn’t need to. As if reading my mind, he said, “It doesn’t matter if you meet your ‘the one’ after marrying your 'good enough’ option. Society and laws prohibit you from acting on your emotions.” I stopped myself from pointing out the stupidity of his last statement. It shouldn’t be the “society and laws” that stop you from cheating on your spouse. It should be LOVE. I’m not going to disclose the rest of our conversation, but at the end of it, we both knew what we were trying to tell each other.

I didn’t fully understand the meaning behind the Dr. F’s actions at the time; there were many incidents I didn’t disclose on here that I took for granted; and I’ve only begun to appreciate his wisdom. He never once overstepped boundaries; not to me, not to his wife, not to himself. He never risked my reputation nor his. He never compromised my emotions or made empty remarks that he could have used to bind me. We never once held a private conversation in an enclosed space. (We had unspoken agreement to choose painstakingly bothersome ways to avoid being in the room alone.) We never even talked on the phone with each other–we would go through a nurse. Our first and last physical contact was a 30-second-long handshake on my last day. So both of us could turn our backs and walk away guilt-free.

Regardless of Dr. F’s sentiments toward me, I knew I wasn’t his soulmate. Or more precisely, he’s not mine. While I can fully relate to the fear of never meeting my soulmate, the possibility of losing my soulmate because I acted on that fear is far more terrifying to me. And if I’m the sort of person who’s willing to wait for God’s best, I know that my soulmate is someone who will honor God the same way; as much as I respect and liked Dr. F, I knew God wouldn’t have assigned a married man as a soulmate. Also, I was never going to get involved with anyone who was going to think I was the “second best” or a “good enough” option. I firmly believe that I deserve to be recognized as the best option for my soulmate.

Nevertheless, I learned great deal about love from Dr. F. His actions toward me was nothing short of respect. If someone who never dated me was so respectful, I know what I should expect from my soulmate now. I also learned that there are people out there who will put aside their own desires to protect the subject of their admiration; declarations of passion and empty promises are not markers of true affection; and silent actions speak just as loudly as words.

After writing so many posts on religion, I was very scared to send in this submission. The idea of admitting that a married man could have so easily seduced me terrified me. I was scared some may call me a hypocrite or worse; after all, I used to look down on women who stole another woman’s man from her; but to be honest, the only reason Dr. F and I kept ourselves out of emotional and physical affair was by making conscious decisions on both ends. We were both mature enough to understand the situation at hand without discussing it overtly, and we never crossed that line.

So when I see people criticizing Harry for getting involved with Ms. Markle when she was in a relationship with another man, I get a bit uncomfortable. While I agree that his behavior was wrong, I know better than to criticize solely him for this behavior. After all, had Dr. F made advances like Ms. Markle made to Harry, I doubt I would have had the powers to resist him. In this regards, both Ms. Markle and Dr. F had choices in their respective relationships. Ms. Markle chose to cross that line; Dr. F chose not to. Ms. Markle disrespected her partner; Dr. F chose not to. Ms. Markle turned herself into a cheater; Dr. F chose not to. Ms. Markle turned Harry into “the other guy”; Dr. F chose not to turn me into “the other woman.” From these choices alone, I think Dr. F respected me far more than Ms. Markle respected/respects Harry; it’s not that I somehow “deserved” such respect; it’s that Harry’s not getting what he deserves. We all deserve to be respected–and you don’t have to settle on that. Xoxo, Roseberry (RCC)

Thank you so much, I loved this story, Adam and Eve, you both chose to honor God and came away wiser for it. By the way, you are very beautiful.  XOX💖💖

[bluewatsons]

Lisa Gabbert, Suffering in Medical Contexts: Laughter, Humor, and the Medical Carnivalesque, 133 J Am Folklore 3 (2020)

This article argues that a primary context for medical humor is a culture of suffering that permeates the medical profession and suggests that this laughter–suffering connection is part of a broader phenomenon called the medical carnivalesque that is found in medical culture.

A man takes his sick mother to the Emergency Room. After waiting around for hours and hours in a state of fretfulness and without knowing what’s going on, the doctor finally comes out and asks, “Well, do you want the good news first, or the bad news?” Grimly, the man replies, “The bad news.”

“Well,” says the doctor, “The bad news is that your mother has had a terrible stroke. It’s completely incapacitated her. She’s basically a vegetable. She’ll never be able to feed herself, walk, or talk again.”

“Oh my God,” says the man, “that’s terrible.”

“Yes, but unfortunately, there’s more,” says the doctor. “In addition, to being unable to feed herself, or walk, or talk, she can’t wash or take care of her other bodily needs. You will need to do all of these things for her, day and night, and she won’t even know it’s you.”

“Oh my God,” says the man, “that’s terrible.”

“Yes,” says the doctor, “You’ll be responsible for her every need. The worse news is you’ll end up completely physically and emotionally exhausted because you won’t be eating or sleeping yourself; you’ll also probably end up bankrupt because of the financial burden. In fact, because of the stress, you’ll probably die before she does.”

“Oh my God,” says the man. “What’s the good news?”

“HA! Just kidding—she’s dead.”

I FIRST HEARD THIS JOKE, WHICH HERE I HAVE RECONSTRUCTED from memory, from medical students at Indiana University around the year 2000. My spouse was in medical school at the time, and to be frank, I was somewhat horrified when I first heard it because it seemed so offensive. I don’t think my initial reaction was unusual: physicians tend to find this joke funny, but when I tell it to non-medical people, I am usually met by shocked silence followed by uncomfortable laughter. People then often switch to another topic of conversation.

I have thought a lot about this joke—and medical humor more broadly—since then, and now, 2 decades later, I have finally come to more fully understand what it is about. I initially considered this joke an extreme example of gallows humor, a term sometimes used to characterize the dark or “sick” comic bent for which physicians are well-known (Watson 2011). “Gallows humor,” a recent term that dates only to 1901 in English according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is the last word of a man on the gallows, and it is characterized as dark and bitter or grim.1

For many years, I also considered it to be an example of a traditional, folkloristic inclination to pair humor and death in absurd situations (Gabbert and Salud 2009). As Peter Narváez’ volume Of Corpse aptly illustrates, the pairing of humor, play, joking behavior, and laughter with contexts of death is well-established in a variety of cultures and situations (2003a; see also Miller 2012; Blank 2013). Physicians routinely deal with the specter of death in their training and work, and this explanation seemed logical.

More recently, however, I have concluded that the best way to appreciate this joke in particular, and medical humor more broadly, is to situate it within a larger framework of suffering and laughter. This framework is based on the proposition that suffering is an integral part of medical practice and a feature that permeates the profession. My research suggests first that physicians and other caregivers suffer because of their work and that suffering is an intersubjectively constituted work-related experience. I further argue that suffering permeates medical practice and that it is a cultural, not merely clinical, dimension of medical practice. Finally, I suggest that this culture of suffering is a primary context for medical humor and the medical carnivalesque. As I illustrate below, doctors use humor as an occupational strategy to temporarily reassign the dominant meanings, values, and beliefs normally given to pain, illness, and death, thus shifting the actual experience of work-related suffering by changing its meaning.

That laughter exists in medical contexts is not a new insight. Doctoring is a profession that is stereotyped as having an appreciation for the comic, and the practice of medicine time and again has proved useful fodder for comedy. The House of God by Samuel Shem, for example, is a famous satire about the training and inculcation of medical doctors in an elite East Coast hospital, which was censored by some medical schools when it was published in 1978. It exists alongside a plethora of television comedies such as the classic series M*A*S*H, films, websites, blogs, YouTube channels, and actual joking behavior in clinical settings, most famously by the physician-turned-clown Patch Adams. Folklorist Dr. Sabina Magliocco once told me that she had a pretty good joking relationship with her doctor, but at one point, when she was particularly witty, she was told, “You know, you can’t be funnier than your doctor.”2

Scholars from the disciplines of folklore, sociology, medical anthropology, and literature, as well as from the medical profession itself, have attended to the existence of medical humor and the clinical vernacular. As noted above, medical humor is considered to be a kind of gallows or “sick” humor, and the most common conclusions are that humor in medicine functions as a way to relieve stress, as a defense mechanism, and/or as a way to create solidarity among medical professionals (Coombs et al. 1993; Parsons et al. 2001; Gordon 1983). Others have suggested that it resists the instrumentality of biomedicine (Burson-Tolpin 1989, 1990), or that it arises around patients that confound categories (George and Dundes 1978; Becker 1993; Winick 2004). Many discussions of humor in the medical field take a pragmatic approach, focusing on whether such humor is ethical (McCrary and Christensen 1993; Watson 2011; Donnelly 1986), whether it creates a negative atmosphere or adversely affects training (Wear et al. 2009), whether the risks of humor outweigh the benefits (Berger, Coulehan, and Belling 2004), or whether humor is useful in some way (McCreaddie and Wiggins 2008; Penson et al. 2005; Sobel 2006).

My own contribution to this body of research has been, with co-author and physician Dr. Anton Salud, to coin the term “medical carnivalesque” to describe the inversions, absurdities, and stark, sometimes quite shocking themes and taboos that give medical humor its dark or sick qualities (Gabbert and Salud 2009). Drawing on Bakhtin’s work on medieval Carnival and his notion of carnivalesque laughter ([1968] 1984), we suggest that the medical carnivalesque is found in large, modern teaching hospitals and characterized by irreverence: poking fun at much that is considered “sacred” in medicine, such as patients, science, technology, doctors, and the practice of medicine itself. Like Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, medical humor contains scatological and sexual themes; references to the body, illness, disease, and death; and is distinguished by profound ambivalence. We theorized that the medical carnivalesque is rooted in the occupational paradoxes of modern medicine—specifically, the biomedical attempt to rationalize and contain death and prolong life at practically all costs, which can result in surreal and absurd situations.

Consider, for example, the passage below, taken from The House of God:

“You gave her what?” asked Fats.

“Thorazine.”

Fats burst into laughter. Big juicy laughs rolled down from his eyes to his cheeks to his chins to his bellies, and he said, “Thorazine! That’s why she’s acting like a chimp. Her blood pressure can’t be more than sixty. Get a cuff. Potts, you’re terrific. First day of internship, and you try to kill a gomere with Thorazine.”

The character known as “Fats” is a senior medical resident tasked with supervising inexperienced interns such as Potts, who has just given an elderly patient improper medication. (The patient is colloquially identified as a “gomere,” a slang term first explored by Victoria George and Alan Dundes that describes a—usually male [“gomer”], but in this case female, hence the term “gomere”—elderly patient who is perceived as dirty and debilitated [George and Dundes 1978; see also Leiderman and Grisso 1985].) This mistake, and the unhappy result, is the source of Fats’ laughter, which rolls out of him and over the intern in waves. Fats’ “juicy” laughter and his “bellies” clearly suggest a carnivalesque element (Gabbert and Salud 2009). The entire book consists of medical bad-boy antics, rule-breaking, and joking behavior, much of which is mediated by the laughter of “the fat man.”

What we did not identify in our previous work and what this paper adds, however, is that suffering is a crucial part of the medical carnivalesque. In The House of God, for example, what is unstated but found throughout the book is the suffering both patients and doctors endure. In the above passage, Fats describes the aggrieved patient as a “gomere” who is “acting like a chimp” because Potts gave her Thorazine, an antipsychotic drug that, in high doses, causes motor difficulties. Potts is an intern, a physician who is by definition inexperienced and underequipped, overworked, abused, sleep-deprived, and emotionally and physically exhausted. The result is an unhappy situation for both patient and doctor, generating laughter and hilarity from Fats.

This scene is only one of many that describe suffering; indeed, The House of God can be read as a novelistic catalog of humorous play that emerges in the context of some of the horrific events that both patients and housestaff endure. These scenes are fiction, but they index an actual culture of suffering that permeates the practice of modern biomedicine. Unfortunately, the suffering of physicians and other caregivers is rarely acknowledged either by themselves or others, and this lack of recognition contributes to this culture of suffering by silencing its existence.

The identification of suffering as a cultural component of medicine is important because the medical humanities seek to understand the field of medicine from a cultural perspective. Many culturally-oriented studies of biomedicine focus on technological, scientific, dualistic, and rationalist perspectives, and explore how such perspectives shape the medical field’s values and beliefs, but suffering as a cultural element largely has not been addressed. The field of medicine itself seeks to relieve suffering, and therefore suffering has mostly been treated as an external, clinical phenomenon to be treated in patients. It has not been recognized as a more pervasive and ingrained cultural feature that shapes the experiences of physicians and permeates medical practice in various ways. This culture of suffering undergirds much medical humor and the medical carnivalesque, providing a foundation and explanation for its existence. Studies of medical humor tend to offer functional, Freudian, or neo-Freudian explanations, such as the idea that medical humor functions to release aggression and hostility, to relieve stress and pent-up anxiety, or to act as a coping mechanism. While these interpretations are certainly true, functionalist explanations do not address the underlying causes of the humor itself, nor do they explain its particular qualities.

The pairing of suffering and laughter is commonly viewed in a negative light. By calling a patient a “gomere” and laughing at her behavior as well as the misery of his hapless intern, for example, one might presume that Fats is engaging in the offensive act of schadenfreude, literally translated as “harm-joy” and defined in the OED as “malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others.”3 The idea underlying schadenfreude is that laughing at the suffering of others constitutes maliciousness. To laugh at another’s suffering is, according to modern sensibilities, unjust, cruel, or even sadistic. It presumably isn’t something a moral or good person would do.

This idea that suffering and laughter are incompatible carries over into scholarship. A search through the MLA database reveals only a few articles on suffering and laughter, and none of the articles published in Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research, the primary research journal on humor and laughter, contained the word “suffer” or “suffering” in the title at the time this article was drafted in 2018, at least as they were indexed in MLA and JSTOR. The very existence of medical humor has even compelled medical ethicists to ask whether or not such humor is compatible with quality medical care (e.g., McCrary and Christensen 1993). Yet suffering and laughter co-exist in reality, and Fats is not engaging in schadenfreude. He is laughing at the absurdity of the situation in which both patient and physician find themselves, one in which they both suffer and from which neither can easily escape. The identification of suffering as a basis for medical humor helps contextualize the sometimes harsh dimensions of medical humor that can make outsiders (and insiders) uncomfortable. Laughter is an appropriate, albeit seemingly incongruous, response to the very painful but quite human situations that frequently occur in medicine.4

To Suffer

According to the OED, a primary meaning of the verb “to suffer,” as indicated by Roman numeral I, implies an experience: “to undergo, endure.” (Further in the entry, Roman numeral II lists definitions clustering around the meaning of “to tolerate, allow.”5) In the subsequent glosses for Roman numeral I, the OED explains that what one undergoes or endures during suffering is usually “painful, distressing, or injurious.” So while suffering evokes something painful, the main aspect of the definition is that it is a particular type of experience.

What type of experience is suffering? What are the constituent elements? Eric Cassell, a physician and professor of medicine and public health, began to explore these questions in the early 1990s ([1991] 2004). He is credited for having raised the awareness of physicians about the complicated nature of suffering. Writing about medical training in the first half of the twentieth century, Cassell noted that doctors traditionally were trained to treat diseases rather than patients ([1991] 2004:7, 10). Rather than looking at the person holistically, physicians treated the disease and straightforwardly presumed that curing the disease would cure the person. Physicians also primarily equated suffering with pain and sought to relieve pain in order to relieve suffering. In contrast, Cassell argued that suffering is an experience made up of a variety of elements, of which pain is but one. Suffering is painful, but Cassell noted that a person can be in great physical pain and not suffer. Pain and suffering therefore are not the same thing; suffering entails more.

The additional elements of suffering that Cassell identified include not only pain but also hopelessness, isolation, shame, dread of the future, and an impending sense of total destruction of the self ([1991] 2004:33–5, 42, 56–7). People who suffer feel alone and isolated; it seems as though there is no one to talk to and that there is no one who shares or can understand the experience. People who suffer also often are ashamed of themselves and/or are ashamed of what they are having to endure—the experience itself is perceived as shameful. This shame then reinforces feelings of isolation, since people who feel shame are not likely to speak about their experiences to others. Sufferers also feel helpless, since they seemingly cannot change their situation, and they feel hopeless because they see no end to the suffering. Finally, a person who suffers often feels that the suffering is meaningless—that there is no reason for it. This lack of meaning can engender an existential crisis for the sufferer; he or she feels that the basis of his or her existence has been destroyed or completely rearranged. Clearly, suffering is a phenomenon that goes well beyond medical facts. Cassell argued that physicians wanting to relieve suffering need to treat their patients holistically, since suffering involves a person’s entire being: mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual states, not merely the physical body.

Cassell’s work has had an enormous influence on the practice of medicine over the past 30 years. One significant development has been the emergence of the field of palliative care. The World Health Organization describes palliative care as “an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.”6 In other words, palliative care treats suffering holistically. Yet even with a modern, expanded view of the holistic nature of suffering, the field of medicine still situates suffering within a clinical perspective: suffering is conceptualized as a problem to be solved in treating patients. Suffering is not considered apart from immediate patient care, meaning that little consideration is given to how it operates or is positioned within medicine systemically.

One way suffering operates systemically is vis-à-vis the suffering health care providers may endure as part of their everyday work: they work in difficult conditions; they are witnesses to the suffering of their patients; and they are tasked with the difficult job of relieving or eliminating suffering, making suffering an internal and pervasive feature of the profession. Suffering therefore is constitutive of medical practice; it is not solely a clinical condition to be addressed in individual patients.

My research has been and continues to be based on personal experience as the spouse of a physician, as well as library research and fieldwork conducted over a number of years. I first recognized that medicine had its own body of occupational folklore when my husband entered medical school at Indiana University in 1999, and I began collecting folklore-related items at that time. In the intervening years, I have lived through the rigors of his intern year, residency, and a fellowship in pulmonary critical care at the University of Utah, an intense training period that lasted 11 years. During that time, I have met, socialized with, and become good friends with physicians representing a wide variety of specializations from all over the country and their families, and conversation in social situations often turns to work and stories about work. I began a more in-depth phase of research when I interviewed medical students in 2012, and I have since conducted additional, sporadic interviews with physicians across a variety of specialties in Utah and New York, work that is still ongoing. I also spent 2 days doing observations in the operating rooms (OR) at the University of Utah Hospital on June 20, 2016, and August 1, 2016.

This research has focused on medical students and doctors, so I am unable to comment on the experiences of suffering and its relation to humor among nurses and other health care providers. But the reality of the suffering of physicians hit home to me during those 2012 interviews with medical students at a school in the Midwest. The original purpose of those interviews was to discover whether or not students had become more sympathetic to their patients’ suffering as a result of sensitivity training. What I found was not a lack of sympathy to patient suffering, but rather that the terrible conditions of their patients greatly affected and even traumatized these bright and idealistic young people. Students told heart-wrenching stories about how the suffering of their patients directly affected them on a daily basis.7 One fourth-year medical student, for example, told me about one of her patients who was dying from complications related to HIV. The man had recently moved to the area to be with his girlfriend, but she had broken up with him. He was poor, and he had no family nearby. This student was so overcome by his case that she nearly purchased a plane ticket with her own money so that he could go home to see his friends and family one last time before he died. She cried at his bedside over his situation. The interview excerpt below, as well as the others in this article, has been edited lightly for readability.

I suppose the intense situations that uh, I would frequently see really sick dying people. . . . I did see one person who I knew had a very very short life expectancy while I was on internal medicine that really affected me. He was, I think in his 40s and he had lived for probably 20 years with HIV and had . . . what . . . he was pretty much end-stage liver failure and had a 6-month outlook. And it was very sad to me because he had moved to [Midwestern city] to be with a woman who also had HIV and I guess they had kind of broken up but she was still supporting him, and all of his family and friends were really in New York. And he was too poor, really, to afford a trip back to New York. And I seriously considered buying him a plane ticket to New York so he could go see his family and friends one more time before dying. It was very very hard for me to think about being somewhere where you didn’t have that many connections and really wanting to see people one last time.

It was particularly hard for students to see children die. One student told me about a child who had a number of medical problems, including dwarfism. The child’s mother was unequipped to care for him, and he spent several extra weeks in the hospital before his grandmother agreed to take him home. When the medical student returned to the rotation, the child was back in the ICU, had been living in foster care, and was in a severe state of septic shock. They had to remove most of his bowel, and he died.

The same medical student quoted above told another story about a baby whose death greatly affected her:

I think that some of the things that make it hard is when the people themselves aren’t—who are having these horrible things happen to them—aren’t expecting it and aren’t ready for it. For instance, when I did the pediatric stuff, it was just so hard to see the children die and see their family, when it was someone who had been previously healthy or everything had been going around like normal. For instance, there was a child who had been born who after a normal, uncomplicated pregnancy, had great Apgar scores, like probably 7 and 9 or something like that, and then, 2 hours or 3 hours after birth, the baby started crashing and nobody knew why. So the baby was transferred to our pediatric intensive care unit and put on . . . support actually, and just everything we did didn’t help. . . . It was just so hard to see that family because they, they had no idea this was coming. Everything had seemed perfect and happy and before they withdrew support they, they took a few minutes to dress the baby up, take some pictures, and hold her, which was something they hadn’t really been able to do. And it’s just such a surprise to them that, that they had this, this horrible thing happen.

Kahn and Steeves outline eight aphorisms of suffering, one of which is that “the experience of suffering . . . includes . . . the caring of others” (1995:13). As an inter-subjective experience, the witnessing of suffering can lead to suffering on the part of the witness, an idea that was borne out in interviews. Students often lost sleep after having to work intimately with people in unhappy, tragic, and hopeless situations.

Further contributing to their suffering was the fact that physicians are expected as part of their job to solve the problem, or at least to render some relief. The official roles of medical students were that of “caregiver,” and “student-physician,” roles that presume their competence and ability to help and/or heal. Doctors are by definition responsible for their patients, and these students perceived themselves as being responsible for improving their patients’ lives if possible. The reality, however, was quite different: students quickly discovered how limited they were in their ability to help others effectively. Many patients were simply too sick or had complicated social or psychological problems for which the practice of medicine is unequipped to deal. As intelligent, idealistic young people accustomed to achieving a certain degree of success, these medical students were confronting for the first time not only the realities of the modern Western health care system but also their own limitations. Learning the harsh realities of medical practice engendered feelings of frustration, heartsickness, shame about their own perceived inadequacies, and powerlessness in their dealings with illness. The relationship between doctor and patient is quite intimate, even if it appears clinical, and such experiences triggered significant losses of idealism, faith in science, and confidence in their own abilities. Several students told me that they couldn’t talk about these horrific experiences with their friends, parents, or spouses because they felt that no one but other medical students would really understand “what was going on,” thus contributing to feelings of isolation and loneliness. Together, these feelings of futility, loneliness, isolation, physical exhaustion from food and sleep deprivation, a feeling that nobody else understands what is going on, shame for being unable to help, a crisis of identity, and a sense that it will never end clearly constitute suffering according to Cassell’s criteria. The experience of confronting serious illness, death, and tragedy over and over again—and being professionally responsible for curing, staving off, or offering relief from them—can, for some caregivers, cause personal suffering.8

Few medical students and doctors describe training and work experiences in terms of trauma and suffering. This is likely because there are multiple, deeply ingrained social and cultural injunctions against talking about provider suffering: apparently, it is a taboo topic. The first injunction comes from the occupational culture of care providers. As a physician, it would be unseemly and unprofessional to focus on one’s own state when one’s patients are clearly in worse condition. As noted by Meier, Back, and Morrison, “in the idealized professional model, the needs and interests of the patient are intended to be the sole focus of the relationship and . . . physicians’ feelings are extraneous” (2001:3,007). Focusing on himself is exactly what Fats does in House of God when he advises Potts about the third (satirical) “law” of medicine: “At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse” (Shem [1978] 2003:40), but this law is funny exactly because it directly contradicts the official directive to care for one’s patients first. It of course also contains, like much humor, an element of truth and/or good advice.

There is also an informal code of endurance among physicians that impels workers to downplay or ignore their own physical and mental discomfort in their duties as caregivers. Hospital staff will go into work when sick, for example, rather than calling in ill, as doing so (unless one is infectious) can be deemed a sign of weakness. Compared to sick patients with severe, perhaps life-threatening problems, a physician’s cold, fatigue, or even depression is considered unimportant, and staff learn to ignore their own physical limitations and well-being. When my spouse went through internal medicine residency at the University of Utah beginning in 2004, I discovered that it was not infrequent, for example, for overworked and slightly sick residents to give themselves bags of IV fluids in order to rapidly hydrate so that they might keep working. Semiotically, staff are paid health care providers and not patients, so by definition they can’t be sick; being sick, with the possibility of being re-categorized as “patient,” unsettles their identity and role as care providers.

A final reason why physicians and other staff tend to ignore their own sickness has to do with the organization of hospital work. Taking care of sick people is not work that goes away or can be ignored; someone must always be there to take care of the patients. When a physician calls in sick, his or her co-workers are forced to work harder because they then must not only do their own work, but also the sick physician’s undone work. Taking time for one’s physical or psychological needs increases the already heavy workload of one’s co-workers and therefore is always at their expense, making most physicians quite reluctant to take time away from work for themselves.

Another injunction against talking about provider suffering comes from humanities-oriented medical research in academia. In folklore studies, the discipline eventually moved beyond item-centered examples and notions that folk medicine was found only among rural, uneducated “folk” to highlight the perspectives and experiences of patient health care beliefs and practices among all populations, a patient-centered approach pioneered by David Hufford (1994, 1998) and Bonnie O’Connor (1994). Folklore studies generally attend to folk or vernacular perspectives, often understood as the perspectives of those lacking power. Because patients lack power when encountering modern medical health care systems, patient-centered approaches were crucial in making marginalized voices heard. The field has since learned that patients are not really entirely powerless but actually make strategic health care choices, drawing from a variety of vernacular, folk, alternative, and official sources (O’Connor and Hufford 2001; Brady 2001) and that they resist conventionalized and scientized medical narratives about disease, treatment, and technology in a variety of ways (Goldstein 2004; Campion-Vincent 2005; Kitta 2012; Lee 2014). Yet with the exception of the above-mentioned studies on medical humor and a few other examples, folklorists have not addressed physician and/or clinical perspectives likely because they are perceived as powerful, while the topic of suffering has not been addressed at all. Charles Briggs (2012) suggested a more holistic folkloristics of health, including urging folklorists to “study up,” and it is in this spirit that I offer a look at physicians rather than patients.

The topic of provider suffering also is marginalized in the scholarship of the medical field, which has a more extensive body of research on suffering than folklore studies but also focuses mostly on patients. A search through the PubMed database9 for the terms “suffering” and “providers” in the title yielded only four results, none of which focused on the suffering of providers. A search query in the same database using “suffering” in the title field and “doctors” in the general field yielded 222 results, most of which also focused on patient suffering. Yet, as Katie Watson points out, “surely we can advocate for the humanity of patients without denying the humanity of those who treat them” (2011:38). In other words, while we can all agree that focusing on patients and patient suffering is crucial, if we want to understand the culture of medicine more broadly, we should also allow ourselves to focus on other stakeholders within the health care system, including physicians, nurses, and other staff. In reality, for example, physician power is highly context-specific. Just as professors who work at universities are perceived by the public to have power but are subject to many institutional limitations in their work, the power of doctors who work in hospitals is highly regulated. Physicians are subjected to a shifting and complex matrix of competing claims by administrators, state and federal government regulations, insurance companies, ethical guidelines, patient wishes, and the contingencies of what can actually be accomplished.

Statistics illustrate that physicians suffer. Consider the high suicide rates. The suicide rate for female physicians is 250 percent to 400 percent higher than females in other professions and 70 percent higher among male physicians than males in other professions (Brunk 2015). These statistics suggest a high degree of suffering among doctors, presuming reasonably that a person who commits suicide suffered beforehand.10 Mark Harris, a neurosurgical anesthesiologist in Salt Lake City whom I interviewed in 2018, characterized the state of physician suicides as “an epidemic,” with about 400 physician suicides per year in the United States, the equivalent of approximately two classes of medical school students nationwide (Harris 2018). Physician suicide is pervasive enough that the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention produced a documentary in 2008 entitled Struggling in Silence: Physician Depression and Suicide. The word “silence” in the title indicates the degree to which it is taboo for physicians to talk about their personal problems, and it reinforces the point that it is considered unseemly and unprofessional for physicians to admit that they need help simply because their job is to care for sick others. It is common knowledge that denying or ignoring one’s own sickness has negative consequences, yet this feature is built into and perpetuated by members of the profession.

Further, physicians witness every aspect of human suffering, sometimes on a daily basis, depending on their specialty. But as noted in the Journal of Palliative Care, the effect of witnessing suffering on the part of experienced clinicians largely has been unexplored (Breaden et al. 2012). An editorial in the pulmonary journal Chest similarly notes that patient suffering affects doctors, but the little existing literature focuses mostly on practical ways to fix the problem, such as offering more support to staff (van Staa, Visser, and van der Zouwe 2000; Meier, Back, and Morrison 2001) or noting that not much is done in terms of training physicians on how to deal with it (Curtis and Levy 2014; Outram and Kelly 2014).

Some studies suggest connections between the witnessing of patient suffering and physician burnout, which is a pervasive problem, or they suggest that witnessing suffering can lead to symptoms of grief and depression. Studies conclude unsurprisingly that physicians who work with the terminally ill have high rates of burnout and stress. One sample study found that nearly 25 percent of oncologists (a specialty with a particularly high death rate among patients) experienced some kind of psychiatric disorder arising from grief, and that nearly 50 percent of physicians who worked with the terminally ill were affected themselves (Redinbaugh et al. 2001:187–8). Another study, which focused on health care workers in the palliative care unit of the National Cancer Institute in Portugal, concluded that such work induced physical and mental stress due to workers’ involvement in the suffering of patients and families (Kappaun and Gomez 2013:2,549). In their study of nurses, Steeves, Kahn, and Benoliel link patient suffering to work burnout by noting that nurses appropriate patient suffering, which then leads to burnout (1990; see also Kahn and Steeves 1994), and this is likely true for physicians as well.

This body of research does not characterize burnout, grief, and depression as suffering, or the result of suffering. But, in a crucial link between the two, Thomas Cole and Nathan Carlin note that “burnout, we believe, is also a euphemism for what many physicians experience as a crisis of meaning and identity” (2009:1,414). A crisis of meaning and identity is a metaphysical crisis, one in which core beliefs are questioned or undermined and one’s relevancy is called into doubt. Recall that Cassell’s model for suffering specifically identified a crisis of meaning as an important element; this idea is reformulated in Kahn and Steeves, who identify threat to identity as an element of suffering as well (1995:12). Combined with stress, grief, and depression, burnout can arguably be considered an experience of suffering on the part of care providers, though it is usually labeled as something else.

In sum, suffering in the medical field generally is understood as something existing in patients, as something associated with an individual, and as something to be treated clinically. Yet as a holistic, intersubjective phenomenon, suffering in medicine can extend to physicians, who may suffer because of difficult, strenuous working conditions; because they are encouraged by their occupational culture to deny their own needs; because of their professional role as witnesses to suffering; and because their job is to relieve it. Suffering is built into the very nature of health care work.

Suffering, Laughter, and Transformation

So what might suffering have to do with humor and laughter? One important point that Cassell makes is that pain and suffering are interpretations of what is going on. He writes: “The pain [e.g., suffering] as experienced is itself the interpretation” ([1991] 2004:268). People experience pain in various ways—ways that are connected to individual experiences, beliefs, and values. Cassell notes that if the beliefs and values associated with pain and suffering shift, then the actual experience of pain and suffering can shift as well. Cassell argues that if culturally relevant meaning can be assigned to pain and illness, suffering lessens because suffering entails hopelessness and meaninglessness. Meaningfulness alters medical facts.

The most important type of culturally relevant meaning assigned to suffering and through which it is transformed into “something else” is religious meaning. The first truth of Buddhism is that “life is suffering,” while the Judeo-Christian theological idea of theodicy directly addresses the question of suffering by asking: “If God is good, why do people suffer?” In the Judeo-Christian tradition, suffering is considered to be a test, punishment, correction, or opportunity. The Book of Job is a primary text on suffering; Job’s suffering at the hands of God is explained as a test and opportunity for growth. Personal transformation can be one outcome of suffering—one becomes a better human being, rearranges life priorities, or maintains a closer relationship with God.

Assigning religious meaning lessens suffering for many people. Knowing that one’s suffering has transcendent implications helps some people interpret their suffering as having a higher purpose that goes beyond the immediate painful, injurious, or grievous experience. Reframing suffering as an experience with a purpose by linking it to a deity as religion does may counteract the meaninglessness, hopelessness, shame, and impending sense of total destruction of the self that define suffering. When people who are suffering accept a religious connection to their experience, they move from a state of meaninglessness to meaningfulness and, in doing so, move from hopelessness to hope. Even if they die as a result of their suffering (as with serious illness), the sense of impending total destruction of the self is eased if they see death as having a purpose that transcends the mundane world.

Western medical contexts are decidedly secular, and an alternative way in which suffering can be transformed into “something else” is through humor and laughter. Folklore scholarship has long revealed that laughter, humor, and joking behaviors are traditional mechanisms for changing given meanings. Humorous devices temporarily overturn, reframe, and challenge situations by inverting given hierarchies and values. They reveal the ambiguity of language and provide opportunities to imbue situations with alternate interpretations. In speaking of verbal jokes, a genre designed to confound categories and generate laughter, Christie Davies notes that “jokes are a brief time off from the everyday inhibitions and restrictions that bind the ways we speak. Jokes mean we can indulge in ambiguity, blatant and obvious departures from reality or logic, absurdity, impropriety, and the utterly shocking” (2011:3). Jokes allow us to speak the forbidden, temporarily rearrange given categories, and produce brief transformations or alternate interpretations. As noted above, there is a robust and extensive body of humor among medical professionals that is well-documented in both scholarly and popular literature. Physicians who work in teaching hospitals may perform various kinds of verbal speech play, including jokes, puns, nicknames, slang, toasts, funny personal stories, and other routines; they may also engage in practical jokes and pranks, poke fun at co-workers and administrators, and parody work situations through song and dance routines on YouTube and other media (Gabbert 2018). This body of humor functions temporarily to transform dominant frameworks of interpretation that assign meanings of sadness, grief, and failure to patient pain, illness, and death, thus shifting the actual experience of work-related suffering by changing its meaning.

There is, for example, a large and well-documented corpus of medical humor about death. Doctors work profoundly with the body, and there is a comic orientation toward the body in medical humor, particularly toward what Bakhtin ([1968] 1984) called the lower material bodily stratum (the reproductive organs and digestive system), an orientation that makes medical humor frequently off-color, scatological, and sexual. Death, however, is the most dire, real, and constant threat to the body in medical work, and it is unsurprising that a large quantity of folklore surrounds death.

I believe that one of the earliest spaces in which medical humor about death and the body begins to emerge is in gross anatomy class, a first-year medical school requirement in which an entire human body is dissected. Gross anatomy is very intense, differing for obvious reasons from the other science classes that first-year medical students take, such as microbiology or pharmacology. While most medical students have completed dissections prior to medical school, this is often the first official time that students come face-to-face with death and the human body on a daily basis. Students are required to accomplish a full dissection including head, face, hands, and genitalia. Veins, organs, nerves, and other tissues are removed, dissected, and examined, and some parts, such as the head, must be severed using a bone saw. As one medical student blithely noted, anatomy lab is a proving ground for black humor since “it’s a bunch of dead bodies around you . . . so it’s kind of a surreal environment” (Anonymous 2012c). My spouse took gross anatomy in medical school at Indiana University in 1999 and explained that everyone in the group had to remember to keep their mouths closed and not talk while the bone saw was being used to avoid getting bone chips in the mouth—and, of course, when one student didn’t stop talking and did actually get a bone chip in his mouth, everyone laughed and made fun of him. Body parts are stored until the end of the semester when they can be disposed of properly; when I visited the gross anatomy lab in 1999, I observed that they were stored in a large covered bucket under the table. The smell of formalin, the main chemical used to preserve the bodies, is pervasive and overwhelming, and students come home “smelling of death,” as one explained to me. Students may also find unexpected body modifications, such as tattoos or scars, as well as objects, like breast or testicular implants in the body, and these modifications may be the subject of jokes and laughter. Gross anatomy is, without a doubt, an extreme situation in which students confront death starkly and must overcome fear, repulsion, horror, and ambivalence to do what is likely taboo the world over: take apart a human being bit by bit.

Though certainly not all students use humor, many do respond to such situations in traditionalized, comic ways. A common response is to name or nickname the body (Hafferty 1988) since donors are anonymous. One student explained in an interview that every anatomy lab group named its bodies. His group nicknamed its body “Fred,” but he explained that the names were not always real names since they often derived from the physical characteristics of the donor. “One was like the Green Man, the Green Lantern, whatever. Because he was green. I don’t know why he was green. . . . He was green” (Anonymous 2012c). Another group named its body “Julia” because it had painted fingernails. The reference was to Julia Roberts and the character (a sex worker) she played in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman. Yet another group named its body after porn star Ron Jeremy since the donor had congestive heart failure, resulting in an extremely swollen and enlarged penis. Students may also celebrate the body’s (fictional) birthday.

Even students who do not engage directly in humor and jokes in gross anatomy acknowledge that the atmosphere is quite casual. One student characterized herself as someone who held the highest respect for body donors and who would be easily offended by inappropriate or disrespectful humor. Even she, however, did not recall an instance during her gross anatomy lab where she felt offended by laughter. “It definitely was like a very like, relaxed, casual atmosphere. I guess I sort of told myself that that’s what our body donor would have wanted. She would have wanted us to enjoy it” (Anonymous 2012a). Another student similarly emphasized the importance of having respect for the body donor, saying that her group’s humorous comments mostly consisted of joking attempts to explain why they couldn’t find a particular structure: “We said, ‘Well, she didn’t have one of those!’” (Anonymous 2012b).

Another, less common, traditional response is to play tricks using anatomical specimens as props. One medical student quoted above told me that he switched hearts between two different bodies because his group’s heart looked quite different; the purpose was to mess with his buddy’s dissection. This same student also said that he snuck up behind a friend, “the smartest guy in the class,” who happened to be dissecting alone with headphones on, in the lab near Halloween. The prankster floated a lab skull in his hand, right outside the boundary of the student’s vision. The student saw it out of the corner of his eye, screamed, and jerked suddenly with scalpel in hand, almost cutting the prankster. “I realized in hindsight that this was really dumb,” he said (Anonymous 2012c). Such behaviors fit easily into an established folkloristic body of work that connects death to humor, practical jokes, play, and laughter (Narváez 2003a, 2003b; Miller 2012; Blank 2013; Marsh 2015). This type of humor has been identified as being important to the socialization of medical students (Hafferty 1988; Becker 1993), but I also believe that it is the first time in which students start using humor and laughter as a resource for the pain and discomfort inflicted on them by their training.

The specter of death does not stop with gross anatomy class, but follows medical professionals throughout their career. As medical students progress in their training, they become more and more responsible for diagnosing, understanding, and monitoring their patients’ health. Patients are sick, perhaps terminally ill, and physicians, who are legally responsible for their patients, are supposed to figure out what is wrong and help them if possible. Physicians therefore sometimes feel like death is a bad outcome, or even a foe that the doctor is supposed to vanquish or stave off. Dr. Harris explains:

I always joke with patients: “My job is to put you to sleep, keep you alive, and wake you up again.” And so for me, my job is to keep people alive. And so if someone dies in and around my gravitational pull, I feel a little—sad, obviously, but, like, disappointed in myself. Because if I’m seeing someone, it is because there is hope and there is a plan and there is a way out. And there is a cure potential and at least a potential of staving off of death. And if someone dies then we have failed in our intent.

Dr. Harris also noted that only one person had ever died on his watch in the OR and, in that case, the patient was so sick that the team was “tilting at windmills.” Death is also a taboo topic in American culture generally (Samuel 2013), and Americans tend to believe they have the right to long, healthful, and youthful lives. Growing old and dying are unacceptable options, and this orientation affects medical care.

Unsurprisingly, then, there are numerous slang terms for death among medical professionals, many of which have been amply documented in previous studies. While terms can be localized and may vary from hospital to hospital, in general physicians (as well as sometimes the general public) are familiar with them not only nationally but sometimes even internationally.11 This is because physician culture, including folklore, is occupationally based; it is less tied to geographical location than it is to the structure of education and training. Physicians have an extremely lengthy training period and train in different parts of the country. A physician may attend a 4-year medical school in one state, a 3-year residency in another state, and a fellowship of 1 to 4 years or more—plus additional specialization—in yet another state before finally settling on a permanent place of work. In this way, physicians differ from other health care providers who do not train for as long and who are not required to move around for training purposes, and who may have a different, though likely related, occupational culture.

Some examples of slang words for “death” are “cooled” and “tagged” (Coombs et al. 1993:994). These terms evoke images of a morgue: the word “cooled” references the fact that the temperature in morgues is kept low, while “tagged” refers to the identification marker (the tag) on the body. Other terms related to death, such as “to box,” “dirt nap,” and “planted,” are slang terms for burial (Coombs et al. 1993:994). The term “box” refers to the coffin in which bodies are placed before burial, while “dirt nap” and “planted” refer to the earth in which bodies are buried. Additional slang terms for “died” include “croaked,” “kicked the bucket,” “checked out,” “crashed,” “ate it,” “went belly up,” “bit the big one,” and “bit the long weenie” (994). Some phrases are quite specific to the medical profession. “To die a Harvard death,” for example, means that a patient’s lab values were normal (that is, perfect, like Harvard University), but the patient died anyway (Burson-Tolpin 1989:287). A common phrase that I have often heard in medical circles is “circling the drain,” or CTD for short, which is applied to a patient who is clearly dying but who is not dead yet. The idea is that a dying person is swirling inevitably toward death, circling closer and closer, much like water swirling around a drain before finally being sucked down the drain hole.

Physicians also have comic terms for patients who are either dying or dead. Because physicians are taught to have the highest respect for their patients, speaking humorously about dying or dead patients not only breaks cultural taboos by making death a lighthearted subject, but also targets a category of persons who are usually accorded great value and respect. In England, for example, an elderly patient might be diagnosed as having TMB, which stands for “too many birthdays” (Fox et al. 2003:188), a term I have also heard used in the United States. In this case, the only problem the patient has is advanced age. Normally, elderly people are given a lot of respect in face-to-face situations. In this case, however, the term makes fun of the elderly and therefore inverts normal social and professional etiquette. Another British term is “T. F. BUNDY,” which stands for “Totally fucked but unfortunately not dead yet” (Fox et al. 2003:188) and refers to a patient who is still alive but medically has little hope. Again, this term inverts expected etiquette. It not only suggests that it would be better for the patient to be dead, but also does so using vulgar language. A final, related term from Great Britain is “GPO,” which stands for “Good for parts only” (Fox et al. 2003:185). This term refers to dying patients; the implication is that parts of their body, such as transplant organs, may be of use to others.12

Slang terms for death do not address suffering directly, but they do index feelings of futility and hopelessness, criteria associated with suffering. A doctor’s job is to stave off death and illness, yet patients can and do remain sick and sometimes die, so it is not uncommon for physicians, depending on their specialty, to feel like they are responsible or perhaps like they even have failed in their duties, as Dr. Harris noted above. Even if a physician helps one patient get well, that patient will be replaced by another one who may not get well. Medical students explained to me that working with the sick and terminally ill can be relentless because of the organizational structure of hospital work. Sometimes a single patient is replaced by many patients, all of whom may have overwhelming, unsolvable problems. The cycle is repeated endlessly, and the workload is incessant. One’s duty as a doctor can feel hopeless, meaningless, and overwhelming, with seemingly no way out. When I asked Dr. Harris if he ever felt overwhelmed during his training, he replied, “Oh absolutely, most of the time. . . . For me it felt like . . . running ahead of like an avalanche. Like I was sprinting as hard as I could and looking over my shoulder and those rocks were just almost right there” (2018). Slang or humorous terms for death and dying or dead patients allow care providers a way to speak about a taboo topic and temporarily transform official interpretations of death as a serious or tragic event, a perceived failure on the part of the physician, or something he or she is helpless against to something funny or even banal.

The examples from gross anatomy class perform a similar transformative function. Gross anatomy lab is difficult academically, technically, and often emotionally or psychologically. Students stare death in the face every time they walk into the lab, and they engage in acts for which they would be arrested outside of a medical school. Jeannie Thomas explores the emergence of laughter in response to unfunny stories of appalling situations, such as family narratives about suicide attempts and abuse. Drawing on Kristeva, she argues that “laughter at the painful often signals the recognition of . . . a situation that threatens abjection, a state where we recognize with horror that we can be undone” (Thomas 1997:59). In other words, encounters with the abject—such as a corpse—can lead to laughter. Laughing at the characteristics of a cadaver, naming or nicknaming it, or joking about it re-humanizes an anonymized donor, reminding students that their lab specimens were once also living people with all the identity features and associations that living people have. To name is both to label and to control: in the face of anonymity, the horror of death, and a potential state of abjection in which one is confronted with a horrific “undoing,” some medical students resort to traditionalized forms of laughter. This is particularly important as the dissection progresses, since the donor comes to look less and less like a human being over time.

Physicians acknowledge that humor and laughter make work more bearable. They do not state that it relieves their suffering per se, since physicians do not see themselves as sufferers—they identify as people who relieve suffering and who, in fact, rarely even get sick (see above). Yet humor and laughter emerge almost immediately once training begins (in the gross anatomy lab) and continue to develop over time, so there is clearly a relationship between working conditions and laughter. Dr. Harris initially completed an ER residency in Scotland in the 1980s. He describes the grueling circumstances of training at that time, which continue in many medical graduate training programs today.

Residency was really for me—and I think my wife would confirm this—was really where it got hard. When I did my residency my first six months I averaged 120 hours a week in the hospital. We were on call one in three. And what that meant is you stayed in house [in the hospital] every third night, including the days on either side of it. And the same for the weekends. You’d go in on Saturday morning and you’d come home on Monday night. And it was busy: you were working, you were not sleeping.

Dr. Harris also stated that humor is directly correlated to working conditions and acknowledges that the forms of humor change as physicians advance in their training. As working conditions change, humor changes as well.

I’ve actually come to the conclusion that I think there has been several phases of humor . . . at least that I have observed in my medical career. Initially as an intern and as a resident in Scotland, where the circumstances were a lot harder, the hours were a lot longer, [residents] were less supported . . .—the humor was a lot more bitter and kind of gallowsian? . . . I think that was because it was tough. . . . We were kind of almost lashing out a little bit at circumstances and medicine and supervisors and our patients sometimes. . . . As circumstances get better, as people get a little more comfortable or happy in their careers, the humor mellows a bit.

I then asked Dr. Harris whether or not the humor lessened once physicians were out of training.

I think it changes. So, you know, I do—I think that when you’re a med student, when you’re an intern and any time during your training, and it’s human nature right? When you’re scared, when you’re frustrated, the humor becomes more of a defense mechanism. It becomes more of, either to keep things away, or to some degree make them less scary. I think as you become more comfortable, as you move through your career, the humor becomes more of a way of discussing the situation we’re in. A way of, for me anyway, a way of talking about the differences between specialties, between approaches, a kind of making light a little bit of some of the sadder parts of our job. Not as a defense mechanism but as a kind of . . . sharing.

Historical examples also provide evidence that suffering can serve as a primary context for laughter. Steve Lipman has documented the extensive nature of humor and laughter used by Jews and others during the Holocaust, one of the world’s greatest examples of suffering. Lipman writes: “Jokes were made about every facet of life and death in the Nazi era. . . . Starvation, disease, beatings, murder, and every form of persecution were grist for the victim’s joke mill” (1991:19). His book catalogs Nazi-era jokes, witticisms, satirical folk songs, and the like, and he notes repeatedly that Holocaust humor was born of sorrow. “By appreciating the humor from the period we are not laughing at the victims or their suffering; we are simply recognizing that laughter was a part of their lives, a part nurtured by their suffering” (Lipman 1991:9; emphasis added). Lipman also insists that Holocaust humor was not gallows humor but rather a laughter of hope and resistance based in horror. He writes: “Life is often tragic, but its pathos reflects itself most distinctly in jokes. There is behind the comic façade not only something serious . . . but sheer horror” (12). Lipman’s work clearly illustrates that contexts of suffering can generate humor and laughter; indeed, in such contexts, it is the only way out: “In freedom, humor is a mere luxury,” writes former Nazi prisoner Natan Sharansky. “In prison, it’s the only weapon. The moment you can laugh at them you are free” (quoted in Lipman 1991:134). While the conditions of modern medical practice obviously are quite different from the conditions of Nazi Germany, the notion that humor and laughter free people from terrible conditions is similar.

Some studies of occupational folklore also illustrate interconnections between suffering and laughter, though they are not framed as such. Claire Schmidt documents the extensive use of “sick” humor by prison guards (2017), while Tim Tangherlini documents the sick/funny stories told by paramedics, who are often the first responders to terrible crime scenes and horrific auto accidents (1998). These studies do not identify suffering as a primary context for humor, but prisons arguably are institutions designed to increase suffering as a form of punishment, and it is likely that this institutional purpose affects not only the prisoners but also the guards. Indeed, Schmidt’s informants told her over and over again that laughter and humor were survival tools. Tangherlini does not elaborate on the humor used by paramedics, but he repeatedly points out the horrific (abject) nature of the situations in which paramedics find themselves and at which they consistently laugh.

Returning to the joke with which this article began then, what the joke accomplishes seems less offensive when it is contextualized within a framework of suffering and laughter. First, the joke addresses the topic of suffering from both the perspective of the patient and the caregiver. The joke describes a nightmare, the worst situation imaginable for all parties involved. According to the scenario set up by the joke, the mother has survived the stroke but is doomed to suffer and live as a “vegetable,”13 while the son will suffer and die. The son will die more quickly than the mother as a result of the stress of having to give so much care. In addition, his care is futile, since the mother will never improve and will never recognize her son. The picture painted is hopeless; it is one of endless pain, anguish, expense, and meaninglessness. It is a picture of suffering.

Additionally, this unhappy situation is the result of successful medical care. As noted above, the impulse in Western medicine is to preserve life at all costs, and the death of a patient is considered a bad outcome. But many physicians and other care providers fully understand that preserving life at all costs can be a problem. For example, it can lead to painful, unsuccessful procedures being performed on patients. In the most extreme cases, such as the one described in this joke, preserving life at all costs can increase suffering, a direct violation of the principal precept of bioethics, which is primum non nocere (first, do no harm). The situation, then, is the direct result of occupational paradoxes.

The final line “HA! Just kidding, she’s dead” is the most shocking. First, the line reframes the given nightmarish situation, revealing it to be false: the doctor has played a prank on his patient’s son (Bauman 1986; Marsh 2015). In real life, a doctor would not joke about a patient’s condition to a loved one, so this is one of the strongest taboos that the joke breaks. Additionally, the actual words “Ha! Just kidding” render this reframing purposefully insensitive. The proper response to death is to offer consolation, so this line highlights a presumed lack of feeling or callowness on the part of the physician. But from the doctor’s point of view in this case, death is, in fact, the “good news,” because it is an escape from the suffering that has been described. The sadness and narrative tension that build as the doctor describes in horrific detail the length and nature of suffering the son must endure is suddenly gone, released by death with a single line. This idea directly contradicts and inverts the dominant perspective that life must be preserved at all costs, but it is also why the joke is shocking to people who work outside the medical field. Most Americans are not immersed in contexts of sickness, suffering, and death in their everyday work, and this perspective is foreign to them.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that a culture of suffering permeates medical training and some forms of practice for physicians, particularly those at teaching hospitals, and this culture of suffering is a primary context for medical humor and the medical carnivalesque. While the functions of medical humor are relatively well understood— relief of anxiety, expression of hostility, a defense mechanism, and a way of speaking about taboo topics—suffering as a primary condition for medical humor has not been identified. In contexts of suffering, physicians use humor as a traditional means of transformation; in Cassell’s framework, they assign comic meaning to various dimensions of suffering and, in doing so, temporarily transform it into something else.

Medical humor is secular, but there are parallels between the transformations of suffering accomplished by humor and the transformations of suffering accomplished by faith. In his book Redeeming Laughter (1997), Peter Berger makes the strongest case for links between the comic and the sacred, despite the seeming incongruity between the two and the fact that the Judeo-Christian tradition rarely utilizes the comic or addresses laughter (Houck 2007; Joeckel 2008).14 Berger draws parallels between the ways in which both faith and the comic offer new perspectives on the ordinary world. Both are transformations, breaks from ordinary reality, a shift of insight into “what is going on.” Berger writes that ordinarily the comic registers in a “lower key,” meaning that it reframes ordinary life temporarily but does not offer “transcendence,” which he defines as indexing another world that is redemptive, that has been made whole, or in which the mysteries of the human condition are abolished. Berger considers this “world beyond” a register of the “second/higher key” (1997:190ff.); it is the one in which faith generally operates.

Yet even in the lower key, the comic can point toward higher spheres of meaning. Berger notes, for example, that “the comic presents a world without pain. . . . It is, above all, an abstraction from the tragic dimension of human experience” (Berger 1997:194). His example is the clown who is beaten over and over again, but apparently feels no pain and continues to get up to receive yet another beating. The audience laughs because pain does not exist for the clown. As soon as the clown feels pain, the scene is no longer funny. Berger writes: “Generally, any comedy turns into tragedy as soon as real suffering, real pain, is allowed to enter into it,” and, from a religious standpoint, “the promise of redemption is always a world without pain” (195). In other words, the comic beating of the clown operates in the lower key, but because the clown is free from pain, it points toward the higher, more transcendent sphere, which is always free of suffering.

Berger’s example of the beating of the clown who feels no pain again reminds me of contexts for Bakhtin’s carnivalesque laughter, many examples of which were predicated on death, violence, and the dismemberment of the body, and many others of which were predicated on medical quackery (Bakhtin [1968] 1984). Bakhtin insists that carnivalesque laughter is transformative and ambivalent. Scholars have focused on the celebratory and potentially revolutionary aspects of carnivalesque laughter and have explained descriptions of its horrors as evidence of rebirth. Perhaps what is implied in Bakhtin’s work but not stated directly is that carnivalesque laughter is directly related to real pain, death, and suffering, experiences that religion traditionally identifies as having potential for growth. Humor, such as that which arises in the practice of medicine and is part of the medical carnivalesque, also accomplishes the transformation of suffering, a phenomenon that not only undergirds medical comedy and the clinical vernacular but appears to have deep historical roots.

Coda

In an op-ed published in the Atlantic in 2012, the author Samuel Shem offered his thoughts on The House of God 34 years after its publication, and he commented specifically on the role of suffering. He remarked that he didn’t recognize the effect his book was having until his publisher forwarded him a line from an intern at the VA hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The intern had written to Shem: “If [it] weren’t for your book I’d kill myself.” Reflecting on the life history of this novel—which originally was censored by medical school deans—Shem characterizes it as a “fiction of resistance” to the inhumane treatment of both patients and doctors. Shem notes that he has added four more “laws” over the years to the original 13 outlined in his book, stating that, of these new four, the law of “making connections” in order to stave off suffering is important. He concludes his op-ed noting:

This is the culmination [of] my learning so far. All of us will suffer—it’s not optional. Some will suffer more, some less. The issue isn’t suffering, it’s how we walk through it, and how we help others walk through it. If we decide to walk through suffering alone—“stand tall, draw a line in the sand, tough it out”—we will suffer more, and spread more suffering around. This is where we health-care folks come in—this is our job, to be with others in caring.

Notes

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “gallows,” OED Online.

Personal communication by email, February 10, 2015.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “schadenfreude,” OED Online.

The term “appropriate incongruity” comes from Elliott Oring’s elaboration of incongruity theory, which is the explanation that two ideas that are seemingly opposite are paired together to generate humor. Oring elaborates that the joke is funny because the elements are not only incongruous but also somehow work; hence, the term “appropriate incongruity” (2003, 2011).

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “suffer,” OED Online.

World Health Organization, WHO Definition of Palliative Care, http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/definition/en/ (accessed June 2, 2019).

Carolyn Ware found similarly distressing experiences with veterinarians who often bond emotionally and spiritually with their animal patients, despite the rhetoric of scientism and emotional detachment found in histories of veterinary practice. As one informant explained, “every day we take home that loss” (quoted in Ware 2018:25).

It is important to note that for many, if not most people in the health professions, caring for people is rich and rewarding work. The purpose of this article is not to suggest that all health care workers automatically suffer because of their working conditions; the contexts of health care work vary greatly, as do individuals and their levels of resilience. Rather, the idea in this article is simply to point out that the effects of witnessing suffering and caring for sufferers can and does take an emotional toll, and the phenomenon of suffering permeates the profession in multiple ways.

See PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health database, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/.

One possibility for the large disparity in suicide rates between physicians and other professions is that, because of their medical knowledge and training, doctors may simply be more successful at committing suicide than other people.

For example, when I gave a version of this paper in Kyoto, Japan, for the Vernacular Culture Study Group in 2017, one Japanese member of the audience said that she had relatives in the medical field and the humor was familiar to her.

For additional examples of medical slang and medical language, see Coser (1959), Becker (1993), Dans (2002), George and Dundes (1978), Gordon (1983), Leiderman and Grisso (1985), McCrary and Christensen (1993), Odean (1995), Taller (1983), Winick (2004).

The term “vegetable” is a lay/vernacular term and not a medical term. A physician would likely never actually use the term “vegetable” to describe a patient’s clinical condition in a professional setting, although it might be used in informal circumstances.

Joeckel points out, for example, that the rule of St. Benedict, which was established in the sixth century, specifically forbids laughter: “Of speech provoking laughter we condemn everywhere to eternal exclusion” (Benedict quoted in Joeckel 2008:416). Although St. Benedict banished laughter, there were other saints known for their laughter, such as Margery Kempe and St. Bridget, who insisted that heaven was a merry place; their laughter, however, was strongly critiqued by the Church. (My thanks to Dr. Christine Cooper-Rompato for these medieval examples.) Peter Berger also points out a few brief examples of the comic in Christianity, including tropes of folly in the New Testament and the Paschal laughter of the medieval church and Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, first printed in 1511, which is one of the few publications in which folly is viewed as benign (Berger 1997). Folklorists also have illustrated connections between laughter and religious/sacred contexts: in the Narváez volume, for example, Illana Harlow (2003) sets the context of Irish traditions of practical jokes at wakes within a larger religious belief system, noting the contrast of play with the official seriousness of death and elite religious ideology, while Donald Cosentino outlines a logic in Haitian thought between death and laughter as manifested in the Gedes, “whose antics transform the cemetery into Haiti’s theater of the absurd” (Cosentino 2003:243).

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[conanobrien1963]

It’s show time By Nicholas Kralev, The Financial Times Magazine, February 10, 2001

NEW YORK — Conan O’Brien has no regrets that the longest election in US history is over. True, Campaign 2000 and the 36 agonising days that followed were a gift from heaven for late-night TV hosts. They were courted by both Al Gore and George W. Bush, who made “nice-guy” appearances aimed at winning young voters (keener viewers of late comedy shows than the prime-time evening news). At the same time they had a ball firing jokes at the candidates.

But now, with a new president in office, “it gets even better”, says O’Brien, beaming at the thought of the mocking monologues probably being born in the writing room of his show, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”, as we speak.

“Presidents get funnier all the time,” he says. “Nixon was a lot of fun for comedians — a good target. But Clinton may be the funniest. The bonus when you are finally president is that you don’t have to come on these dreadful shows any more.”

As “Late Night”, along with other comedy programmes — such as “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” on NBC and “The Late Show with David Letterman” on CBS — makes media analysts ponder the impact they have on voters, late-night comedians feel on top of the world. Having had Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman sing Sinatra’s “My Way” on his NBC show, and made good use of all the negative points of White House contenders during the campaign, O’Brien says that his is “a good business to be in”.

The taping of “Late Night” has just ended, and we’ve swapped Studio 6A at NBC’s Rockefeller Centre headquarters in New York for O’Brien’s comfortable ninth-floor office. The 6ft 4in comedian has replaced his on-camera suit with jeans and a casual shirt, and is kicking off the post-production part of his evening with a cold beer. I notice that he’s neither as lanky as he used to be — his reported $2m salary has apparently made a difference — nor as carrot-topped as everybody describes him. “My hair is much more red on TV, from the lighting,” he agrees quickly. “It was never that red. It’s a misconception.”

Misconceptions are no novelty for O’Brien. Having watched him for an hour every night for seven years, millions of Americans have created an image of him based solely on “Late Night”. They expect him to joke and be funny all the time, and think that he’s kidding even when he’s serious. “Most people usually assume that I’m making a joke. When I try to complement someone sincerely, they think I’m being sarcastic. Sometimes I’d say, ‘You did a really nice job for me, thank you’, and they’d say, ‘Go to hell, how dare you, you are so mean’. And I’m just being nice.”

Another unpleasant consequence of having a job like his, he explains, is that, “when I walk around the street, since people see me only on the show, always smiling, they are not used to seeing me being just normal, and think that I’m depressed. I’m not — I just have this face, I’m neutral. I’m going to buy bread, or I’m walking my dog”. But he’s not, he’s quick to point out, one of those comedians who are “funny only during that hour they are on TV”, and “quiet and shy” in real life. “We always hear that Steve Martin, Woody Allen and others, who are really alive on camera, are introverted at other times. I don’t relate to that and don’t understand it. During the day, you’ll see me wandering in people’s offices, trying to make them laugh. I enjoy it.”

Most of O’Brien’s staff — about 60 people occupying the entire floor — are accustomed to his style. Some, however, never get used to the pressure of the daily deadlines and the speed, which often resembles that in a newsroom. “I have fired people who haven’t worked out,” he admits, “but not too many. I’ve had people murdered, but that’s a different story — it’s much easier.”

That, of course, is a joke. And it’s a perfect illustration of how others’ expectations of O’Brien sometimes force him to play the funny guy from the show, rather than be himself. His jokes, however, aren’t always easy to distinguish from his “serious speak”. To make it easier for me, he suggests holding up his hand when he’s serious. But things work out without hand intervention, as soon as I engage him in a meaningful, intellectual conversation.

If one keeps him serious for a while, the 37-year-old O’Brien can be thoughtful and philosophical about his job. Although now everybody takes his success — and his refreshing yet nervous boyish charm — for granted, it took nearly four years to prove himself to network executives, audiences and critics. After many 13-week contracts and reviews calling his show “lifeless and messy”, he finally signed a five-year deal in 1997. But when he started, in 1993, he was virtually unknown, and many people accused him of not having earned his big break.

“After the first tough years, I felt I’d paid for that studio,” he muses. “I bled for this show. I put my heart into it.” He says that he realised he was “in a lot of trouble” at first, but never contemplated giving up. “In such cases, you tend not to think too much — you just do. There was no time to sit around and worry. If you are trapped in a burning house, you don’t sit on the floor thinking what to do. You start running around, try to find an open window and get out. What kept me going was that I really wanted it to work. Deep inside I knew I could do this. I just needed time to develop the skills.”

Confidence was the key to his “dramatic transformation”, O’Brien says. “I used to live or die by what I said every night. If I had something funny to say, I felt like a hero. But if I didn’t get a laugh, I was visibly unhappy and upset. It took confidence to realise that not everything I say is funny. I learned to enjoy the mistakes as much as the success. Now I make fun of myself for not getting a laugh.”

Today, with the wisdom of an almost veteran, he counters the notion that the way to succeed in a job like his is to learn how to play a TV talk show host. “That’s not true. The way to succeed is to somehow figure out how to be who you always were, but in a very strange environment — in a studio, with cameras looking at you. My struggle was finding a way to take this part of me that was very natural and spontaneous, get control of it and make it look the same in this artificial surrounding.” Unlike on “Friends” and “Frasier”, where an actor plays someone else for half an hour, “on my show, it’s me for an hour every night”. So, inevitably, “people are going to see who I really am. I can’t invent a personality, but I can showcase the personality I already have”.

Although he has always liked performing, as a child O’Brien never though that it would become his profession. “I was very serious, and I didn’t know that you could do comedy for a living — it was something you did with your friends. My hometown was as far removed from Hollywood as you can imagine. I’d never met anybody in show business — or any famous person for that matter.” Born on April 18, 1963, in Brookline, Massachusetts (the Boston suburb known as John F. Kennedy’s birthplace), O’Brien was one of six children of a Catholic Irish family. His mother, Ruth, was a lawyer, and his father, Tom, a doctor, so Conan thought he’d do “something responsible”– “go to a good college, then law school, and then maybe get into politics”.

He followed his plan, but very briefly. He was a “smart student, with a good work ethic” and, after graduating from Brookline High School in 1981, he enrolled at Harvard, in neighbouring Cambridge. (“When I heard, as a boy, that there was Cambridge, England, I thought that they were copying us.”) He had written plays and sketches before, and performed them for his friends, but it wasn’t until he started working for the Harvard Lampoon, the university’s venerable comedy magazine, that he realised that “adults were taking this seriously”. He decided that if he could make $5 a day doing comedy, he’d go for it.

He eventually became the Lampoon’s editor — a position that helped him to get to know many of his fellow students. “Everybody assumes that only the smartest people in the world go to Harvard,” he says. “They don’t. It’s just a very unusual collection of people. A few years ago, when they caught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, the news media were shocked that a Harvard graduate could be this weird, eccentric loner, who is bent on destroying society.’ I was the exact opposite: I said, ‘Of course he went to Harvard. I knew at least five future Unabombers when I was there.’”

Just before O’Brien left Harvard, the student newspaper asked him what he thought he’d be doing in 10 years. He said he’d have his own television show. He underestimated himself — eight years was all he needed.

He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do after Harvard. He loved comedy and performing, but had no interest in acting. In 1985, he arrived in Los Angeles, where an acquaintance helped him to get a writing job on an HBO show called “Not Necessarily the News”. He also joined a local improv class — “Friends” star Lisa Kudrow was among his fellow students. Two years later, he began writing for the late-night series “The Wilton North Report”, but it had a short life, so O’Brien decided to move to New York. For three years from 1988, he worked as a writer for NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” (“SNL”). The show, featuring some of America’s top comedians, such as Phil Hartman, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, helped him to make valuable professional connections. He appreciated the opportunity to create his own sketches, but when it came to performing he was allowed only fleeting appearances as a crowd member or security guard.

In 1992, O’Brien joined the staff of Fox’s hit animated series, “The Simpsons”, starting as a writer and producer, and moving up to supervising producer the following year. But he wasn’t happy there, either. “As great as the show was, I was speaking through all those other established characters, while at “SNL” I could create a whole new world, with no limitations. Another frustration was that “The Simpsons” had a much more controlled environment, because it’s animation. You can spend a year on an episode to get it right. I loved the show, but it wasn’t mine — there is a big difference between being the manager of a Hilton hotel in Hawaii and running your own bed and breakfast.”

His B&B chance came sooner than he expected. In 1993, late-night legend Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show and NBC sought a replacement. David Letterman, then hosting “Late Night”, was regarded as the heir apparent. The job, however, went to the little-known Jay Leno, and the deeply offended Letterman left the network, taking over “The Late Show” on CBS, which directly competes with Leno’s programme. The “Late Night” seat was now open, with no obvious front-runners. O’Brien begged executive producer and “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels to let him audition. He got the job immediately.

Having long been a fairly good writer but a “frustrated performer”, O’Brien had finally found the right combination. Although he would, for the most part, recite lines written by someone else, he could make a creative contribution at any time. But being in front of the camera made a world of difference. “When I wrote,” he recalls, “it was never over; I was always editing it in my head, torturing myself. Now, I can worry during rehearsals, but when the hour is over, the hour is over. It’s done, and there is another show to do tomorrow. It’s been good for me, because I needed to learn how to just let go of things — I’m obsessive and compulsive. I forget about what just happened and move to the next thing, and I do it as well as I can.”

With the initial scepticism forgotten, O’Brien’s show now attracts an estimated 2.5m viewers a night. Although “The Tonight Show” remains NBC’s premier forum for Hollywood celebrities — and, lately, for politicians — “Late Night” has had luminaries like Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Elton John, Sigourney Weaver and Helen Hunt. “The booking is a nightmare,” O’Brien complains. “Fortunately, we’ve been around long enough to get good guests. At the beginning, it was very tough, because we had to make it funny with unknowns. But no show can survive if it requires Tom Cruise or Madonna — those people have to be a nice, occasional surprise.”

O’Brien says that he avoids watching comedy on television: “It’s like a dentist going home and cleaning someone’s teeth for fun”. He prefers documentaries and “serious movies”. He’s cautious about trying to learn from fellow comedians, afraid that doing so would take away his “unique flavour”. Unlike broadcast journalism, for example, where “you can learn certain techniques, comedy is a very personal thing”, he says. “Once you start to alter too much who you are, to reach some professional quality, you lose what many people tune in for.”

His own celebrity is now part of the reason for “Late Night’s” popularity. He thinks that “it’s fair game for the media to ask about my personal life — I have nothing to hide — but I’m not an important historical figure, so it’s good to keep some things private”. He has been single since his last, nine-year relationship ended in 1999, though the tabloids have been speculating about new girlfriends. “I’m going out with Cher now. Please write this!”

O’Brien returned to Harvard last June, to give the traditional Class Day speech before the graduating class. “I was very much aware that someone else could have been speaking that day, and that no one might have remembered Conan O’Brien — a complete nonentity, who had graduated in 1985, with a degree in American history and literature, and had vanished. That keeps me humble. I feel really lucky — I’m the poster boy for luck. Getting this job was an extremely fortunate break.” (x)

[aligarbawaukesha]

How to List References for a Job: Tips, Examples, and More

If you’re looking for how to list references for a job (or who to list as references for a job), then you’re in the right place.

I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about giving professional references for a job – on your resume, on applications, after the interview, and when recruiters ask.

I’ll also cover the mistakes you need to avoid if you want to get hired.

Let’s get started…

References on a Resume: Why You Shouldn’t List Them

I don’t recommend putting references directly on a resume. Ideally, your references will be people you’ve spoken with recently and are willing to speak highly of your work. You don’t want to flood these people with a huge amount of phone calls. You want to “save” them for when an employer is truly interested in you.

This is what the best, most in-demand job seekers do! Imagine you have 20 companies trying to hire you. Are you going to just send them each a list of your references, and have each of your references take 20 phone calls? No way!

So to position yourself as an in-demand candidate and appear modern/up-to-date in your job search, I recommend NOT including professional or personal references on your resume.

I also don’t recommend saying, “references available upon request,” on your resume. This doesn’t need to be said; employers already assume you have references that you can provide. So including this sentence just makes your resume format look outdated.

References on Job Applications

Since you don’t want to give references too early (as discussed above), you should not provide a list of references on an application form, either.

Instead, put a note indicating that you have multiple personal and professional references that you’re ready to provide, however, you’d like to speak first to ensure that the position is a potential good match.

It’s okay to say that you don’t give references before having an interview.

“Won’t This Cost Me Interviews?”

If you’re worried about losing out on job interviews when you apply for jobs, you could list names and positions, but no contact info. That way, the employer or recruiter sees that you have references ready to go, but understands you’d like to have a real interview first.

Here’s a sample of how it would look:

Reference Name: Bethany Jones

Relationship: Bethany was a fellow Customer Support Associate at ABC Company

Email: Will be provided after job interview

Phone number: Will be provided after job interview

When Should You Provide References to an Employer?

The right time to give your list of references to an employer is when you know they’re interested in offering you the position.

It should be a late-stage step, not the beginning of the process. Remember: You don’t want to waste your reference’s time by asking them to talk to countless employers who may or may not even want you on their team! 

So it’s best to try to hold off on giving your references until you’ve had at least one or two interviews – for example, a phone interview and then a face-to-face interview with the hiring manager.

That way, you’re not asking too much of your references, and you know that you’re close to the end of the process when you do provide a list of professional references to the company. 

One exception: If you were fired or laid off, or a recruiter or employer has some other concerns in a first conversation, they may ask for a reference ahead of time. You can consider providing one great reference if this is the case.

How to Respond to Recruiters Asking for References

Throughout your job search, you may also have a recruiter asking you for references.

When a recruiter asks for references, it’s okay to tell them that you have multiple professional references that you can provide, but you have a policy of not giving out references until you’ve had an interview with the company and made sure the position is a good potential fit. 

Explain that you’re happy to give references and you certainly understand that an offer won’t be made without it, but that you aren’t comfortable providing references upfront. Tell them that you’ll provide them directly to the hiring manager when the time comes.

One exception: If you were fired or laid off, a recruiter may want to talk to a reference just to hear someone verify your explanation for why you were fired.

They’re going to invest time/effort into working with you and helping you find a position, so they want to understand your story.

In this case, it might be a good idea to provide one reference upfront to put their mind at ease and get them to buy-in to helping you. But for everyone else, tell them you need to interview for jobs first, and you’ll provide references at the appropriate time.

For a full explanation of how recruiters work and how to get them to help you, read this article.

Warning: The “Hidden” Reason Recruiters Ask for References

Recruiters from staffing agencies will often ask for a list of professional references in the first conversation as a way to build their network and find even more job seekers to work with.

They’ll call the references and ask a few questions about you, but also try to build a relationship so they can represent that person in their job search next time they’re looking for a change.

So, be aware of this, and don’t let recruiters get your references before you’ve spoken with an employer directly! This is yet another reason to tell them you do not give references before having an interview and knowing if the employer is interested in your background. 

Professional vs. Personal References

Professional references are people who have seen your work first-hand and have been colleagues, bosses, or supervisors in past jobs. (Or occasionally, someone you’ve supervised). If you’re an entry-level candidate, then your professional references can be professors/teachers.

On the other hand, personal references (also called character references) are people you know personally. This could be a former sports coach, family friend, or any other personal contact who can speak to your character and personality traits (like hard-working, excellent leadership, etc.)

When choosing personal references for a job, pick people who know you well and like you. They’ll be able to speak highly of your character and personality traits, which will help you get hired. 

How Many References Should You List?

You should include at least two professional references, and up to four. You can also list one personal reference such as a family friend, a mentor, a coach, or anyone else who can speak to your work ethic, attitude, intelligence, teamwork, or other traits that employers love to see.

How many references is too many?

Any more than four professional references is unnecessary, and will be considered to be too many by many employers. If you have more than four references, you should decide who you think will provide the best testimonials of your work and narrow your list down to those four people.

You also shouldn’t have more than one personal reference. And personal references should not be used in the place of professional references. 

If you’re looking for your first position and don’t have any work experience, don’t worry. In the next section, I’ll explain who to put as your professional references for a first job.

Listing Professional References for a First Job

If you just graduated or are looking for your first position, don’t worry – you can list teachers and professors as your references!

When you’re looking for your first position, your academic experience IS your professional experience. That’s the advice I give on your resume, too. You should write about projects, accomplishments, presentations, and leadership that you did in school, especially if you have no internships or other work experience to show.

And you can ask your professors or teachers to be references in the same way that you’d ask a colleague from a past job. We’ll cover how to ask anyone to be a reference coming up soon in this article, so keep reading.

Giving References While Still Employed

If you’re currently employed, rounding up great references can be tricky, but here are some ideas to help you:

First, if you’ve held other jobs in the past, you can approach colleagues from those previous positions and ask them to be a reference. Explain that you’re currently employed and therefore cannot use references from your current job. That way, they’ll understand why you’re contacting them even if it’s been a few years since you worked together.

Employers should understand why you can’t provide references from your current job, too. Any reasonable employer will quickly realize why you’re not able to ask someone you currently work with to be a reference.

However, if you do have a very close relationship with someone at work and trust them enough, you could also ask them to provide a reference. But if you feel this is a risk, or you’re not sure how they’ll react, DON’T risk it! 

You can simply follow the advice above and give references from past jobs.

Always Ask Your References for Permission First

Whoever you decide to ask to be a reference, make sure to talk to them first!

I’ve worked for many years as a recruiter and there’s nothing worse than calling someone’s reference and being told, “Oh, I didn’t know that they had put me down as a reference.”

It just doesn’t reflect well on you. It doesn’t make you seem upfront, or like someone who communicates well. (And those are traits that hiring managers look for in interviews).

So always talk to your references and ask if they’re okay with being listed. And also ask if they feel comfortable speaking highly of your work! You don’t want a reference who’s going to say you’re not a great worker.

So you should ask, “Are you willing to be a reference in my current job search?” but then also ask, “And do you feel comfortable speaking about the quality of my work, and recommending me to employers?”

As a final step, make sure you confirm the best phone number for them to receive calls on. You don’t want any mix-ups where someone is expecting a phone call on a different number and misses the call.  

Professional References Format Example

Once you have your list of names to give employers, you’ll want to format it and get it ready to send.

I recommend putting together your full list in a Word doc or the body of an email.  You could also ask the recruiter or employer which format they prefer. 

Example of how to format your references:

Name: John Smith

Relationship: John supervised me for 18 months at XYZ Company, from 2016 to 2018.

Email: johnsmith@gmail.com

Phone number: 555-555-5555

Availability: Weekdays from 9 AM – 3 PM Eastern Time

Reference Letters

Employers may ask you for reference letters, too. In this case, you’d ask your references to write a page about why they’d recommend you and what they observed about your work that would make you a great employee. 

Reference letters are great because you can send a copy to multiple employers, which could save time in the long-run. However, it’s best to find out what format an employer prefers (phone call vs. reference letter) and provide what they want!

If you follow the steps above, you’ll make a great impression with employers and get more job offers from your interviews… without ever providing a “bad” reference or doing anything that could cost you the job!

 The post How to List References for a Job: Tips, Examples, and More appeared first on Career Sidekick.

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[biofunmy]

Must You Say Hello to Your Co-Workers?

Send questions about the office, money, careers and work-life balance to workfriend@nytimes.com. Include your name and location, even if you want them withheld. Letters may be edited.

Sunrise Salutations

I work in a high school where two teachers receive a stipend for supervising the entrance at the beginning of the day. Both teachers sit behind a table facing the entrance, by which all teachers and students must pass, but they never say hello to the students or staff. If I say hello they sometimes respond, but other times nothing. I have stopped saying “good morning” but find it terribly uncomfortable to walk past in silence. Other times of day these same teachers try to engage in conversation, but I harbor resentment from the morning. Shouldn’t greeters say hello?

— New Jersey

The single best thing about leaving high school is abandoning the requirement to be anywhere by 7:45 a.m. I’m trying to summon a memory from the start of any first-period class. All I can come up with are recollections of signing in late at the security desk, which suggests either that I was tardy every day (possible) or that my brain is unable to form lasting memories before 8 a.m. I don’t know what time your school starts, but it’s definitely too early. Your co-workers get there even earlier.

Yes, it would be nice if everyone trudging into school received a personal country club welcome. You are clearly passionate about this issue; consider arriving at work early to greet crowds the way they deserve, pro bono.

People other than United States ambassadors to Western European nations are generally not paid to relax and have fun, yet a portion of the school’s budget was allocated as compensation for arrival supervision. Perhaps this was the only way to ensure people would show up and do it. It would be grim to speculate about why administrators feel that dedicated staff members must monitor the ingress of every person on school property. (I imagine students would prefer to slip by unnoticed to conceal flagrant dress code violations.) You give no indication that the teachers are frequently absent or otherwise preoccupied. It sounds like they are ably performing their assigned task: “supervising the entrance.”

A few possible explanations for why they might not greet you: They are scanning the perimeter for interlopers. They are not early birds. They recall past attempts to engage you in conversation that found you standoffish, owing to your secret tendency to “harbor resentment from the morning.”

The best way to make a friend is to be a friend, and the best way to force someone to say hello to you is to make eye contact and offer a clear, bright “Hello!” every morning until you break them. Let’s be gentle with one another before 10 a.m.

Fan Mail

I read your column online and always seem to draw a comparison to Hustler magazine’s Forum because so many of the letters seem contrived. Then I think about their content, and I realize the writers must be either extremely insecure or just plain indecisive. Doesn’t make me feel better, but reminds me I have just wasted a few minutes that I will never recover. We are in grave danger if any of them are allowed to vote or procreate.

— Anonymous

The internet has brought a lot of good to the world, such as the highly revered Work Friend column, but it has also facilitated the spread of incorrect information and lackluster opinions on which even holders’ grasps are tenuous. Forum was a Penthouse feature. Please click here.

Primal Screen Therapy

Our team had a meeting with another team requiring a screen share from my laptop. As the meeting ended and everyone “hung up,” my manager, who was unable to attend, messaged me to ask how it went. I was unaware that our messaging was not the private conversation I thought it was; other people were reading our messages because they hadn’t closed out their screens.

None of what we said was unprofessional or untrue, but a woman who can be difficult did a screenshot of the messages and sent it to my boss’s boss, who had been on the call. I am really upset about this invasion of privacy, lack of respect and questionable ethical judgment.

I want to address this situation, as I feel violated and wronged. This person needs to have consequences, in my opinion; she is a V.P. and should know better. I don’t know her well and will see her in person at a large-ish meeting in two weeks. I don’t really want to call her myself, and I feel like H.R. should do something, but all of this just furthers the friction, even though she’s bringing it on herself.

1) Shouldn’t this person have closed her screen and/or let me know that my screen was still open? 2) What the $&@? Sending the screen to my boss’s boss — what could she hope to achieve with that?!

— Anonymous

1) Yes, that is the professional, polite and kind thing to do, but not the most strategic, entertaining or delicious thing to do, which is why many people would not do it.

2) A good guess about what she hoped to achieve: everything from your worst nightmares — making you and your manager look careless, disagreeable, technologically inept, etc.

It certainly sounds like a lot of difficult people work in your office, but without my knowing your boss’s boss, it’s tough to determine how close your co-worker might have come to achieving her goal. That some people detest tattletales and that the leaked conversation does not sound explosive are points in your favor. I am curious who alerted you to the existence of the screenshot. If it was your boss’s boss, you have a powerful ally (good) who loves drama (chaotic).

As an ever-increasing amount of office communication takes place in digital environments offering the appearance but not guarantee of privacy for participants, it is crucial to shed the presumption that these conversations are secret. At a minimum, don’t send anything over a work platform — be it instant messenger, email or chat room — you wouldn’t feel comfortable hearing read aloud by opposing counsel. (I say this as someone with brief cameos in the internal chat transcripts of a former employer that were entered into evidence in a Florida court.) Even better: Don’t transmit anything you couldn’t say at a normal volume in a restaurant across the street from your office.

From the comprehensive way you enumerate your co-worker’s failures of judgment, and the resulting negative impacts on your emotions, I suspect you are experienced in the alchemy of transforming your complaints into others’ punishment. It is for your own office reputation that I say: This is not an H.R. issue. Your computer was not hacked.

The good news is, this will never happen to you again, because you will be paranoid about it for the rest of your life.

Caity Weaver is a writer for the Styles section and The New York Times Magazine. Write to her at workfriend@nytimes.com.

Sahred From Source link Fashion and Style

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[cathrynstreich]

The Evolution of Agent Teams

And How the Best Have Gone From Startup to Powerhouse 

Editor’s Note: This is the cover story in the February issue of RISMedia’s Real Estate magazine. Subscribe today. 

While the growth of agent teams has been prolific in the last decade, and the effectiveness of the team model has been proven many times over, the art of forming, operating and succeeding with an agent team is complex, and requires dedication and a commitment to changing with the times.

As teams have evolved, so have the dynamics of creating and running a winning agent team. Ten years ago, RISMedia published “Power Teams: The Complete Guide to Building and Managing a Winning Real Estate Agent Team.” Although teams are still defined in much the same way—two or more agents working together for a common purpose—what has changed is the staggering amount of business today’s Power Teams are closing, the rising sophistication of their professional and operational skills, and their adaptation of the latest technology and marketing resources.

That’s why RISMedia has also evolved its coverage and offering for agent teams, whether you’re just exploring the team concept or whether you’re ready to take your team to the next level. In RISMedia’s Ultimate Real Estate Team Guide, by RISMedia Associate Content Editor Liz Dominguez, we interview many of the nation’s most successful real estate teams to uncover their best practices for winning with the team model in today’s real estate environment.

RISMedia’s Ultimate Real Estate Team Guide is just one facet of our ongoing coverage for and about Power Teams in 2019. You can find more in our weekly Team Tuesday enewsletter, filled with team profiles, trends and business development strategies designed specifically for team success.

The team structure brings with it many high-level challenges, all of which can be tackled head-on with the proper tools and by taking the necessary steps to protect and educate yourself and your team. RISMedia’s Ultimate Real Estate Team Guide helps you address these challenges through our research and the expert insights of top-performing teams across the country. Remember, in the world of real estate teams, there is no one-size-fits-all solution; however, the path ahead will be easier and more successful for those who educate themselves. Following are excerpts from the first volume of the Ultimate Real Estate Team Guide.

The Legalities of Forming a Business Entity Forming a team can have myriad advantages for all agents involved; however, it is a complex process that involves a lot of legal consideration.

Sara Guldi, REALTOR® and owner of The Guldi Group at Keller Williams Realty in Maryland and coach at Workman Success Systems, manages a team of eight, including her administrative and support staff.

“When we formed the team, there were no real state guidelines, so we followed what we had learned from our broker, made sure we were in compliance with general real estate state laws and called the legal hotline for input whenever needed,” says Guldi. “When our state did issue guidelines, we had to make mostly small adjustments.”

Before forming a team, agents must consider how they’ll register it as an official business entity, as it will not be legally valid until this is done.

“We have been an S corp for the past 11 years, formerly an LLC. At the advice of our accountant, we switched to the S corp for a more favorable tax situation,” says Leigh Reed, senior vice president/partner of Heller Coley Reed at Long & Foster Real Estate. “Once the S corp paperwork was drafted, before it was filed with the state, we did have to pass it through the Long & Foster legal department to be sure we had their blessing, so they would be able to pay us as a corporation.”

Reed has worked in the real estate industry for 30 years. Her team is made up of three partners, three staff members, one assistant and 11 agents.

When it comes to teams that work in more than one state, the legalities of broker-imposed regulations can become a little more complex. Guidelines vary between states and are changing quickly.

“In Maryland, we do have a few extra layers of broker supervision that do not yet exist in Washington, D.C., or Virginia,” says Reed. “Some of this has to do with advertising rules in Maryland relative to team disclosure, and some is the contract law that forms the legal chain from the individual agent in a transaction, to their team leader or associate broker, to the sales office manager, to the state broker of record.”

Setting Expectations and Goals With Core Values Although not always written out, core values are a set of goals and rules by which all companies run their business. When forming a team, these values can be the glue that holds all members together.

Most teams use their core values as a type of contract by which their agents must abide. Jeff Ruff, president of Vutech Ruff at HER Realtors®, formed his team in 1993 with his wife, Marilyn. The team currently has 11 licensed agents.

“We look for team members with very good communication skills,” he explains. “We are very specific about the personalities of our team members and their work ethic, as the reputation of each person is critical to our team’s reputation.”

Todd Crockett, partner at The Crockett Team of Howard Hanna Real Estate, has worked in real estate for 40 years, 24 of which have been spent on a team. Currently, he manages a team of 20 agents, a marketing manager, a listing service manager and two closing coordinators with his wife, Judie, as his partner. The Crockett Team Core Behaviors were created as the team evolved, focusing around six guiding behaviors that set them apart from the competition: Collaboration, Innovation, Adaptation, Implementation, Clarification and Reiteration.

“The Crockett Team lives and breathes the Core Behaviors that instill camaraderie amongst the teammates,” says Crockett.

Tackling Financial Challenges Knowledge is power when it comes to numbers; therefore, it is imperative that team leaders stay up-to-date on finance language and the diverse options available for payroll, accounting, bookkeeping, etc.

“We keep it very simple. Selling members are given a percentage of every deal and support members are paid hourly, plus bonuses on each listing and each closing. This way, everyone has skin in the game and stays excited,” says Steve Abbe, co-team leader of Abbe/Mullinnix Distinctive Properties at Coldwell Banker Global Luxury in Florida. “The support members are paid as independent contractors, so we 1099 them each year.”

Teams have different approaches to tracking their finances. Many newer or smaller teams prefer to take on more responsibility themselves.

Abbe prefers to take on a portion of the financial tracking, as it is manageable for his team of three selling agents and two support staff members. However, he delegates the accounting responsibilities to a professional.

Cleve Gaddis, broker/managing partner of Gaddis Partners of RE/MAX Center, believes it is necessary to seek professional help with some components to ensure the business stays profitable. “We have a part-time bookkeeper/accountant who also keeps the books for our property management company,” says Gaddis. “I had owned several businesses in the past myself, so setting up payroll and other financial systems wasn’t really different than other businesses. We used a payroll service for the first few years and now we handle payroll in-house.”

The real estate industry can be unpredictable at best when it comes to making sales throughout the year; therefore, most teams are committed to monthly business tracking. “It’s not a yearly plan; it’s a monthly plan. We need to know exactly what we are projecting per month and what we have actually closed,” says Collette McDonald, president of Collette McDonald & Associates at RE/MAX Around Atlanta. “My company holds a minimum of six months of operating expenses so that we can adjust when market conditions fluctuate.”

Of course, determining what the numbers are is not enough. Once spending and revenue are tracked on a monthly basis, teams must formulate budgets and business plans based on the trends they see in their financial history.

“We try to use percentages as much as possible in setting budgets. As an example, we want our marketing, lead generation and conversion costs for buyer clients not to exceed 25 percent of the company dollar,” says Gaddis.

In addition, adjusting to changes in the market and changes to the team’s spending should be part of everyone’s business plan.

“Real estate is a little bit different because one year can have very little to do with the next year,” says Abbe. We found that we are constantly adjusting our budget. In real estate, the budget has to be a ‘living document.'”

And with more experience comes increased elasticity in business planning and budgeting.

“My budget evolves with the market,” says McDonald. “I know exactly what I have to close in order to pay the bills based on the last four years of expenses. Expenses change, but from experience, I know the range we have to make in order to stay at the level we are at and grow 5 percent per year.”

Successful Marketing and Profitable ROI Every new marketing product introduces a learning curve, not only to use the service, but also to determine how many leads it generates and if those leads turn into profits. The real estate industry heavily relies on lead generation and conversion, and so marketing sources must be analyzed carefully, or business owners risk losing money and time—two of the most valuable assets for a real estate team.

But how is the value of a product determined? There are many factors, but return on investment (ROI) is the most significant. Each team has to determine which products work best for their unique format and business style. In order to do this, they must first identify their team’s source of business—what makes them run and what drives profits.

“We use a variety of marketing tools, including ‘For Sale’ signs; open houses; ‘Just Sold’ postcards; personal Facebook posts and paid business page Facebook posts; 9,000 farming emails every other month; SEO with my world-class website; obtaining testimonials on Zillow, Trulia, realtor.com®, Yelp, Google and Facebook; email blasts; and a variety of print advertising directing people to my website,” says Mike McCann, associate broker of The Mike McCann Team with Keller Williams Realty Philly, who is known as “The Real Estate Man.”

“Our marketing expenses incorporate so many different products, systems and tools that are all necessary to invest in,” adds McCann. “In this day and age, you have to be everywhere. You can’t hone the market on just one site or by using just one tool. You have to dip into your pockets on every source of possible lead generation.”

Lindsey Gudger, co-founder, with Jason Gasbarra, of The Every Door Team at Every Door Real Estate, has worked in real estate for four years, and lead generation sticks out clearly as his team’s most successful marketing venture.

“Lead generation, hands down,” says Gudger. “We spend the vast majority of our marketing budget on generating online opportunities—around $80,000 per month.”

Once a profit source is identified, teams must find a vessel that works alongside it to create efficiency, streamline the process and provide results. This can be found in a third-party product or in technology offered through the brokerage.

Whether the need is a CRM, a dialer, a social media presence or an online lead profile, it is imperative that team members research all possible avenues before deciding on a product.

“I have trusted team members who bring the innovation to me when they hear of products they think can benefit our team,” says McCann. “Often, I will try new things to see if they generate leads.”

Sometimes, the best research comes in the form of recommended services that have been successfully implemented by other teams.

“Most of the new products we look at come to us through private social media groups where top performers share what’s working for their teams,” says Gudger. “When it comes to evaluating the vehicle, it’s all about the consumer experience.”

A trial period is necessary to determine whether a marketing product is providing the necessary results, not only to generate leads, but also to pay back all expenditures. These trial lengths vary by team, lasting anywhere from a few weeks to a year.

In terms of lead conversion, scale may play a role in timing, as well.

“Scale is a separate issue. Does the vendor have enough consumer traffic to generate enough leads? We feel that a six-month trial is the only real way to assess this aspect,” says Gudger. “You’ll have leading indicators in as little as three months, but a test less than six months isn’t going to give you a big enough sample size to truly evaluate a new vehicle.”

Marketing strategies should be discussed at recurring team meetings and adjusted accordingly to adapt to changes in the industry.

“A busy inbox of incoming leads does not mean you have a strong ROI. We’d happily use a vehicle that provides just a handful of leads per month assuming the return on investment is there,” explains Gudger. “You can’t feed a team off a vendor like this, but if you have the right systems in place, a handful of providers with this profile can absolutely build a strong business.”

RISMedia’s Ultimate Real Estate Team Guide will be available for purchase in print and online in the coming weeks.  

Maria Patterson is RISMedia’s executive editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at maria@rismedia.com.

The post The Evolution of Agent Teams appeared first on RISMedia.

The Evolution of Agent Teams published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

[ourmrmel]

Climbing the Stepping Stones to Career Success

Climbing the Stepping Stones to Career Success

By Mel Feller, MPA, MHR

Mel Feller Seminars, Coaching For Success 360 Inc. /Mel Feller Coaching    

 This article is for every working person, who somehow find themselves in the role of breadwinner and striving to improve their living standards.

 The heading of this article could just as well have been “How to position yourself for promotion” or “How to position yourself for career advancement” or “How to climb the success ladder” or something similar. No matter the title, good work ethics is something everyone must strive for.

 The answer on how to cultivate good work ethics is simple. Make yourself one of the linking pins in your organization. A linking pin is someone to whom everybody turns to, to get information and advice from. It is also someone who can link persons, sections and departments for better co-operation. However, most important of all, it is someone who can exert influence upwards, downwards and sideways in the organization structure. In other words, you must be able to influence people around you to carry out the wishes, policies and strategies of top management, by earning respect through your display of expertise and thoroughness. You must also be able to represent the valid wishes and needs of lower levels to top management. You can become a linking pin by striving to attain the following traits:

 Career step 1: Cover yourself with expert knowledge in your technical field of operation.

 If you are an electrician, do not only be satisfied with your qualification. Try to gain more in depth expertise in this technical field of yours, to distinguish yourself from other electricians.

 If you are an accountant, avail yourself of in depth knowledge about bookkeeping practices by studying or reading up on subjects pertinent for your field of technical expertise.

 You can bluff your way during interviews, but once you have been appointed, people expect from you to perform. This is where the cookie crumbles or you succeed. The point is you must not only perform at an average level, but you must display exceptional or above average expertise, so that others can start to rely on your opinions and advice.

 Career step 2: Produce accurate work.

 Cultivate a habit to carry out your work correctly with a minimum of mistakes. Sloppiness or tardiness must definitely not be present in your attitude, personal appearance or any of your work outputs, be it notes, memo’s, letters, spreadsheets, conversations or anything related to your work.

 Imagine what will happen if debits and credits are, being processed the wrong way around in a financial department. It will have disastrous consequences. Strive for professionalism in what you do.

 Career step 3: Be quicker than most.

 This is one of the best ways to demonstrate your superiority and efficiency. By executing duties and tasks speedily, you are being more productive and can entice more important tasks your way and thereby not only increase your merit ratings, but also your ultimate job rating. If you can perform your duties speedily, do not wait and stay idle, but present yourself to your superior for more work. Find a balance to be both quick and accurate.

 Career step 4: Display awareness of productivity.

 This must start with your own self-evaluation. Ask yourself constantly if you are giving more back to the organization in value, than what you are being paid every month. Although not easy to calculate, just thinking about it may have enough of an impact. Just imagine for a moment if your organization were to be solely dependent for profit on the output of human beings only. In other words nothing to sell or produce but labor output. If you can do more, it reflects directly on profit. Luckily, many organizations have machines that make up in productivity for what is lost by unproductive employees. Nevertheless, being more productive in what you do as a human being, can contribute significantly to the profits of any organization. As salaries are one of the highest cost elements in any organization, this is one of the first cost elements that come under scrutiny during times of cost reduction efforts. You have to show your worth in order not to be included in downscaling of the labor force. However, more positively, you have to show your worth to be counted in for consideration for promotion.

 Career step 5: Get rid of time wasters.

 Arriving late for work, stretching of tea and lunch breaks and elongated private conversations on the phone, are not only wasting your valuable time, but are a reflection of your poor awareness of productivity. Private conversations on the telephone are one of the most abused methods of stealth stealing from your employer. If you cannot be trusted on the use of the telephone, what else can you be trusted with? Are you a role model for getting rid of these time wasters or for abusing it? Are you earning respect for your ethical conduct in eradicating time wasters or are you just one of the crowd? If you discipline yourself and others around you on the economical use of time, you are on your way to earn a respected leadership role. Others must detect a sense of urgency in your execution of duties to begin to respect and follow your example. Do you want to be a follower or a leader? Do you want to stay obscured in the crowd for the rest of your life or do you want to be recognized? There is such a thing as telephone ethics, you know. If you are prepared to pay for your use of the employer telephone, you are not abusing it. Do you really know what you are costing your employer for using the phone? You are not supposed to use it for private purposes in the first place. It is a privileged instrument entrusted to you to help you in your work and not to cause financial loss to your employer.

 Career step 6: Be open-minded and ready for organizational changes.

 Whenever changes are announced, be positive and display a leadership role in executing the new policies and strategies. If you participated in the planning of the changes, then you were forewarned. However, even if you experience unexpected changes, be first to look out for positive reasons for such changes and to influence others around you to accept it with positive attitudes. Defending superiors and higher management will increase your leadership status and trustworthiness. In a political sense, it will display your role as siding with management against the disgruntled crowd.

 Career step 7: Arrange and organize your paperwork.

  A good filing system allows you to retrieve required documents and information fast for own use or for use by other parties. It is a reflection of your efficiency and your ability for sound logic thinking. If you surround yourself with paperwork to impress on others how busy you are, you are making the mistake of your life. It can be interpreted in many different ways, like you cannot cope with the workload, you cannot delegate, you spend too much on time wasters, you are too slow and worst of all you cannot manage yourself or others. If you cannot get rid of papers, you will not find the time to attend to the needs and development of your subordinates. You will also not find the time to manage your colleagues or to discipline your section or department. You will be a walk over and ripe for being misused by subordinates not respecting you. Rather be a reliable source of information with the time for training your subordinates and others. Clean up your desk to make time for others.

 Career step 8: Read up on the principles of supervision and management.

 Familiarize yourself with the knowledge on how to be a good supervisor or manager. If you can display management capabilities, you will sooner be identified for promotion. It is better to be promoted for your managerial capabilities than for your technical proficiency. It will allow you to perform your managerial duties better. Apart from being technically proficient, prepare yourself in advance for possible promotion. Make yourself ready and available for your employer and the future needs of your organization.

 Career step 9: Confidential information.

 Your treatment of confidential information is going to be a good gauge of your character. You only have to make one mistake in this area, not to be trusted ever again. If you have a problem in this area, rectify it quickly. Your superiors and employer have to trust and rely on your discretion with confidential information. Some information must be kept confidential or secret until it is time for disclosure.

 You must prove your ability for discretion with this type of information, so that they know they can trust and rely on you. Let them know and understand that you are part of management.

 Career step 10: Show initiative.

 Make suggestions to improve methods of work and systems. See problems as opportunities for improvement. Do not just report problems, but also analyze it wisely and make recommendations for improvement. Recognize opportunities for improvement and development and utilize it.

 Career step 11: Be honest, open and direct.

 Harboring a secretive attitude of slyness with hidden agendas, will not remain a secret for long. Other persons will eventually detect it and despise you for it. You can just as well fire yourself, because that is where you will end up. Nobody will trust you after you have been exposed. Be open and direct in your communications and handling of conflict situations. Do not be afraid to air your opinions, as long as it is genuine and true. Truthful mistakes can always be remedied later on.

 Mel Feller, MPA, MHR, is a well-known real estate business consultant and speaker, specializing in performance, productivity, and profits. Mel is the president of Mel Feller Seminars with Coaching For Success, Inc. and Mel Feller Coaching, a real estate and business specific coaching company. His three books for real estate professionals are systems on how to become an exceptional sales performer.  His four books in Business and Government Grants are ways to leverage and increase your business Success in both time and money!

[vcareersone-blog]

The 10 worst summary mistakes to avoidCommon resume errors are falsely easy to do.

You're applying for crazy jobs, but it seems like all your apps are gone in the black hole of the internet. Wondering why your resume does not give you an interview?

Vcareers willing to bet that it is not because you are not qualified or just not good enough (which, for the record, is good enough). It is likely that your resume contains one or more "fatal errors".

Job seekers, beware! All it takes is one shot for your job search to take its place. It is clear that novice workers need to be vigilant when writing your first resume.

Do you think your resume is bullet-proof? Even the most experienced professionals are still guilty of errors.

With only six seconds to impress a recruiter, having an error on your resume is not a risk, even the one looking for the boldest should take. After all, your resume is the first point of contact you establish with a potential employer. So you want this first impression to be a strong and clear demonstration of what you are doing in your life. That's how you get an interview, and then once you've rocked, a job.

When you write your CV - or update it every six months - make sure it does not include any of the common resume errors listed below.

1. Typos and grammatical errors

Yes, we know that this is probably the most obvious of all resume builder tips: it must be grammatically perfect. If your resume is not, employers will read between the lines and draw unflattering conclusions about you, such as "This person does not know how to write" or "This person obviously does not care.

2. Lack of details

Your resume should not just indicate the obvious to a hiring manager. Employers need to understand what you have done and accomplished. For example: A. Worked with employees in a restaurantB. Recruited, hired, trained and supervised more than 20 employees in a restaurant with annual sales of $ 2 million These two terms could describe the same person, but the details and specifics of Example B will likely attract the attention of the employer.

3. Attempt to approach 

"one size fits all"Every time you try to develop a generic resume to send to all job postings, you almost always end up with something that employers will throw in the trash. Your lack of effort shouts, "Your company does not interest me particularly. Frankly, any job will do the trick. Employers want to feel special and want you to write a resume specifically for them. They expect you to clearly show how and why you are in a specific organization.

4. Emphasize homework instead of accomplishing

Your resume should show how good you are at work, but it's too easy to switch to a mode in which you simply start listing your tasks. For example:

Attend group meetings and record minutesWorked with children in a daycareUpdated departmental filesIt's more or less an echo of your job description. However, employers care less about what you did than about what you did in your various activities. They are looking for statements more like these: Recording of weekly reports and compilation in a Microsoft Word-based file for future reference of the organizationDeveloped three daily activities for preschoolers and prepared them for a 10-minute vacation programReorganization of 10-year-old heavy files, making them easily accessible to department members

5. Go too long or cut things too short

Despite what you can read or hear, there is no real rule governing the duration of the resume. Why? Because human beings, who have different CV preferences and expectations, will read it. This does not mean that you should start sending five-page resumes, of course. As a general rule, you should limit yourself to a maximum of two pages. But do not feel obliged to use two pages if you want. Conversely, do not cut your resume just to make it conform to an arbitrary one-page standard.

6. Bad summary

Employers read your career summary, but all too often, they furrow vague pufferies of the type "Professional growth sought." Give employers something specific and, more importantly, something that focuses on their needs and yours. Example: "An accomplished marketing executive who has developed award-winning campaigns for Fortune 500 clients that have contributed to a 50% increase in stock value."

7. No action verb

Avoid using phrases such as "responsible for". Instead, use action verbs. Not only do these words help show your initiative, they also help boost your resume. For example: Resolving user questions as part of an IT support center serving 4,000 students and staff.Increase in the number of organic research visits by 20% compared to the previous yearDevelopment of a comprehensive integration program for new employees

8. Leave important information

You might be tempted, for example, not to mention the jobs you have done to earn more money for your studies. However, the non-technical skills you have gained from these experiences (eg, work ethic, time management) are more important to employers than you think.

9. Visually too busy

If your resume is a wall-to-wall text with five different fonts, it will probably be a headache for the employer. So, show your resume to several other people before sending it. Do they find this appealing visually? If what you have is hard for the eyes, revise.

10. Incorrect contact informationI 

already worked with a student whose resume seemed incredibly sound, but he was not hindered by his employers. So one day, I asked him jokingly if the phone number he had written on his resume was correct. It was not. Once he changed it, he started receiving the calls he expected. Moral of the story: Recheck the smallest details, taken for granted, as soon as possible.

[ultralifehackerguru-blog]

New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/xoxo-what-does-your-email-sign-off-say-about-you/

“XOXO”: What Does Your Email Sign-Off Say About You?

Once, many moons ago, I was the managing editor of a small, biweekly political magazine run (mostly) by men. Closing the issue was a fortnightly ordeal in which I spent the afternoons and evenings harassing my colleagues, propelled by the quixotic hope that I could finish before the wee hours of the morning. A midnight stopping point was considered a triumph; more often I found myself staring down the single digits of the clock as the production manager and I huddled over the final proofs. I once walked three miles back to my apartment, unable to find a cab, at dawn. (It was the pre-Uber days.)

In these wee hours, my staff and I could get a little loopy. I nominally supervised a cohort of recent college grads, just a few years younger than I was at the time. In reality, I was more like a bossy older sister who required emails with very specific subject lines. (I had an issue to close! There was no slack.) When one of my ostensible subordinates, in the middle of one of those dazed late-night sessions, closed her email with an xoxo, she immediately followed it with another message to apologize . “I’m so sorry,” she wrote. “That is totally not something you write in a work email.”

I’ve been thinking back to this moment recently when I realized I was regularly deploying Gossip Girl’s preferred sign-off in my professional correspondence as a senior editor at Vogue, and that such liberal sprinklings of affection never would have entered my digital lexicon when I worked at the male-dominated political publication. Did my somewhat unlikely evolution into an editor at a fashion magazine sap my correspondence of its gravity? If Mike Pompeo’s recent email to his State Department employees is anything to go by—“Keep on crushing it”, he wrote—the penultimate line of an email is an opportunity for burly encouragement, not feminine demurral. Was each closing of my correspondence depleting the impact of everything that had come before?

Much has been written about the femininity of the exclamation point—make-nice punctuation that masks an emotional labor that falls disproportionately on women. “We expect exclamation marks (i.e., friendliness) from women,” wrote Amelia Tait in a 2017 piece published in The New Statesman, “and women add exclamation marks to live up to this expectation.” Is xoxo is the new exclamation point? I asked a friend who works in PR, someone who is paid professionally to play nice—and, coincidentally, works in a field dominated by women—if she uses xoxo in her email correspondence, and she wrote back with chipper pep: “Really funny you mention the xo, as I’ve recently noticed I’m using xx far more than I used to.” (She’d never use xoxo in a cold email to a stranger, she asserts, and limits herself to one exclamation point per email.) While more of a xx gal than the xoxo variety, Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, perhaps the most popular book on punctuation ever written, also told me that she notes the tendency for physical symbols of affection in her woman-to-woman correspondence. “Thinking about it, I do notice when women don’t break out the x after a little while. I assume that the x is being deliberately withheld, and that they are telling me, ‘Let’s not get overfamiliar here.’” The pattern held when assessed from the other side: “The xo greeting is something I find unimaginable from a man,” said John McWhorter, a (male) linguist at Columbia University. “Or just maybe, it is conceivable from a gay man, but that means we are more precise and say that it is inconceivable of a straight male (cis male)?”

The idea that language is gendered has a long history, dating, most prominently, to linguist Robin Lakoff’s work in the 1970s, which asserted that gender-based differences between men’s and women’s speech resulted in power differentials. “The ultimate effect of these discrepancies is that women are systematically denied access to power, on the grounds that they are not capable of holding it as demonstrated by their linguistic behavior,” Lakoff wrote. That work has been criticized in the years that followed, but it’s also hard to ignore its impact. (See here, and here, and here for the endless fascination with the girlishness of the exclamation point.)

And something about Lakoff’s theory rings true for me in 2018 when I consider my reliance on xoxo. More recent research seems to show that women do behave differently in their email. At a New Zealand company studied in the grippingly titled Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, researchers found that women at one company were much more likely to act “polite” in email correspondence. Both men and women were equally inclined to include some kind of closing, but men were much more likely to use just their name, while women were almost twice as likely to include a “thanks” or other softening addition. (These findings didn’t hold across all companies; there’s a lot of variation due to workplace culture.)

When I asked a former boss who is a friend—a woman I admire for her forthright sensibility and voracious work ethic—if she uses xoxo, she was (characteristically) to the point: “If anything, as I’ve managed more people, and have to speak to men in positions of power, I’ve clipped my language a bit. Never xo. Instead, ‘Thanks’ or ‘Best.’” It was the inverse that proved my fears; arguably my most successful female friend had a deep-seated aversion to emailed hugs and kisses. Forget xoxoas the new exclamation point—was the email sign-off the new sparring ground for the battle of the sexes?

Time to consult the gendered-language grande dame herself. “Closings (ways of saying ‘goodbye’) are the trickiest points in a conversation, written or oral,” reminded Lackoff in an email. “You have to both get away and convince your addressee that you still like them and want to continue the relationship in the future.” Duly noted, but what does this mean for xoxo? Was I insecurely shouting “like me!” at the end of every missive in an effort to negotiate this tricky terrain like an eager-to-please woman? “I agree that it’s more apt to be used by women than men: We’re more comfortable expressing intimacy, real or conventional,” Lackoff wrote. “It isn’t that men are necessarily more cold or businesslike, but that they are apt to be more comfortable representing themselves that way rather than seemingly giving someone who might be a mere acquaintance a glimpse into their true selves. I think women are more comfortable seemingly erasing those boundaries.”

And there’s the rub—the feeling that my slide into this form of intimacy wasn’t altogether bad. Did I want always to conduct myself at work in a coolly professional way, or was I comfortable injecting some occasional levity—some affection—into my 9-to-5 transactions? It’s not that politics is all business and fashion is all fluff—not at all. As far as I know, the magazine I currently work for never closes in the early morning hours, and that’s entirely due to the culture of extreme efficiency that governs our every keystroke—x’s and o’s included. In greatly reductive terms: If the job gets done, why should I act more like a man? Wouldn’t it be acceptable to think that a man should act more like a woman?

Perhaps, as McWhorter suggested to me, the entire problem with my question is in thinking about xoxo or any phrase alongside a gender binary. There’s an ongoing quest, he reminded me, “to degender language usage completely”—hence them and they as nongender pronouns, and Latinx. “The guiding principle, though, is that changing language can only go so far,” he said. “As long as gender is a perceived binary, ways of indexing it in language will never die.”

As I was writing this piece, corresponding with sources and friends, I became acutely aware of how I was closing each email. I’d linger above my signature line, paralyzed by the message behind the message. Mostly I just concluded with “Thanks” and moved on to other things. But when informed, intelligent responses came back to me signed xoxo at the bottom, I had to smile.

(C)

[onlinemarketingcamp-blog]

Has social media marketing gone too far?

Last year, a University of Toronto student emailed the editors of The Varsity with a story idea about a local food service company. The student hadn’t written previously for the newspaper, which is geared at the university’s 60,000 undergraduates, but he still got the assignment. After the piece ran, editorial staff discovered the author was actually a social media “brand ambassador” for the company, and the newspaper decided to pull the article from its website.

Editor-in-chief Danielle Klein says she is deluged with online solicitations from students who have struck promotional deals with the marketers of products, local clubs or other advertisers. Using their personal social media accounts, they tweet or post on various social media platforms for the brands, but they also come forward with offers to help news organizations like The Varsity write articles promoting certain products or services, typically without disclosing their connection. “I find that quite dishonest, because you’re representing that ad as content,” says Klein.

Apart from the journalistic breaches, Klein adds that she’s struck by the terms of those agreements – in exchange for promotional tweets or posts tucked into their newsfeeds, these young brand ambassadors often get freebees, and perhaps a bit of cash or “resumé lines.”

“That’s a problem,” she says. “It’s sort of tricking people.”

Welcome to the wild west of social media marketing. With young people turning away from Facebook, marketers focused on this huge demographic segment have turned to new, and ethically problematic, ways of reaching audiences that are spending much more of their time on established or emerging platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. Unlike Facebook with its unmistakable in-your-face promotions, these other platforms have become vulnerable to a stealthier type of marketing, one that doesn’t come tagged as advertising.

In the past year, according to Toronto social media marketer Steve Tam, some brands have sought to establish marketing relationships with so-called “teen influencers” – young people who aren’t celebrities but have nonetheless built up such large social media followings that their feeds become interesting to marketers looking to reach specific audiences.

It’s a practice that has raised eyebrows, and not only with student newspaper editors. “People have to know they are being advertised to,” observes Chris MacDonald, an associate professor of business who established Ryerson University’s Jim Pattison Ethical Leadership Education and Research Program. Marketers, he adds, “can’t absolve themselves [of that obligation] by using a third party.

Cristina Onose, manager of public affairs for the Canadian Marketing Association, points to her organization’s guidelines for marketing to teenagers, as well as Canadian and international regulations which require advertisers to “properly disclose” their promotional activities. “Responsible organizations advertising online are expected to be transparent about their advertising techniques,” she says.

But the reality, as student editor Klein observes, is quite different. These brands and their youthful ambassadors understand that a positive tweet hidden inside an individual’s newsfeed – a message that goes out to hundred or thousands of followers – is “the best way to disguise” an ad.

It’s like a word-of-mouth endorsement… except that it’s not.

The story of how social media advertising is morphing into a no-holds-barred marketing environment begins with an unexpected twist: an exodus of young Internet users from Facebook, the original social networking giant.

According to a recent survey of 7,200 students by U.S. investment bank Piper Jaffray, teen interest in Facebook has been falling precipitously. It found that 45 per cent of surveyed teens were using Facebook as of fall 2014, down dramatically from 72 per cent just six months earlier. The drop was so steep, reported Bloomberg, that “Facebook stopped discussing teen usage on its earnings calls after last year’s disclosure alarmed investors.”

(Of note is that Facebook, in an unusual and some say desperate move, launched a print and TV ad campaign in Toronto and Vancouver this past February aimed at building a stronger emotional connection with young users. Marketing experts believe it’s a trial run of a planned larger campaign designed to help stem its Millennial and Gen Z exodus).

Morgan Baskin, a 19-year-old Toronto high school graduate, articulates her recent thinking about the social network with which she came of age. “Honestly,” she says, “like a lot of young people, Facebook for me is like a utility, like a washing machine. It’s a way of facilitating my life. It’s nothing I’m excited to use.”

Then Baskin offers up this right hook to social media marketers: “I ignore 95 per cent of Facebook advertising. There’s so much of it and none of it is clever.” She mentions one aggravation – a proliferation of male cosmetic products on her feed. “Why are you trying to sell me beard oil?” she laughs, speculating it’s because she clicks on hipster websites too often. “Their algorithm is clearly screwed up.”

This teen breakup with Facebook hardly indicates a mounting indifference among young people to social media. Other less commercialized platforms, like Instagram and Tumblr, remain as popular as ever, while the social media space in the past year or two has become increasingly populated by new entrants: Snapchat, Whisper, Vine, and Yik-Yak, all of them providing the kind of knowing and insider-y appeal that Facebook alone delivered to those millions of early adopters a decade ago.

Ever since the early days of Facebook, young people flocked to social media sites because they promised a world free of adult concerns and supervision. “I remember that feeling of being part of something that no one else was part of,” recounts Tam.

Yet as soon as social media platforms became popular and their popularity can be quantified by analytics software, the advertising followed. Those revenues offered the only way for social media companies to remain viable after their founders burned through angel and venture capital, but the presence of advertising also made the user experience more commercial.

In other words, the problem with the social media business model may be the fact that there’s a business model at all. Says Angelo Dodaro, a partner at boutique digital agency Multivitamin Media: “Young people who grew up with social media are running away from commercialization.”

Or are they? Consider the case of Alex Lee, a baby-faced Texan teenager. In a matter of days last fall, Lee went from being an unremarkable 16 year old to an Internet phenomenon – one of those instant digital celebrities created by the law of exponential growth.

Lee, who looks like a young Justin Beiber, was working as a bagger at his local Target when someone snapped his photo. A couple of shares later, the image was moving through the account of a U.K.-based Instagram user with a large following.

The law of viral growth clicked in, and within days, Lee’s Twitter account had hundreds of thousands of followers. Teenage girls started showing up at the Target to ogle. The mainstream media soon detected the Alex Lee supernova on the horizon, and interview requests from CNN and the New York Times, among other media outlets, flowed in.

Speculation about Target’s role in the Alex Lee story spread almost as quickly. After all, the company’s brand had just received the equivalent of a steroid injection, just in time for Christmas. A Los Angeles social media-marketing firm took credit, but the company denied authorship. To this day, the answer remains unclear.

The more intriguing part of the Alex Lee story, however, started after that initial whoosh of attention. Lee had become “an influencer,” but not the conventional celebrity sort of influencer, like a hip-hop artist, a movie star or a professional athlete. Rather, he was influential because he was a kid with a large following.

In fact, Lee moved swiftly from viral Internet celebrity to a celebrity teen influencer with something to sell. His Twitter feed is now populated by pitches for a new phone app as well as an outfit that bills itself as a social media tour and music festival. (He also has a website that sells branded Alex Lee World products.)

Young people with large followings understand that social media thrives on clever, funny and ironic content – memes, gifs, or the tsunami of photos and mini-videos on Snapchat, a platform that allows users to converse using images that last for only a few seconds. With highly engaged followers, their feeds are perfect environments for promotional pitches.

“It’s a new vehicle that is definitely picking up momentum,” says Tam. Most will never get past the sort of brand ambassador stage. But others, he adds, have such huge followings that they hire agents to negotiate fees and arrange appearances. “Their parents may not even know this is something that’s happening.”

This type of promotion is a relatively new feature of our noisy media environment. Despite codes of conduct promoted by advertising standards organizations, the line between online editorial and advertiser content has become increasingly blurry in recent years. Bloggers, for example, strike agreements with advertisers that allow brands to sponsor user forums in exchange for invitations to events, samples and so on.

But tweets and posts sent out by youthful brand ambassadors or teen influencers are stripped of all disclosure-related content, even though the brand’s marketing officials likely vetted them.

As MacDonald points out, this new relationship between brands and teen influencers is anything but even. “The advertising people are supposed to know about the ethics of advertising, whereas you can’t expect a young teen to be familiar with advertising ethical standards or think it through by themselves.”

Besides trying to reach young consumers in new ways, brands may also be thinking about getting the most bang for their marketing bucks. It’s one thing to pay a supermodel or a star athlete millions of dollars to promote a product, and quite another to avoid those outlays by offering a few dollars or t-shirts to students with lots of social media followers.

Increasingly, brands are opting for other rapidly emerging tactics that hook young consumers with the kind of content they are constantly exchanging on their own feeds. Jack Harding, the director of user engagement for Poolhouse, a Toronto advertising agency and blog publisher, says some innovative marketers are establishing direct online relationships with social media users who have tweeted or posted positive messages or images about a client’s brands. The brand – or its marketers – constantly scour social media networks for favourable mentions, and then reach out to unsuspecting teens with offers of discounts or gifts.

“Users are always shocked [when they get a message from a brand], but in a good way,” says Harding. “When it does happen, it’s really unique. This conversation is something no one else has had before. It makes you feel special and more connected to the brand.”

Yet brands aren’t just trading freebies for mentions. Poolhouse, for example, publishes a website called ThreeMillionDogs that offers pet-related content and is funded by pet-product advertising. To better engage younger followers of the site, Harding, 22, started producing very short videos to send to Snapchat users. He’ll grab a snippet of a Top 40 song and lay it over one of the countless number of funny pet videos circulating online.

One recent example: a clip of a dog lifting weights with Britney Spears singing “Work Bitch” in the background. When Harding posts these snaps, they’re not only passed around; they generate new followers, new videos and a dialogue with individual Snapchat users. Eventually, that Snapchat user will receive an image of a coupon for products featured on the ThreeMillionDogs site.

The ongoing interaction, Harding observes, “builds trust. You now have a person-based approach to putting ads in front of people.” (These ads take him a few minutes to produce, and cost only his time. The return on investment is significant when compared to the enormous outlay required for more conventional advertising.)

Snapchat has become all-consuming for many teens, a trend identified early by fast-food retailer Taco Bell. The restaurant chain is recognized as one of the first firms to begin posting snaps, typically quick-and-cheerful images that have a homemade quality. Owned by PepsiCo, it has drawn the attention of brand marketers because of its especially adroit, youth-focused social media marketing methods. It was quick to spot the fast-moving teen transition to Snapchat, and in 2013 took a gamble on what was then a two-year-old and not yet fully evolved platform, says Harding. “They were on Snapchat six to 12 months before everyone else.”

Many others have since followed. Social media marketers are now intensively scrutinizing the ephemeral culture of Snapchat to better understand the platform’s youth appeal as a kind of antidote to Facebook’s relentless commercialization.

Morgan Baskin offers an instructive anecdote about Snapchat, having recently found herself totally absorbed with the snaps generated by the organizers of Fashion Week in New York. “I watched a ridiculous amount,” she says, noting that the images – smart phone photos taken next to runways and at backstage VIP events – seemed authentic and spontaneous. As she puts it, they feel like there’s a person, and a personality, behind the brand, which is precisely the point.

Ultimately, the question is whether this fast-emerging approach to social media advertising is causing undue harm to the impressionable young people to whom it’s targeted. Like many teenagers, Baskin is media savvy enough to understand the marketing imperative. If the content is clever enough, she says, “you don’t care.”

But Ryerson’s Chris MacDonald says the stories of covert marketing at and by teens should be ringing alarm bells within companies. Corporate social responsibility departments should be paying particular attention, given their mandate to think beyond compliance and embrace the highest standards of ethical conduct.

Advertisers, after all, are expected to adhere to all sorts of industry standards when they promote their products in other more established media. What is it about social media that permits those rules to be tossed out the window?

“If we’re seeing problems,” MacDonald says, “the blame has to start with the professionals and the adults who should really know better.”

Source Here: http://www.corporateknights.com/channels/health-and-lifestyle/social-media-marketing-gone-far-14268393/

[museum-mlle]

In Response To:

So earlier this morning, this lovely article came across my newsfeed. You can read the article here, and a longer version here.

Like many of my fellow public historians, I am appalled. Does this man know anything about collections? How they’re conserved and stored? Bought and sold? How nonprofits work? Anything about museums at all?

Probably very little. So let’s take this point by point shall we? In the interest of time, I’ll just tackle the shorter of the two for now.

This [the selling of collections] happens from time to time when a minor museum can’t fix the roof or keep the heat on, and the moral outrage machine goes into high gear, wailing that the sold works will be “lost” to humanity forever!

Let’s get a grip. Selling major works to save a museum, or revise its overall mission, is rare, and not a matter of art getting “lost”; they go to museums that want to show them, or to wealthy collectors who take good care of them, show them privately and almost always bequeath or give them — to museums.

This seems like as good of a place as any. First, here’s the reality of the situation. Many museums, and other similar institutions (think zoos, gardens, science centers, etc.) are non-profits. Many rely on a myriad of ways to keep the roof from leaking or the heat to keep heating. Some do better at this than others. Some have to make tough decisions, like charging an admission fee. These tough decisions should never include deaccessioning and selling collections as an option to keep the lights on. Museums who do this catch a lot of shit within the profession. Museums who do this are acting against the American Alliance of Museums’ Code of Ethics, which specifically states the “disposal of collections through sale, trade or research activities is solely for the advancement of the museum's mission. Proceeds from the sale of nonliving collections are to be used consistent with the established standards of the museum's discipline, but in no event shall they be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections.” The the simplest example, selling off a painting or two that doesn’t quite fit your mission so that you can buy a new one that does? Yes, this is an appropriate course of action for the overall health of your collection and museum. Selling off those same paintings so that you can pay the electric bill? No, that is the weakest collections related excuse in the book and the money should be found elsewhere.

As for the second part, for better or worse, museums and private collectors are understandably protective over their property. While a painting leaving the public sphere of a museum to go to a private collection doesn’t necessarily mean that it is “lost” to the art world, nor should we assume the goodwill of private collectors. At the end of the day, they have title to the painting and can do with it as they wish, even if it means the public at large won’t see it for a long time if ever again.

However, that debate is hiding a much more interesting conflict: What about the 90 percent of objects major museums have in storage that they almost never display?

Again, here’s the reality of the situation. Every museum has only a small percentage of their collection on display, for many reasons. Some of the collection will likely be too fragile to display or might be in the middle of conservation treatments. Sometimes it just needs time to rest, away from the lights and temperature and general stress of being on display. On that note, special lighting, cases, and mounts gets very costly very quickly. Not to mention, there’s only so much gallery space and we’ve come a long way from the overwhelming displays of yesteryear. At least for the most part.

The Chronicle’s usually thoughtful art critic, Charles Desmarais, writes, “cultural value, as opposed to market value, is the only worth of the objects in museum collections.” 

...

Now, about art having no financial value: It’s a major effort to deny the existence of a multimillion-dollar international market, in which works of art are traded for money in auctions and galleries every day. Here’s a big insight: Money is what museums use to allow art to create its artistic value, which is people engaging with it. Money is how museums have staff, galleries, programs and lighting.

Yes, we do prioritize the non-monetary cultural values of art and objects (and I might respond to Desmarais int he future), but that does not mean we ignore the market value. We know the financial value of our collections better that you might think, largely for insurance reasons. But the total value also includes hidden costs such as maintenance and conservation, the price to maintain proper storage and display conditions, and more. This is the value that we weigh when considering deaccession.

Yes, we need money for all of this and to fund staff, programming, etc. But having art and objects with a high monetary value doesn’t magically mean that the museum actually has that amount to spend freely. We have to get funding in other ways. Through donations and grants and fundraisers and gift shops and, yes, admission fees.

Museum professionals have cooked up a “code of ethics” that forbids them from selling from their collections except to buy more art, and tried to screen this dog-in-the-manger behavior by refusing to even estimate the value of their collections on grounds that they wouldn’t ever sell any of it or borrow against it. But if you call a dog’s hind legs tails, they are still legs and the dog still has four, and if you have a million dollars’ worth of Microsoft stock, you still have it no matter how much you may pretend that you don’t.

This leaves a sour taste sir. Are you amused by the “code of ethics” we “cooked up?” I would remind you that they are there, and followed, for a reason, much like any professional code of ethics. Perhaps it would behoove you to review UC Berkley’s own Code of Conduct. And while I’m all for transparency, nor do I think we should be actively broadcasting dollar amounts from the rooftop.

I have estimated, by triangulation from a couple of cases in which museums did value their collections, the monetary value of the collection of one of my favorite museums, the Art Institute of Chicago: It’s about $35 billion. Absurd to think the institute would just sell the collection, or sell any of its best works, but what about all that stuff in the basement that has no prospect of ever being displayed? Well, if the institute sold 1 percent off the bottom (much more than 1 percent by object count, of course) the institute could endow free admission forever (currently general admission is $25; $20 for Chicago residents).

Admission to art museums should be free for many good reasons — e.g., so we won’t exhaust ourselves trying to see the whole thing on one trip because we had paid so much to get in. The National Museums of the United Kingdom, which include the British Museum, moved to free admission and doubled attendance; that’s twice as much of the cultural value art can create, and a lot more of it for people who can’t afford a ticket.

Admission fees are one of those hot topics within the field that will never go away. For many institutions they are a necessary evil, providing even the barest amount of lifeblood. I personally agree with you- I wish more institutions were free. I believe museums are for the public, and in an ideal world no member of the public would be barred because of ticket price. But the world, as I am constantly reminded, is not ideal. Nor is a one time sale to remove admission fees.

Among the terrors touted by the anti-deaccession crowd (“deaccessioning,” the formal step that removes a work from the collection so it may be sold or otherwise disposed of, is how the art world usually refers to selling works) is that no one would ever give a painting to a museum again, because the donor would be afraid the gift would someday be sold.

To be a bit cynical, while I’m sure the donor would love for their donation to be kept in perpetuity, let alone constantly displayed with a nice plaque detailing their name, they are certainly not afraid. Very few donors would be deterred by a potential future deaccession because either way, they will receive their tax benefit, which is often a nice motivator whether the painting in question is kept for two, twenty, or two-hundred years.

Trustees and state attorneys general (who supervise the behavior of nonprofits), do your jobs: Insist that art museums value their collections, put the result in the balance sheet, and let’s have this conversation with some facts on the table.

I think this is the root of the problem. I firmly believe that there is no topic too taboo to prevent discussion. For all that we say we are for the public, we seem to have a never ending problem connecting with our public. We need to have these discussions about what we do and why we do it. We need to have public understanding and investment.

We as public historians need to do better.

[rksingh1950]

R.K.Singh In Conversation with Abnish Singh Chauhan

A poem rests

on brain signals imaged

in words and silence

one decodes with dog sense

smelling twists and turns in rhythm

that turn it prophetic. (A Poem)

The journey of poetic composition, as the poet says himself, begins with the poet and ends with the reader for which requires verbal competency, intelligence and constructive environment in order to code and decode the ‘signals’ of creative beauty in a forceful and effective manner. Since the poet is the first reader and critic of his poetic piece, he should have the capacity to articulate and interpret his own words in prose in order to judge the suitability, profundity and authenticity of his ‘signals’ in the form of emotions, ideas and images for inter-personal and intra-personal communications. T S Eliot also emphasized this in The Music of Poetry; however, in the coercive manner: “No poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is a master of the prosaic.” Therefore, Eliot’s statement may or may not be true in the making of a poetic piece; but it is certain that command over prose is an additional advantage to the poet, particularly in conversation with himself as well as with the lovers of literature on a public platform; and it is indispensable when the poet also performs as critic for efficient and captivating criticism.  Here is such an Indian poet of communicative sensibilities and critic of glittering language— Ram Krishna Singh (1950). Prof Singh, who is the contemporary of Niranjan Mohanty, Hoshang Merchant, R. C. Shukla, Gopi Krishnan Kattoor, D. C. Chambial, I. K. Sharma, Gopal Honnalgere, I. H. Rizvi, D. H. Kabadi, P. C. K. Prem, etc., knows how to raise and answer the questions about the world and its problems and how to incorporate information along with emotion in poetry and criticism in order to disseminate love and light to all the human and non-human entities of the Mother Earth through purity, charity, sacrifice and suffering: “I gave you my love/ what more do you seek/ to lighten the night/ my beloved/ let the fire burn /and consume the moth.”

Recently retired as Professor (HAG) from Indian School of Mines (now IIT), Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India, R. K. Singh has authored more than 160 research articles, 175 book reviews and 40 books, including his latest poetry collection You Can’t Scent Me and Other Selected Poems (2016) from Authorspress along with his e-book Writing Editing Publishing A Memoir (2016). He has been conferred with many awards and honours across the world. He resides at J/4 (W), Rd. No.1/Block B, Vastu Vihar Colony, N H 2, Govindpur- 828109 (Dhanbad), Jharkhand and can also be contacted at profrksingh@gmail.com

N.B: The profile of R K Singh is separately published in author’s corner. It may be clicked and viewed HERE.

ASC: Sir, you were born, brought up and educated in Varanasi— the seat of light and learning from the ancient times. How did it play its role in the formation of a silver tongue poet and rational critic in you?

RKS: A silver tongue poet? Hm… Thanks for the compliment Abnish. Varanasi is a complex city, a city of contradictions, even if it has ceased to be what it used to be in my formative years in the 1950s and 60s.

The city did influence my mental habits unconsciously, since I was born and raised in the lanes and by-lanes of its interior, with values such as freedom to think and pursue ones interests, tolerance for differences, broadness and openness of the mind, uninhibited sexpression, etc. The conscious creative influences must be the result of meeting many people, visiting various places, and experiencing life differently at different points of time.  Also, reading and observing led to serious critical thinking, writing, debating, and corresponding. I had opportunities to work part-time and be independent to do whatever I liked. Besides writing poetry in Hindi, I had opportunities to reflect on contemporary issues and express myself in a couple of Hindi dailies and weeklies long before my graduation, just as I would actively participate in youth activities, debate and speech competitions, attend musical concerts, art exhibitions, poets’ meet etc and publish reports/reviews.

The city engaged me better than the irrelevant routines of the high school, intermediate and degree colleges. The teachers disappointed me most, from childhood to boyhood to adulthood.

I must also admit that I was not uninfluenced by the chaos and crisis of the 1960s.  As a youth I had no hope, no faith, no trust in the system, nor did I know the direction of life.  It was living in constant tension about the future.  In fact it was a lonely struggle vis-à-vis the glaring waste of time in college and university.  Given my anti-establishment attitude, I was not confident that I could ever get a job or have a career.  Failure and frustration loomed large.  Poetry was the only solace.

ASC: Sir, you started your career as a journalist. The job of a journalist always requires honesty, hard work, quality writing and the courage to tell the truth. But, just after a year or two you changed your job and adopted the teaching profession, which also demands proper understanding of the subject matter, wide interest, helpful attitude, love for learning, skills of classroom management and a desire to make a difference in the lives of the taughts. How much are these experiences constructive in communicating your vision and mission in your literary works and academic writings?

RKS: As I said, as a student I had very poor opinion of my teachers.  I had no interest in teaching as a career, but Professor S M Pandeya, who supervised my M A thesis, insisted that I should not be drawn to the glitters of journalism, and rather take up teaching as a profession.  He even helped me get the first job as a lecturer in a college in Pulgaon by writing to O P Bhatnagar, who later became a life-long friend.  I was 21 years old, wanted to do Ph D in American literature from Nagpur or Bombay university, but the management won’t let me go to meet the faculty there.  I resigned the job in less than six months and came back home.

After a year (or more) of unemployment—a period I spent with Dr B Chakroverty, learning the finer nuances of literary criticism (he was writing a book on Tagore, the dramatist)—I joined the District Gazetteers Dept in Lucknow as Compilation Officer.  The U.P. Government’s job entailed revising and updating the old gazetteers.

I ignored the offer of working in IIT, Kanpur as a junior lecturer. It came just around the time I had made up my mind to work in Lucknow.

In the mean time, I was also selected as a journalist trainee in The Press Trust of India, New Delhi, and was keen to join the position. However, my IAS bosses in the Gazetteers Dept (as also my parents) dissuaded me, but seeing my enthusiasm, they released me, with the kind option to return to the post if not satisfied at PTI within three months.

I was happy to join my dream profession, despite monetary loss and hardships of living in Delhi.  But soon I discovered I was a misfit there.  I couldn’t suffer the envious colleagues and their dubious designs and practices, and so, I finally decided to quit, as soon as I got an offer from the newly set-up Royal Bhutan Polytechnic, Deothang (E. Bhutan).

I was back to teaching, which now appeared more convenient, but very demanding. The direction of my career was clear: I would professionally practice ELT/ESP, but personally pursue literature, especially Indian English poetry, and promote new/less known poets and authors by reviewing their books, writing articles about their work, and editing books and journals.  It was challenging but rewarding. Learning by doing, you know.  It is this that made me known all over, from a small place like Dhanbad. Indeed, all this needs a lot of labour and commitment, as you rightly observed.

ASC: Sir, how do you summon your emotions and experiences for composing a poem or other work of art? Do you respond to urgency, stipulation or passion for creative writings, which seems as real, animated and impressive as the rest of the world?

RKS: To tell you the truth, most of the poems I wrote have simply happened. The poetic mood, short-lived as it is, would help create from anything, anywhere, anytime. I can’t write a poem deliberately on a theme on demand.  Nor have I been interested in didactic or moralistic writing.   My emotions and experiences are, therefore, genuine and sympathetic readers can relate to them.

Personally speaking, a poem’s composition helps me get a release from myself as much as from others or whatever agitates me. I feel free by unburdening myself in verses; I experience an inner relief, a freedom from the built-up pressure, tension, unease, or whatever, you know. If it turns out to be a good poem, it offers a pleasing sensation, rest to my disturbed nerves, and peace to my inner being.

ASC: Sir, you have been regularly writing poetry with social, cultural, spiritual, ethical, mythical, erotic and aesthetic perceptions for the international audiences with the universal lessons of truth, love, compassion, pity, peace and harmony. How do you secure and evolve selfhood along with worldhood in your poetry amidst the fast changing societies and their value-systems?

RKS: Thanks for summarizing well the essential nature of my poems. I, too, think it is broad enough to appeal to audiences everywhere. Human nature is same, whatever culture, society or country, and I have tried to express what people experience universally.  I don’t seek the sublime or great or ideal, you see. I am rooted in my basic nature, which  has been evolving.  When effective, one can physically feel it, I mean, the poet’s emotion or psychosexual sensation, and partake of his self.

There is poetry in the subtlety of awareness, as you will also agree.  I feel myself in words that acquire their own existence in the process of making, in a form I may have no control over, given the pressure or urgency to express the momentness of a moment as lived, perceived, or experienced in the continuity of memory.  My selfhood extends to worldhood in my expression in a timeless frame of a moment inhering the pressure of the struggle for survival, search for meaning or purpose in an otherwise very negative, frustrating, disappointing, painful existence, or social reality, if you so like.

ASC: Sir, when you talk about (even question) sense, silence, solitude, love and sex amidst the sound and serenity of pebbles, stones, rivers and the flora and fauna of the mother earth, you imbibe and inculcate man and Nature in your poetry, which is clearly recognized and understood by your readers. In spite of that, why do you rhetorically proclaim- ‘I Do Not Question’ (1994) and ‘You Can’t Scent me’ (2016)?

RKS: The answer lies in your question itself: it’s rhetorical. Philosophically, a straight forward observation of the Purush-Prakriti or Yin-Yang consciousness vis-à-vis the monotony of existence.  I seek meaning of the mystery of life, its reality and pains through the eyes of Nature, metaphors of self-contradictions, intrinsic dissonance, or search for harmony and identity.

Having said this, let me also add a word of caution. I’m very poor at titling my poems.  In fact I don’t believe in giving a title to my poem, nor do I give a title while composing it. Titles tell too much. In my volume of Collected Poems, you’ll find no title, unless extremely necessary for identification or other structural reasons (as in Haiku/Tanka sequences).  

Without titles, the poems give readers more freedom to make their own meaning and relate to their own experiences, different from the poet’s.

ASC: In one of your interviews, you have exhorted— ‘As a poet, if I use human passion, including the sexual, I try to transmute and transmit memories of experience, possibly more with a sense of irony than erotic sexuality.’ Hence, do you think that your sexual passion expressed in your poetry is meant only for creating a sense of irony— a popular technique of poetic communication or it also stands for something else?

RKS: Sex is eternal, unchanging over time and culture.  It is the basic principle of life and creation.  It’s expression, therefore, calls for celebration.  It is central to social harmony, emotional pleasure, and inner peace. It is not devoid of sensibility.  The metaphors of sex reveal our social consciousness, our inner mind, our hidden reality.   Our sexual passion is the mirror reflecting the spiritual passion; the body reveals the soul.  One needs to appreciate it and relate to the pragmatics of my communication.  While Jindagi Kumari’s ‘The Poetics of R.K. Singh’  is a helpful essay in this respect, Raghuvanshmani Tripathi’s ‘The Asexuality of Sex: A Study of Sex Expresion in R.K. Singh’s Poetry’ should enlighten a sympathetic reader further.

ASC: You wrote the paradox in your poem ‘Degeneration’— ‘I can’t change man or nature, nor the karmas/ now or tomorrow they all delude/ in the maze of expediency and curse/ stars, fate, destiny, or life before and after/ degenerating the mind, body, thought, and divine.’ Do they survive because they bring degeneration, and ultimately death?  If so, no hope, no dream, no joy and no future?

RKS: As a poet I would prefer to refrain from interpreting my own poem for readers.  I would rather leave it to them to make sense of it anyway they like. I don’t question unless it is deliberately personally offending…But, let me see it again. Firstly, the hang of the poem ‘Degeneration’ was added when I posted it online, or submitted it to some e-journal, I don’t remember now.  Secondly, it was my own ‘degeneration’ – physical, mental, financial and spiritual—that afflicted my mood in June 2014 when I wrote it.  Things were looking blue—the envious hostility of my junior colleagues who freely distorted facts and told outright lies, the  deteriorating health condition, the bad time predicted by  astrologers, and tall claims of prophet friends, tarot-card readers and fortune tellers on the net, seeking money to turn the wheel of time in my favour.  Their expectation from me had in-built irony in that I couldn’t compromise my realization that best things in life come free.  But people are as they are—out to grab wealth, favour, profit, promotion, whatever—by cheating, telling lies, weaving dreams, or stabbing in the back.  They suffer.  I can’t change my nature, and my adversaries can’t change their nature.  Ultimately we are all subjected to our own karmas, our destiny, or the forces of Nature. No use cursing or abusing, if we delude ourselves.  The plain truth is:  if we are dishonest to ourselves, we suffer all round degeneration in the maze of our own making.  The poem, however, preaches nothing, except showing a condition. The readers can draw their own conclusions.

ASC: Sir, what is your favorite technique (s) of protest against the anomalies/ grave issues of the world, party created by highly advanced machines and electronic devices and partly by man himself?

RKS: As I told you just now, portray the picture, or create the image of what obtains, and leave the rest to the readers’ imagination, or decision, if you like. No advice, no judgment.  New technologies have thrown up new issues, new norms, new values. The important thing now is to communicate, to interact, to talk about whatever issues or values bother you as an individual. You can’t live by your prejudices or traditional ideas alone, if you hope to be relevant.  The new age demands new language, new expression, new metaphors. You will discover the new technique to protest too. But, let’s come out of the shackles of our own making, first.

ASC: Sir, how do you characterize your Haiku and Tanka? Are they influential and beneficial to the masses to a large extent or only popular among and practiced by some selected people, especially the poets and a few others?

RKS: Let’s be clear about certain basics. Haiku is a difficult genre. It is miniature poetry, a sketch of a moment’s experience, to be filled out by the reader.  It does not use sentences, nor the devices of Western poetry, nor shares its use of the sentimental and simile—preferring always contact with the real—the things of Nature and the spirit of Nature herself, the perception experience. It is down to earth; expression of what is—what you see and hear and touch; the thing itself, not a poetic or literary or philosophical view of it. In haiku we don’t elaborate or explain, only sketch our experience of the moment.  ‘Haiku moment’ is the great secret.

It took me years of preparation and practice to be able to give expression to sudden or subtle moments of awareness into the nature of passing time.  As H.F. Noyes commented, reading some of my haiku, simplicity and lightness should be the aim of all haiku, and detachment is desirable in our way of looking at things-- detachment, selflessness, and a sense of our oneness with all life.  It is achieving the union of our minds with nature, or being in league with the five elements.  It is essentially spiritual.  There is God’s abundance to feel in the three lines.  The briefer you become, the nearer you are to silence.

I have tried to express sensuousness in haiku. After all, it’s not just seeing and hearing that offer us reality, but touch as well.

Another Japanese poetry form, Tanka is a typical lyric poem of feeling and ideas, often involving figurative language, not used in haiku. You can say it is like a ‘long haiku’ in five lines.  It addresses varied aspects of contemporary living. It shares the basic qualities of all successful poems.

But if you’re a poet, writing haiku and tanka too much can suppress some of your true poetic instincts, even if their practice should improve the quality of expression of Indian English poets.  It will ensure a sense of rhythm and prevent waste of words.   Many of my poems have haiku and tanka structure as stanzas.

ASC: W H Auden said, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen. One is deluded if one believes that one can actually preserve the world in words, but one is just playing games if one doesn’t try.’ Do you agree with him? If yes, why; if no, why not?

RKS: I don’t know the context in which Auden said this, but I, too, doubt poetry can make anything happen. It can’t mould a society by itself.  It has no utilitarian function. As I said elsewhere, it can at best create some awareness, hone some finer feelings, present some specialist perceptions, reflect one’s mind and soul, remain part of cultural activities and a form of literary communication.  But it can’t make anything happen.

Personally, I don’t practice poetry with any idealistic notion.  Nor do I share the view that poetry can teach one about ethics, morality, history, politics, or revolution. It is no means for social salvation either.  It might assimilate, inhere or portray a degenerating situation, but it can’t change it. My poetry commits no such obligation. Nor can poetry or criticism become a basis for societal reform.

ASC: Sir, you have been associated with the editorial activities, evaluation work of research projects and book reviews throughout your academic/literary career. Most of the times, it is observed that the authors/ researchers manipulate (also copy, cut and paste) ideas and concepts and produce them in their works. How do you, as a critic, examine and respond to such works?

RKS: What you say is true. It is indeed very disappointing that there is so much ‘recycling’ of material going on in the name of research.  Scholars tend to practice short-cuts, but it is the job of the guides/supervisors and seniors to help them improve their language and literary abilities, particularly research writing skills, and make them read, interpret and evaluate the original texts.  If the seniors are badly trained, their scholars will depend on, what you call, manipulation of all sorts.

To minimize this, scholars are now expected to publish research papers in standard national/foreign/Thomson-Reuter listed journals before submitting their theses just as the teachers are considered eligible for promotion only when they have publications in standard journals.  We need to be sympathetic but tough in this respect.  Let’s  hope things improve in the years ahead.

ASC: Sir, your poetry has been translated into Italian, Japanese, Chinese, German, French and a few other languages of the world. Translation (also other creative works) is not an easy task. It requires proper understanding of the language, its socio-cultural references, trends and tendencies along with the mind and motives of the author. How much is it effective and satisfactory when the readers are less engaged and little interested in the translated works?  

RKS: My poems have been translated not only into Italian, Japanese, Chinese, German and French, but also into Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, Turkish, Romanian, Crimean Tatar, Bulgarian, Slovene, Croatian, Korean, Arabic, Farsi, Serbian, Esperanto, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Kannada, and Bangla.  I hardly know any of the translators personally, but the availability of my poems online has helped me reach out to a larger audience. The translators must have negotiated the difficulties you mention—I can’t comment, for I do not know all these languages (except Hindi).

The problem with most of us is that we don’t read. We don’t care to appreciate others, except ourselves. We don’t bother to study and critique the fellow-travelers but expect from  them to read and write about us.   Additionally, because we write in English, some of us in the academia expect the native speakers of English to pat us; we value their comments/opinions, and down-rate the observations by the fellow Indians, young or old.  Also, most of us don’t encourage serious academic research in writings of the new or less known Indian English authors, self-published or published by the small press.  In such a situation, how do you expect translations to be undertaken or studied?

We as academics need to change our attitude if we want to be accepted within our own country, first.  We can reach out to a larger audience via translation only if we accept the fact that people’s tastes in poetry differ widely, and most Indian poetry in English is generally considered naïve or oversweet.  Not many literary magazines will publish translation, unless it is professionally done and it reads as good as the original (or better than the original).  We need to handle several issues academically first... Frankly, I have more problems with the self-styled experts and dons than with the poets and writers who spend their own hard-earned money to publish their books and bear the cost of sharing these with them.

ASC: Sir, often it is observed that the publication and publicity (including critical appreciation) of literature are based on contact, relation, power and position. How far is it true and how can genuine authors rise and grow in such circumstances?

RKS: Internet has proved a great blessing. The age of all those few great names in Indian English writing that have been repeatedly studied and explored for academic degrees is over.  Now is the time to discover new names; study new authors, new voices. We have to prove that Indian English writing is viable, potent and worth studying; that there is something different about it; that it exists and is growing.  Your Creation and Criticism is doing that, isn’t it?

The institution I worked in Dhanbad is not a mainstream university, yet I could make worldwide publications from early 1980s almost regularly, without any personal contact, relation, or support. I had no short cuts except hard work, clear vision, and passion. You can see from my List of Publications how many new poets (who are now relatively better known) I talked about, not only from our country but also from outside.

When no computer or laptop was available, I would type out my manuscripts on my old typewriter and approach editors and publishers without any backing.  Slowly I made my impact, despite apathy from the likes of Ezekiel, Mahapatra, Shiv K Kumar, and all those Bombay poets.  I could ruthlessly challenge anyone because I never needed them for any personal favour, whatever my position. They didn’t know ESP and I didn’t care to know them (or their writings) till I started the MPhil/PhD programmes at ISM.

In fact, I won’t have time, motivation, or leave from the institution, to attend conferences, or visit other universities and develop personal relationship, except through letters.  Yet, I achieved what I wanted to, and reached the highest in the academic rung, without any personal contact.  Believe me, a good work will speak for itself, if one is honest and working hard.  Unfortunately, in most cases today, the quality is lacking, just as friends don’t want to see beyond themselves.

ASC: Sir, what is the role of social media, especially Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp, in promoting and presenting literature online when a few followers and fellow-travelers (online friends) just ‘like’ (though most of the times ignore the post), remark- ‘congratulation/ best wishes/ wow/ thanks/ excellent/ amazing and so on’ or rarely make some serious comment (s) on the post?

RKS: I view social media as a positive development for poets and writers to be noted, even if the  members’ ‘viewing’ does not necessarily mean a post’s ‘reading’, or their ‘likes’ hardly imply something serious, except a confirmation that they saw it.  If no comments are offered, it does not mean the post has ceased to exist.  One’s presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Youtube, Tumblr etc helps in reaching out internationally. You can develop contacts here. The search engines record what you do on these sites. It’s a matter of time, opportunity, and a little bit of luck when your work is searched or discovered by interested readers, scholars, editors, or publishers.

ASC: Sir, now-a-days, prizes, awards, honors are more lucrative and valuable than before as per the mind-set of the public. If an author is conferred with them, he is accepted and appreciated not only in the literary arena but also out of it. How do you perceive the politics of prize and placement of the author in the present scenario?

RKS: It is no doubt motivating to be honored with some prize or recognition. Better keep from it, if it comes with politics.  It is also wasteful if it comes after paying money, for whatever reasons.

However, if the mainstream media – TV, newspapers, learned societies, government bodies, or publishing houses—and academia ignore me or you, it doesn’t mean we don’t exist.  It’s a matter of time till we are discovered by interested readers, researchers, scholars, editors, or publishers at home or abroad.  We need to keep patience and continue to do what we are doing.  This is what is the biggest reward in itself in the IT-dominated present time.

ASC: Sir, do you have any desire left to be fulfilled in the coming years or fully satisfied with your karmas of an author?

RKS: Though I have minimized my academic activities and stopped teaching after retirement last December, I continue to be active as a poet and wish to be recognized as such by the mainstream media and academia.   As it is, I am afraid I continue to write from the margin, and I hope, in the days ahead more scholars and critics would study and explore my poetry to strengthen creation and criticism.

ASC: Sir, would you please share your opinions about Creation and Criticism— the literary e-journal of English Language and Literature?

RKS: The e-journal is a happy development in the annals of literary publications, both creative and critical, from India.  Both you and Sudhir Arora have been doing very well as editors just as your claim to be friendly to researchers and scholars is justified.  The site is indeed very friendly. Kudos. You have already broken away from the past and hopefully both of you will reach much higher.

Let the journal promote studies on native Indian English poets and authors who have been active for decades from the periphery and suffering colonialist treatment in a post-colonialist environment, even after the maturity of Indian English. Let them not find themselves deprived despite merits; let them not rot in anonymity or degenerate in the politics of belonging.  Let us discover (or re-discover) the neglected and promising good poets and writers and contribute to the development of art and criticism from the perspectives of the 21st century scholarship. God bless.

ASC: Thank you very much for your interesting and enlightening conversation.

RKS: It’s my pleasure.

The Interviewer:

Dr Abnish Singh Chauhan (1979) is a bilingual poet, critic, translator and editor (Hindi and English). His significant books include Swami Vivekananda: Select Speeches, Speeches of Swami Vivekananda and Subhash Chandra Bose: A Comparative Study, King Lear: A Critical Study, Functional Skills in Language and Literature, Functional English, The Fictional World of Arun Joshi: Paradigm Shift in Values and Tukda Kagaz Ka (Hindi Lyrics). His deep interest in translation prompted him to translate thirty poems of B S Gautam Anurag under the title Burns Within from Hindi into English and some poems of Paddy Martin from English into Hindi. He can be contacted at abnishsinghchauhan@gmail.com.

Published in http://creationandcriticism.com/113.html