Saturday, December 06, 2008

Preparing for the worst

Why was this past week so long? It just took forever to get to Friday. It’s not as if we were looking forward to anything in particular, it’s just that each day was about 28 hours long.

I did do a nifty thing at work that I was quite proud of. In thinking about the economy and the lay offs and the poor outlook for new grads, I decided to do a training for the staff on how to help people who can’t find a job, or who have been laid off. We have some new members who have never seen a down market, so I thought they could use some help before the onslaught.

Instead of just lecturing at them I decided to get them involved. I wrote some case studies incorporating pieces of different problems I’d seen before: men, women, different ages, different majors, different stages in life, various degrees of career decidedness. With the staff divided into groups, I had them analyze the cases and report how they would help the individual in each story. It worked pretty well, in fact, in the heat of their discussion, one staff member remarked, “I know this guy!”, and of course they were all composites of people I’ve met over the years. It was then I knew I was on to something.

So, a few people came away inspired to learn more and try some new things. A few of them thanked me—how about that! I finished the session with a short presentation on what I learned from the recruiting trends conference last month. (It’s bad and going to get worse.)

My professional group has a summer conference in August and the program proposals are due soon. I can never think of anything to present, but this time I’m going to put my staff training session in and see if the program committee goes for it. Of course, there is that small matter of a ban on out of state travel at the University.

The Kid was at our house this weekend, just in time for St. Nicholas Day. Nana explained how it worked and The Kid urged his father, “C’mon, Dad, put your shoes out, too!” St. Nick brought him some slippers, some simple toys and five bucks. One of the toys was a very small flower pot with special soil and seeds, so we’re intrigued about how they will turn out. On Saturday, I suggested that he might want to put out Christmas decorations in our house. He was up for that, so I said we had to dust first. He happily proclaimed that “Dusting is my game!” and so dad supervised his cleaning. They did a nice job and then set out the house Christmas bric a brac. Later they headed down to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where kids get in free. He was drawn to the Johnny Cash exhibit, since his mother likes him.

Big changes at church for 2009. As you know, our pastor died a month ago, and we only have one priest now. We are not sure if we will get another one any time soon, so our priest, who is called a parish administrator—not quite a pastor—is cutting the number of Masses in the parish from five to three. We will now have 4:30pm on Saturday, and only an 8:30am and 11:00am on Sunday.

It was apparent that something had to be done after an attendance survey showed that an average of 925 people came to Mass each weekend. The capacity of the church is 910, so it took five Masses to fill the church one time. Now I wonder if people will drift to other churches who have earlier or later Masses than we do. We’ll see what happens over the next few months.

2 Comments:

At 12/07/2008 5:14 AM, Blogger -Ann said...

Can you please send The Kid over to our place? I definitely have some dusting he could do.

 
At 12/07/2008 9:19 PM, Blogger Career Guy said...

Just train Callie to use Toby's tail.

 

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