The Office Newb turns one-year-old today. To celebrate the accomplishments of the past year I have put together a retrospective of some of the 2008’s most popular posts.
Keeping Up Appearances: Why Fat People Make Less Money
Last week I was relating the gritty details of each interview with a close friend and expressed my anxiety about receiving an offer from any one of the companies where I was interviewing. My friend responded with these words of reassurance: “Don’t worry. You have what everyone is looking for in a co-worker: Looks and personality.”
Understanding Generation-Y In 5 Easy Steps
As a public service for all those confused boomers out there, I submit my list of the 5 events that shaped the lives of Generation-Y in hopes of giving everyone a better understanding of why we act the way we do.
Top 10 Most Annoying Office Habits Of All Time
In Letterman-like fashion, I present the most horrifying, offensive and incessant co-worker behaviors that infect the office and kill your productivity.
Hate Your Job? Move To Denmark
What is it exactly about Scandinavian countries that allow them to be so much happier at work? Are they born with the courage to stand up to bad bosses? Is there something in the water that makes them have a more positive attitude than Americans? The answer may lie in the differences in government and social policy between the U.S. and Scandinavia.
How To Write Emails People Will Actually Read
I think we can be smarter about how, what and to whom we write emails. I think we can learn from Europeans and start spending more time “crafting” each email as if it were a true business correspondence rather than an instantaneous record of our immediate thoughts.
Is Having It All A Thing Of The Past?
As a young woman in the workforce, I am bombarded with media stories about the “Mommy Wars” between working mothers and stay-at-home moms. And the “off-ramping/on-ramping” a woman’s career takes if she decides take an off-ramp from the freeway of corporate life to raise children. How to best approach working motherhood seems to be a loaded question, soliciting the harshest critics on either side with no sign of agreement in sight.
How McDonald’s Is Spoiling America’s Future Workforce
Children are no longer being taught the satisfaction of hard work and a job well done. They are being taught that money is the only reason to do anything. Is it no wonder then that the younger generation of workers now entering the workforce expect to be paid six-figure salaries and work on their laptop at the beach after only 6-months employment? Is that not the reward they’ve come to expect from a lifetime of trading performance for money?
Age Is The New Glass Ceiling
The story just serves to illustrate my point, respect should be given based on proven performance. Period. Years served is only a measure of how long someone has managed to hold onto a job, not on whether they are a good employee. Past experience can be a good indicator of whether someone will have the skill set to perform well at a certain position in the future, but the true test of their productivity and quality as an employee can only come from actually doing the work.
Are CEOs 275 Times Better Than The Rest Of Us?
A CEO is charged with making decisions both large and small. They lead the company, they have the ultimate say and absorb the responsibility of making the right decisions–all of the time. The fate of the company rests on their shoulders and they should be compensated accordingly. But a company is not a singular entity. One person alone could not run a fortune 500 business. Does not every employee from the executive in the penthouse to the receptionist in the lobby play a vital role in making a business successful?
My Advanced Degree Is Ruining My Relationship
A recent study, reported in The Wall Street Journal, has found that women with MBAs are twice as likely to be divorced than men with an MBA degree. Women with professional degrees in law or medicine also seem to get divorced at higher rates than their male counterparts.
This blog isn’t just about me and what I think, it’s also about what you, the readers, put into it as well. So I want to thank you, especially to my subscribers, for making this blog as successful as it is.
Keep reading and I’ll see you all in 2009!
The Office Newb 
Happy Birthday. I am rereading some of these stories. This is one of the first blogs that encouraged me to take more control of my career rather than just taking the highest paying job I could get by randomly answering want ads.