Remote Job Quotes

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.

[talking about the Holocaust] 'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.' 'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

make an agreement to exercise mutual control over each other. The unspoken pact between them is, “It’s my job to make you happy, and your job to make me happy. And the best way to get you to work on my life is to act miserable. The more miserable I am, the more you will have to try to make me feel better.” Powerless people use various tactics, such as getting upset, withdrawing, nagging, ridiculing, pouting, crying, or getting angry, to pressure, manipulate, and punish one another into keeping this pact. However, this ongoing power play does nothing to make them happy and mitigate their anxiety in the long term. In fact, their anxiety only escalates by continually affirming that they are not actually powerful. Any sense of love and safety they feel by gaining or surrendering control is tenuous and fleeting. A relational bond built on mutual control simply cannot produce anything remotely like safety, love, or trust. It can only produce more fear, pain, distrust, punishment, and misery. And when taken to an extreme, it produces things like domestic violence.

Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus's but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor...

Mom removed all games that remotely suggest violence and death-but Cody's doing a good job of making harmless cartoon characters suffer in fresh and inventive ways.

This is one big problem with working remotely: no one believes you have a job at all.

The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the east ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of solving Amy. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. My old Amy, damn, she was fun. She was fun. She made me laugh. I'd forgotten that. And she laughed, From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small finger-shaped hollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

Left-wing progressivism” and “managerialism” are synonymous since the solutions of the former always involve the expansion of the latter. To stay with the example of LGBT causes, these may seem remote from something as technical as “managerialism” but consider the armies of HR officer, diversity tsars, equality ministers, and so on that are supported today under the banner of “LGBT” and used to police and control enterprises. The “philanthropic” endeavours of the Ford Foundation in this regard laid the infrastructure and groundwork to setup new power centres for managerialism under the guise of this ostensibly unrelated cause. Similar case studies can be found in issues as diverse as racial equality, gender equality, Islamist terrorism, climate change, mental health, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The LOGIC of managerialism is to create invisible “problems” which can, in effect, never truly be solved, but rather can permanently support managerial jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard such as “unconscious bias training”, “net zero carbon”, the ratio of men and women on executive boards or whatever else.

A farmer feels insecure because of unseasonal rains, lack of rains, pests etc. He hopes to get stability in life when his children get jobs in city. A job goer is stressed due to insecurities of corporate world. She dreams of a peaceful and stable life somewhere in a remote village where she would grow her own food and eat. Mind keeps looking for peace and stability somewhere in future. And that's the trap.

daughter of the servants.” “Gee, you must have been lonely, Judge, having nobody to play with.” “I played with Sam Westing—chess. Hour after hour I sat staring down at that chessboard. He lectured me, he insulted me, and he won every game.” The judge thought of their last game: She had been so excited about taking his queen, only to have the master checkmate her in the next move. Sam Westing had deliberately sacrificed his queen and she had fallen for it. “Stupid child, you can’t have a brain in that frizzy head to make a move like that.” Those were the last words he ever said to her. The judge continued: “I was sent to boarding school when I was twelve. My parents visited me at school when they could, but I never set foot in the Westing house again, not until two weeks ago.” “Your folks must have really worked hard,” Sandy said. “An education like that costs a fortune.” “Sam Westing paid for my education. He saw that I was accepted into the best schools, probably arranged for my first job, perhaps more, I don’t know.” “That’s the first decent thing I’ve heard about the old man.” “Hardly decent, Mr. McSouthers. It was to Sam Westing’s advantage to have a judge in his debt. Needless to say, I have excused myself from every case remotely connected with

Edmond persuasively described a future where technology had become so inexpensive and ubiquitous that it erased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. A future where environmental technologies provided billions of people with drinking water, nutritious food, and access to clean energy. A future where diseases like Edmond’s cancer were eradicated, thanks to genomic medicine. A future where the awesome power of the Internet was finally harnessed for education, even in the most remote corners of the world. A future where assembly-line robotics would free workers from mind-numbing jobs so they could pursue more rewarding fields that would open up in areas not yet imagined. And, above all, a future in which breakthrough technologies began creating such an abundance of humankind’s critical resources that warring over them would no longer be necessary.

Some thoughts on heaven? I have this theory that heaven is different for everyone. It has to be, or it wouldn’t be heaven. My grandmother’s heaven? In her heaven she doesn’t have to share the remote with anyone, and it is Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on all the time, with nary a rerun ever, and the old lady always wins the big money and a trip to Europe to tour a castle or somewhere warm but not too hot with nice churches. In her heaven your knees don’t hurt and your back doesn’t hurt and you get to be whatever age was your favourite age to be and you still have all your teeth and there are bingo games right after dinner and raspberry hard candies and no one ever has to do the dishes. In my gran’s heaven, you can still have yourself a proper smoke in the living room and it doesn’t ruin the new paint job and the lawn never gets too long and the foxes don’t chase the birds off the birdfeeder. In her heaven, a nice bit of cheese won’t give you the bad stomach and real men don’t beat their wives or fuck their children, and every day is payday, and the Friday of a long weekend. Floors wax themselves, but you still get to hang the laundry, but only if you feel like it.

I knew that, on camera, when you walk into a room in your own home, you must know where the light switch is. You can’t need to look. Or else it’s a lie, which is like giving the audience a pinch of poison. When you tell a story, you have to take liberties. You compress time. You create composite characters. You jump years ahead or flash back. Art is not life. But if your character has a longtime girlfriend and you’re tentative or formal with her, touching her as if she’s someone you just met? Another pinch. The audience might not be consciously aware of these little pinches, but if you keep doling them out, they’re reaching for the remote, or they’re walking out of the theater. They’re sick of the poison. They don’t want any more. They’re done. They might not even realize they’re responding to inauthenticity or sloppiness in storytelling. It’s not the audience’s job to articulate the reasons. It’s their job to feel.

To start building your remote culture, establish and share some basic rules. The first and most important rule is mutual trust between the company and its workers. The rules after that? As few as possible. Tell your employees they will be treated like adults with the flexibility to get the job done however is best for them.

One of the most frightening aspects of this alleged technology is the possibility of mind control by “remote control,” that is, through such technology as microwaves and radio waves. There are many stories about this, coming primarily from survivors, although we do know from a variety of reliable websites and mainstream news that such technology is being developed, or at least the technological groundwork laid. Once again, however, we do not know whether this was in place when today's survivors were programmed. It is difficult at this point to determine how much of this is genuine, and how much comes from false beliefs deliberately induced to make survivors feel powerless, much like the “one huge and invincible cult” of whose existence survivors convinced therapists twenty years ago. I know that one of my mind control survivor clients was convinced of technological monitoring during a psychotic period several years ago, but as he healed he discarded such beliefs, along with many other bizarre ones in favor of recognizing that he had been abused by real human beings whose identity he knew. If some of this remote control it is genuine, we may need to develop technological means to combat it. However, we should not be intimidated. Even if “voices” are induced in the head by remote control rather than through alters doing jobs, survivors can learn to disobey such voices just as they do those of alters. Competent and compassionate therapy for the dissociation can help survivors to heal. Meanwhile, there are numerous survivors whose mind control is of the kind that can be treated through psychotherapy. p205-206

But the biggest news that month was the departure from Apple, yet again, of its cofounder, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel engineer in the Apple II division, serving as a humble mascot of the roots of the company and staying as far away from management and corporate politics as he could. He felt, with justification, that Jobs was not appreciative of the Apple II, which remained the cash cow of the company and accounted for 70% of its sales at Christmas 1984. “People in the Apple II group were being treated as very unimportant by the rest of the company,” he later said. “This was despite the fact that the Apple II was by far the largest-selling product in our company for ages, and would be for years to come.” He even roused himself to do something out of character; he picked up the phone one day and called Sculley, berating him for lavishing so much attention on Jobs and the Macintosh division. Frustrated, Wozniak decided to leave quietly to start a new company that would make a universal remote control device he had invented. It would control your television, stereo, and other electronic devices with a simple set of buttons that you could easily program. He informed the head of engineering at the Apple II division, but he didn’t feel he was important enough to go out of channels and tell Jobs or Markkula. So Jobs first heard about it when the news leaked in the Wall Street Journal. In his earnest way, Wozniak had openly answered the reporter’s questions when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been giving short shrift to the Apple II division. “Apple’s direction has been horrendously wrong for five years,” he said.

You have to get into the habit of forcing yourself to analyze, at the time you accept a task, the costs and benefits of doing a less-than-perfect job. You must ask yourself some questions: How useful would a perfect job be here? How much more useful would it be than a merely adequate job? Or even a half-assed job? And you’ve got to ask yourself: What is the probability that I will really do anything like a remotely perfect job on this? And: What difference will it make to me, and to others, whether I do or not?

To try to counter Jobs’s spin, Sculley called Wozniak and urged him to speak out. “Steve can be an insulting and hurtful guy,” he told Time that week. He revealed that Jobs had asked him to join his new firm—it would have been a sly way to land another blow against Apple’s current management—but he wanted no part of such games and had not returned Jobs’s phone call. To the San Francisco Chronicle, he recounted how Jobs had blocked frogdesign from working on his remote control under the pretense that it might compete with Apple products. “I look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I cannot trust,” Wozniak said.

Each half of the arch is made from several sections. Enormous jacks, whose only prior job was raising the sunken Kursk submarine in 2001, were used to lift each stage higher and higher until it reached its full height of 110 meters. Inside are remotely-operated heavy-duty overhead cranes, to be used for moving people and equipment.

Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salesclerks helped us find what we were looking for in stores, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote.

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

Shirogane: "This is a brand-new show called 'Naze? Naze? Neeze!' " I'm Shirogane, the teacher of course.♥" " We're covering Arithmethic!" "Here we have Akira-kun and Kengo-kun, who will tackle the questions with us!" Kengo: "Hello there!" ^_^ Akira: "I'm a high school student, by the way!" "Why do I have to do arithmethic?!" Shirogane: "And here's my assistant, kokuchi!" Kokuchi: "HISS!" Akira: "HEY! I don't get why a kokuchi is here...Besides, does it even remotely understand our language." Shirogane:"Here's the first question" "Akira-kun, what's three times four?" Akira: "Twelve..." Shirogane: "CORRECT!!!" "Wonderful Akira-kun! Fantastic Job!" "You're so smart. Can I call you genius from now on?" Akira: "Only if you want a pencil shoved in your eye!" "Stop making fun of me right now!" Shirogane: "Let's move on to the next question.♥ (Shirogane spinning) Akira: "Why are you so hyper today?" "You're acting like a different person!" Shirogane: "Kengo-kun what is 23 minus 15?" Kengo: "Twe--" Shirogane: "WRONG." " If you can't solve a simple problem like this, you don't even deserve to be considered human. You'd be better off dead. SO JUST DIE." Kengo: "I made a small mistake! No need to walk all over me like that!!" Shirogane: "Let me explain this problem so that stupid Kengo-kun can understand." Kengo: "I...I am not stupid!" Shirogane: "First, you have 23 kokuchi..." "...You take 15 from the 23..." "...AND KILL THEM" (Shirogane killing the Kokuchi) Kengo: "OMG, Akira! Can you stop him?!" Akira: "Well...Why should I? I don't really care...I'm tired." Kengo: "AKIRA!!" (Shirogane covered in Kokuchi blood) Shirogane: Now then! How many kokuchi do we have left now, Kengo-kun." (Kokuchi shivers) Kengo: "SO GROSS! EI--EIGHT! THE ANSWER IS EIGHT!" Shirogane: "Yes you are correct! Well, the dumb boy finally understood the problem, and it's time for us to say goodbye!" "Take care and see you next week!" (Akira sleeping) Kengo: Not likely..." Shirogane: "GOODBYE!

Care of the soul doesn’t mean wallowing in the symptom, but it does mean trying to learn from depression what qualities the soul needs. Even further, it attempts to weave those depressive qualities into the fabric of life so that the aesthetics of Saturn—coldness, isolation, darkness, emptiness—makes a contribution to the texture of everyday life. In learning from depression, a person might dress in Saturn’s black to mimic his mood. He might go on a trip alone as a response to a saturnine feeling. He might build a grotto in his yard as a place of saturnine retreat. Or, more internally, he might let his depressive thoughts and feelings just be. All of these actions would be a positive response to a visitation of Saturn’s depressive emotion. They would be concrete ways to care for the soul in its darker beauty. In so doing, we might find a way into the mystery of this emptiness of the heart. We might also discover that depression has its own angel, a guiding spirit whose job it is to carry the soul away to its remote places where it finds unique insight and enjoys a special vision.

The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp . . . Fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal. Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.” —Chinua Achebe

I know for a fact that I would be awful if I was built like Serena Williams or Jennifer Lopez... If I had a body remotely close to what they have, I would be a terror. My ass would cause me to do really inappropriate and rude things. I'd be so ridiculous that people would be able to pick my labia out of a lineup. I'd wear zero clothes any- and everywhere, every day. I'd show up at church rocking a denim thong and a cropped T-shirt and have the nerve to sit right next to the head usher and dare her to say anything to me. And if anyone did say something to me, I'd tell them, "Jesus blessed me in many ways, and I am just showing off His works. HALLELUJAH." People would be disgusted and appalled by me and I wouldn't care. All insults would bounce off my ample backside. To whom much is given, much is required, and I'd require that my much would be given nary an inch of fabric. I'd hire a band whose sole job would be to follow me around and play theme music for my yansh, based on the mood I was in... I might opt to walk backwards into any room I entered, because why not?... I might also declare my booty its own limited liability corporation, assigning myself as CEO and chairman of the Donk. My jeans would be tax-deductible business expenses, and I would add my ass to my LinkedIn profile's Skills section. Everyone would throw hate ration in my dancery, and I wouldn't even see it, protected as I would be by the throne I sat atop.

Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either. Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers--obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

Having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural forms, his language, his food habits, his sexual behavior, his way of sitting down, of resting, of laughing, of enjoying himself, the oppressed flings himself upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a drowning man. Developing his technical knowledge in contact with more and more perfected machines, entering into the dynamic circuit of industrial production, meeting men from remote regions in the framework of the concentration of capital, that is to say, on the job, discovering the assembly line, the team, production �time,� in other words yield per hour, the oppressed is shocked to find that he continues to be the object of racism and contempt. It is at this level that racism is treated as a question of persons. �There are a few hopeless racists, but you must admit that on the whole the population likes….� �With time all this will disappear.� �This is the country where there is the least amount of race prejudice.� �At the United Nations there is a commission to fight race prejudice.� Films on race prejudice, poems on race prejudice, messages on race prejudice. Spectacular and futile condemnations of race prejudice. In reality, a colonial country is a racist country. If in England, in Belgium, or in France, despite the democratic principles affirmed by these respective nations, there are still racists, it is these racists who, in their opposition to the country as a whole, are logically consistent. It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization. The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal. He has achieved a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology. The idea that one forms of man, to be sure, is never totally dependent on economic relations, in other words—and this must not be forgotten—on relations existing historically and geographically among men and groups. An ever greater number of members belonging to racist societies are taking a position. They are dedicating themselves to a world in which racism would be impossible. But everyone is not up to this kind of objectivity, this abstraction, this solemn commitment. One cannot with impunity require of a man that he be against �the prejudices of his group.� And, we repeat, every colonialist group is racist. �Acculturized� and deculturized at one and the same time, the oppressed continues to come up against racism. He finds this sequel illogical, what be has left behind him inexplicable, without motive, incorrect. His knowledge, the appropriation of precise and complicated techniques, sometimes his intellectual superiority as compared to a great number of racists, lead him to qualify the racist world as passion-charged. He perceives that the racist atmosphere impregnates all the elements of the social life. The sense of an overwhelming injustice is correspondingly very strong. Forgetting racism as a consequence, one concentrates on racism as cause. Campaigns of deintoxication are launched. Appeal is made to the sense of humanity, to love, to respect for the supreme values.

Until now. You and I are a mis-Match, Ellie, because I hacked into your servers to manipulate our results.” “Rubbish,” Ellie said, secretly balking at the notion. She folded her arms indignantly. “Our servers are more secure than almost every major international company across the world. We receive so many hacking attempts, yet no one gets in. We have the best software and team money can buy to protect us against people like you.” “You’re right about some of that. But what your system didn’t take into account was your own vanity. Do you remember receiving an email some time ago with the subject ‘Businesswoman of the Year Award’? You couldn’t help but open it.” Ellie vaguely remembered reading the email as it had been sent to her private account, which only a few people had knowledge of. “Attached to it was a link you clicked on and that opened to nothing, didn’t it?” Matthew continued. “Well, it wasn’t nothing to me, because your click released a tiny, undetectable piece of tailor-made malware that allowed me to remotely access your network and work my way around your files. Everything you had access to, I had access to. Then I simply replicated my strand of DNA to mirror image yours, sat back and waited for you to get in touch. That’s why I came for a job interview, to learn a little more about the programming and systems you use. Please thank your head of personnel for leaving me alone in the room for a few moments with her laptop while she searched for a working camera to take my head shot. That was a huge help in accessing your network. Oh, and tell her to frisk interviewees for lens deflectors next time—they’re pocket-sized gadgets that render digital cameras useless.

Each purpose, each mission, is meant to be fully lived to the point where it becomes empty, boring, and useless. Then it should be discarded. This is a sign of growth, but you may mistake it for a sign of failure. For instance, you may take on a business project, work at it for several years, and then suddenly find yourself totally disinterested. You know that if you stayed with it for another few years you would reap much greater financial reward than if you left the project now. But the project no longer calls you. You no longer feel interested in the project. You have developed skills over the last few years working on the project, but it hasn’t yet come to fruition. You may wonder, now that you have the skills, should you stick with it and bring the project to fruition, even though the work feels empty to you? Well, maybe you should stick with it. Maybe you are bailing out too soon, afraid of success or failure, or just too lazy to persevere. This is one possibility. Ask your close men friends if they feel you are simply losing steam, wimping out, or afraid to bring your project to completion. If they feel you are bailing out too soon, stick with it. However, there is also the possibility that you have completed your karma in this area. It is possible that this was one layer of purpose, which you have now fulfilled, on the way to another layer of purpose, closer to your deepest purpose. Among the signs of fulfilling or completing a layer of purpose are these: 1. You suddenly have no interest whatsoever in a project or mission that, just previously, motivated you highly. 2. You feel surprisingly free of any regrets whatsoever, for starting the project or for ending it. 3. Even though you may not have the slightest idea of what you are going to do next, you feel clear, unconfused, and, especially, unburdened. 4. You feel an increase in energy at the prospect of ceasing your involvement with the project. 5. The project seems almost silly, like collecting shoelaces or wallpapering your house with gas station receipts. Sure, you could do it, but why would you want to? If you experience these signs, it is probably time to stop working on this project. You must end your involvement impeccably, however, making sure there are no loose ends and that you do not burden anybody’s life by stopping your involvement. This might take some time, but it is important that this layer of your purpose ends cleanly and does not create any new karma, or obligation, that will burden you or others in the future. The next layer of your unfolding purpose may make itself clear immediately. More often, however, it does not. After completing one layer of purpose, you might not know what to do with your life. You know that the old project is over for you, but you are not sure of what is next. At this point, you must wait for a vision. There is no way to rush this process. You may need to get an intermediary job to hold you over until the next layer of purpose makes itself clear. Or, perhaps you have enough money to simply wait. But in any case, it is important to open yourself to a vision of what is next. You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling your time with distractions. Don’t watch TV or play computer games. Don’t go out drinking beer with your friends every night or start dating a bunch of women. Simply wait. You may wish to go on a retreat in a remote area and be by yourself. Whatever it is you decide to do, consciously keep yourself open and available to receiving a vision of what is next. It will come.

I can’t resist free coffee, like when I was at that funeral chapel. I wasn’t really at the chapel, just walking by. The door was open, and so was the casket. People crying. Bunch of folding chairs. Guess it was a viewing. Then I see the big silver coffee urn in back. Next thing I know: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I say: ‘Drinking free coffee.’ ‘Did you know the deceased?’ ‘Not remotely.’ ‘I want you to leave.’ ‘Right after I get a refill.’ ‘No! Get the fuck out now!’ I said, ‘Have some respect: There’s an old dead guy up there.’ ‘That’s my mother!’ ‘Then you have a refund coming. They did a messed-up job. Of course I didn’t know what she looked like before, so maybe it’s a great job.’ ‘Why you—!’ Then all these guys attacked me. Well, tried to, but they didn’t anticipate my triple-threat martial-arts weapons training. I can handle a folding chair like nunchakus. Except I lost my grip and the thing went flying. I tried to explain that the old woman was already dead so it didn’t matter that the Samsonite hit her in the coffin. Things like that always seem to happen when I drink coffee. It’s weird.

Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second Language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a lefty nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day.

Why do you think so many people believe in texts written thousands of years ago? And why does it seem the more supernatural, unprovable, improbable, and ancient the source of these texts, the more people believe them?” “Humans need reassurance,” Wakely wrote back. “They need to know others survived the hard times. And, unlike other species, which do a better job of learning from their mistakes, humans require constant threats and reminders to be nice. You know how we say, ‘People never learn?’ It’s because they never do. But religious texts try to keep them on track.” “But isn’t there more solace in science?” Calvin responded. “In things we can prove and therefore work to improve? I just don’t understand how anyone thinks anything written ages ago by drunk people is even remotely believable. And I’m not making a moral judgment here: those people had to drink, the water was bad. Still, I ask myself how their wild stories—bushes burning, bread dropping from heaven—seem reasonable, especially when compared to evidence-based science. There isn’t a person alive who would opt for Rasputin’s bloodletting techniques over the cutting-edge therapies at Sloan Kettering. And yet so many insist we believe these stories and then have the audacity to insist others believe them, too.

I was never good at the future. I grew up with girls whose chief occupation was the future—designing it, instigating it. They could talk about it with so much confidence that it sounded like the past. During those talks, I had contributed nothing. I had visions, too abstract and flat for me to hang on to. For years I saw a generic city lit up at night. I would use those remote, artificial lights to soothe myself to sleep. One day I was quitting my job with no sense of exhilaration, one day I was leaving a note for my father, pulling out of his driveway, slightly bewildered, and two days later I was sitting in front of Howard. That was the way the future came to me. The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn’t look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn’t call to mind. She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

I dedicate this work to Vasily Arkhipov, the deputy commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine off the Cuban shore who said no to his comrades and may have saved the world. That was on October 27, 1962, around the time my father came home from his defense job and told me at the doorstep to our house that there was “only a twenty-percent chance, son” the next day would never come. No terrorist action today remotely poses that kind of existential threat for our world, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind in reading on.

It’s also a lot harder to bullshit your peers than your boss. In talking to a project manager without tech chops, programmers can make a thirty-minute job sound like a week-long polar expedition, but if their tall tale is out in the open for other programmers to see, it won’t pass the smell test.

The ends of the earth” is a common phrase, occurring over fifty times throughout the Scriptures that means more than just “remote lands,” but rather includes the notion of the very physical end of the whole earth all around before the cosmic waters that hem it in. Here are just a few of the verses that indicate this circular land mass bounded by seas as the entire earth:   Isa. 41:9 You whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners   Psa. 65:5 O God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas   Zech. 9:10 His rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.   Mark 13:27 And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.   Acts 13:47 ‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’   Job 28:24 For he looks to the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens.

When her father mentioned their old house, tears sprang to her eyes. In a way it was helpful to be in a place her mother had never seen. It was one of the last conversations she had had with her mother, telling her about Adam's new job, which back then was only a remote possibility, as they rode together to the hospital. "Don't go," her mother had said from the front seat. "It's too far away. I'll never see you again." Six hours after saying this, her mother was dead. Ruma suddenly wanted to ask her father, as she'd wanted to ask so many times, if he missed her mother, if he'd ever wept for her death. But she'd never asked, and he'd never admitted whether he'd felt or done those things.

A good example of ill-conceived (and premature) training approaches is seen in the many calls I get to conduct training programs to help people become better managers. I put my callers through a standard set of questions: •Did you choose people for managerial roles because they were the type of people who could get their fulfillment and satisfaction out of helping other people shine rather than having the ego-need to shine themselves? (No!) •Did you select them because they had a prior history of being able to give a critique to someone in such a way that the other person responds: "Wow, that was really helpful, I'm glad you helped me see all that." (No!) •Do you reward these people for how well their group has done, or do you reward them for their own personal accomplishments in generating business and serving clients? (Both, but with an emphasis on their personal numbers!) People can detect immediately a lack of alignment between what they are being trained in and how they are being managed. When they do detect it, little of what has been discussed or "trained" ever gets implemented. "So, let's summarize;' I say. "You've chosen people who don't want to do the job, who haven't demonstrated any prior aptitude for the job, and you are rewarding them for things other than doing the job?" Thanks, but I'll pass on the wonderful privilege of training them! Here's a good test for the timing of training: If the training was entirely optional and elective, and only available in a remote village accessible only by a mule, but your people still came to the training because they were saying to themselves, "I have got to learn this-it's going to be critical for my future; then, and only then, you will know you have timed your training well. Anything less than that, and you are doing the training too soon.

You will invariably face jobs that are associated with uncomfortable feelings, ranging from relatively minor annoyance (e.g., taking out the garbage in the rain) to more persistent and recurring feelings of stress and discomfort (e.g., dissertation, organizing income taxes) that activate your procrastination script. Even a minimal degree of stress or inconvenience (what we have come to describe as the feeling of “Ugh”) can be potent enough to make you delay action. Think about some of the mundane examples of procrastination, such as watching a boring television show because the remote control is out of reach (e.g., “It’s ALL THE WAY over there.”) or exercise (e.g., “I’m TOO TIRED to change into my workout clothes.”). The use of capital letters is meant to illustrate the tone of voice of your selftalk, which serves to exaggerate and convince you of the difficulty of what you want to do. You are capable to perform the action, but your thoughts and feelings (including feeling tired or “low energy”) makes you conclude that you are not at your best and therefore cannot and will not follow through (for seemingly justifiable reasons). You might think, “I have to be in the mood to do some things.” But, how often are any of us in the mood to do many of the tasks on which we end up procrastinating? The very fact that we have to plan them indicates that these tasks require some targeted planning and effort. When facing emotional discomfort, ADHD adults are particularly at risk for bolting to pleasant, easy, and yet often unsatisfying activities, such as eating junk food, watching television, social networking, surfing the Internet, etc. In fact, sometimes you may escape from stressful tasks by performing other, lower priority errands or chores. Thus, you rationalize violating your high-priority project plan in order to run out to fill your car with gas. This strategy can be seen as a form of “plea bargaining”—“I will do something productive in order to justify not doing the higher priority but less appealing task.” Moreover, these errands are often more discrete and time limited than the task you are putting off (i.e., “If I start mowing the lawn now, I will be done in 1 hour. I don’t know how long taxes will take me.”), which is often their appeal—even though they are low priority, you are more confident you will get them done. You need not be “in the mood” for a task in order to perform it. A useful reframe is the reminder that you have “enough” energy to get started and recall that once you get started on the first step, you usually feel better and more engaged. Breaking the task down into its discrete steps and setting an end time help you to reframe the plan (e.g., “I’m tired, but I have enough energy to do this task for 15 minutes.”). Rather than setting up the unrealistic expectation that you must be stress-free and 100% energized before you can do tasks, the notion of acceptance of discomfort is a useful mindset to adopt and practice.

Too much familiarity, the dreariness of domesticity, of paying bills, raising children. Of having full-time jobs and always too much to do. She doesn’t know if a weekend away at a lovely and remote place in the country will make that much of a difference, but it could be a start.

need say was I need some time off. But she couldn’t do it. “The St. James house at half-past seven,” she repeated. “Got it, sir.” He rang off. Barbara hung up. She tried to plumb the depths of her feelings, to put a name to what was slowly washing through her veins. She wanted to call it shame. She knew it was liberation. She went to tell her father that they would need to reschedule his doctor’s appointment for another day. Kevin Whateley had not gone to the Royal Plantagenet, which was the pub next door to his cottage. Rather, he had walked along the embankment, past the triangular green where he and Matthew had once learned to operate their pair of remote-control planes, and had instead entered an older pub that stood on a spit of land reaching like a curled finger into the Thames. He’d chosen the Blue Dove deliberately. In the Royal Plantagenet—despite its proximity to his house—he might have forgotten for five minutes or so. But the Blue Dove would not allow him to do so. He sat at a table that overlooked the water. In spite of the night’s falling temperature, someone was out, night fishing from a boat, and lights bobbed periodically with the river’s movement. Kevin watched this, allowing his memory to fill with the image of Matthew running along that same dock, falling, damaging a knee, righting himself but not crying at all, even when the blood began to seep from the cut, even when the stitches were later put in. He was a brave little bloke, always had been. Kevin forced his eyes from the dock and fastened them on the mahogany table. Beer mats covered it, advertising Watney’s, Guinness, and Smith’s. Carefully, Kevin stacked them, restacked them, spread them out like cards, restacked them again. He felt how shallow his breathing was and knew that he needed to take in more air. But to breathe deeply was to lose his grip for an instant. He wouldn’t do that. For if he lost control, he didn’t know how he would get it back. So he did without air. He waited. He didn’t know if the man he sought would come into the pub this late on a Sunday night, mere minutes before closing. In fact, he didn’t even know if the man came here at all any longer. But years ago he’d been a regular customer, when Patsy worked long hours behind the bar, before she’d got her job in a South Kensington hotel. For Matthew’s sake, she had said when she’d taken on the

Clock In Clock Out helps businesses track the locations and hours of workers, confirming they are actually where they claim to be. When they claim to be there. Finally, you can stop worrying about the night shift and employees that are working remotely. Clock In Clock Out provides for a simple, completely automated way for workers to check in on the job and to verify when they are leaving the specified location.

Every business that pays for remote employees or service providers those they cannot see at work has to blindly make out payroll checks. Am I paying for services delivered or am I a victim of fraud? That is precisely why Clock In Clock Out was created. For the first time, companies have a way to apply “balances” to their process before they write payroll “checks.” Through a powerful but simple technology, Clock In Clock Out helps to assure that people you are paying to be on the job during non-traditional hours of a day such as night shifts and/or at remote locations, were actually where they claimed to be.

You will learn on the job, in the process of repairing many different kinds of equipment and seeing how the designers solved various problems, or failed to solve them in some cases. For every repair, you will fill out a log describing the cause of the failure and what you did to rectify it. If you don’t understand something, you may consult the more experienced Technicians, including myself.” He led the group down a wide hallway, and they crowded into a soundproofed studio. “This is the backup broadcast studio, which kept operational at all times in case of a major failure in the main studio. The first item in the signal chain is the microphone. We use dynamic mics for DJ’s and guests, and various ribbons and condensers for radio plays and orchestral broadcasts. For pre-recorded sound sources, we have direct-drive turntables, cassette decks, open-reel decks, and cart machines. All machines are wired for remote start from the console. “The consoles are vacuum tube type, fully balanced with input, output, and interstage transformers, and completely modular. They were designed in-house for absolute reliability. Channel modules can be hot-swapped without powering down the console, so that breakdowns can be fixed in a matter of seconds. “The output of the console is wired to a stereo compressor, variable mu type, to regulate the overall volume. The studio switcher selects the currently active studio and routes it to the transmitter. The output passes through an additional compressor, VCA type, with sophisticated circuitry for leveling, peak limiting, soft clipping, filtering, and pre-emphasis, in order to maximize the station’s loudness without overmodulating the transmitter.

Indonesia Mengajar offers a similar empowerment platform through education. It rigorously selects the country's top graduates, asking them to forgo potentially high-paying jobs in favor of teaching in remote village schools for one year.

Jensen, R. (2002). "No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization. Journal of Social History,36(2), 405-429. Retrieved August 26, 2021 The Irish American community harbors a deeply held belief that it was the victim of systematic job discrimination in America, and that the discrimination was done publicly in highly humiliating fashion through signs that announced “Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply.” This “NINA” slogan could have been a metaphor for their troubles—akin to tales that America was a “golden mountain” or had “streets paved with gold.” But the Irish insist that the signs really existed and prove the existence of widespread discrimination and prejudice. The fact that Irish vividly remember “NINA” signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic groups complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs that said employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through a window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend? The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle-class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. … Irish Americans have all heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had “legs”: people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O’Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up.

Having Tech that does not fully meet the needs of remote workers hurts morale, lowers job satisfaction, and increases the potential of burnout

After accepting a nursing job in a remote Alaskan town, Rowena Shipton finds herself caught up in a nightmare when she's kidnapped in the middle of the night. Blindfolded and dumped in the forest, she has twenty minutes to get as far away as possible before the men of the town are released for their mating hunt. But will her handsome new admirer rescue her in time? Or will he be the the monster she needs rescued from?

Somebody please tell me what’s so great about Krissie Kelly. She can’t act, she’s ass-ugly and she’s got the brains of a dodo bird, and the only talent that is even remotely relevant is her willingness to hang her bare ass out for all the world to see. Somebody get that girl a GED and some self-esteem, and while you’re at it maybe a nose job

She wets her lips. “Fine. I’m mad at myself for getting involved in this mess. I’m mad that I fucked up my sister’s meeting today, one that she worked hard preparing for, given the short notice. I’m furious that I don’t have enough courage to tell my mom that she was right, that I never should’ve taken that job with Angela. I hate that my pride is more important than the truth. And most of all”—her eyes scan me up and down—“I’ve never despised someone as much as I despise you. I think you’re cold, baseless, and have no regard for anyone but yourself. I hate that I have to rely on you, that you need to rely on me, and most importantly”—she catches her breath and her fingers curl around my hand that’s pinning her arm to the wall—“I hate that I think you’re even remotely attractive.

Contact Clock In Clock Out with questions or feedback on our time & attendance tracking solution, monitoring when & where employees clock in and out of work. Through a powerful but simple technology, Clock In Clock Out helps to assure that people you are paying to be on the job during non-traditional hours of a day such as night shifts and/or at remote locations, were actually where they claimed to be. When they claimed to be there.

But of course, she wouldn’t. She would avoid the confrontation, as usual. Typical Sera. “Josh, you and Lauren start recording the location of the necklace,” he said. She did a double take. He was assigning undergrads to a find of this magnitude? “I’m okay,” she said shakily as Nora helped her to her feet. “I’ll work on the amulet.” Chad’s eyebrows pulled together. “The what?” “It’s an amulet. To protect the temple.” She did her best not to cringe from his glare as she explained. “It sure did a piss-poor job,” Nora huffed. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You’re going to rest.” He turned around. “Back to work, everyone. We’ll have time to gawk at the pretty necklace later.” Sera frowned as he casually dismissed her and walked away. World-renowned archaeologist Dr. Charles Lambert—Chad, as he preferred to be called by students—made significant advancements in remote sensing technology in the last decade, sending his career skyrocketing. Her college’s archaeology department had been using his new methodology last year when they discovered the buried temple in Campania, Italy. After requesting to lead their excavation this summer, Chad had agreed to return to the university as a visiting scholar for the next school year, much to the excitement of the entire archaeology department.

Clock In Clock Out allows you to track workers to assure that during night shifts or at remote locations, they are where they claim to be at the right times. Through a powerful but simple technology, Clock In Clock Out helps to assure that people you are paying to be on the job during non-traditional hours of a day such as night shifts and/or at remote locations, were actually where they claimed to be. When they claimed to be there.

If you want to construct the perfect virtual team, there are a number of elements that you need to consider. The first is how many staff members will you require? If you have several employees, you may require more than one team to complete various jobs. If you are working with individuals from various histories, it will be harder to examine their capacities. If you employ people with varying degrees of experience, the team will be less efficient as well as will only wind up developing even more irritation. The 2nd aspect is the ability degree of each member. This is necessary since you will certainly require to produce a sense of neighborhood among employees. A virtual team-building video game will certainly aid you to attain this. A virtual team-building game called the 100 Information Obstacle is fun and also can make everyone included really feel even more connected. You can locate an assisted-in virtual team structure game with a business such as a Tag. If you do not intend to employ a team leader, you can attempt the 100 Things Challenge to discover exactly how you can develop a community within your business. Another attribute of a virtual team monitoring device is the capability to take care of digital teams from throughout the globe. This device makes it less complicated to take care of online teams from anywhere. As an example, if you have a remote employee, you can use the ClickUp app to appoint jobs and timetable meetings. You can even use it as a style accessory, which has been hailed by Path magazine. And also if you're seeking one more virtual team-building tool, it deserves to think about Donut. Virtual team structure video games are enjoyable ways to create a connection and also construct team comradery. Gamings like online retreat areas, murder mysteries, tests, as well as facts video games can also be an enjoyable way to connect with a staff member.

Don’t move to Silicon Valley. Even before 2020, I would have said, “Don’t quit your job, don’t move to SF, don’t pass go, and don’t collect $200 (from VCs).” After all, San Francisco is expensive, traffic-heavy, and not a great place to raise your children—or even a dog. Now, post-COVID, remote work is the new normal, and that means you can stay where you are. Sam Altman, the former CEO of Y Combinator, said that he was “very excited to see SF have to compete with other cities.” Me too. Not only is it cheaper and less competitive to build your company in a smaller town or city, but it’s also better for the local community, which as we’ve learned can pay dividends for your business.

As author Brigid Schulte writes, “Unlike a century ago, when Americans showed their status in leisure time, busyness has become the new badge of honor. So even as we bemoan workplaces where everyone is busy and no one is productive, busyness has actually become the way to signal dedication to the job and leadership potential. One reason for this is that, while productivity is relatively easy to measure on a factory floor, or on the farm, we have yet to develop good metrics for measuring the productivity of knowledge workers. So we largely rely on hours worked and face time in the office as markers for effort, and with the advent of technology and the ability to work remotely, being connected and responsive at all hours is the new face time.

Huh?!” the manly voice blasts out in a surprised manner. “That’s something you start off a conversation with! I’m Benson Wheeler, the head dispatcher of the Guardians Intelligence Bureau (GIB). I’m the one who gives you your missions and aids you remotely on things you need to know.” Wheeler said in a professional but appalled tone. “You’re not really good at your job. You didn’t help me at all during the mission.” “The signal was jammed, Guardian.” “But you work for the intelligence bureau. Shouldn’t you have thought of something crafty that could’ve aided me?” she asked curiously. “I don’t know how to respond to that question.” Wheeler said in an appalled manner, not knowing how this conversation reached this point of bewilderment. “That’s not an intelligent response. And, I still have no clue on who you are.

In fact, right now, all Resolve could really do was his actual job and as he vowed to store the hope inside his heart that such pleasures might occur somewhere, somehow at some point in the near future, he smiled because he wasn't actually sure that he had a heart to store such wishes inside, or that such a wish was remotely even possible.

professional isolation among remote workers was negatively associated with job performance.

remote work doesn’t significantly hurt job performance in any type of work.

Near the end of his tenure as co-CEO of SAP, Jim Hagemann Snabe discovered that the German software giant had amassed more than fifty thousand key performance indicators (KPIs), covering every job across the company. Snabe was horrified. “We were trying to run the company by remote control,” he recalls. “We had all this amazing talent, but had asked them to put their brains on ice.

After graduation she saw several active deployments in the Urban Rapid Suppression Force. Then her parents were killed by a drone bomb some bunch of anti-imperialist anarchist whack-jobs launched at the sneering symbol of their evil foreign economic oppressors—or, in English, the Italian remote drone systems factory where her father worked.

Ruth is in a meeting about Virtual Learning Environments. It’s very dull and rather depressing. Steven, the head of technical support, is telling them that soon they will be able to communicate remotely with their students via something called Zoom. ‘You won’t have to see your students at all,’ he says with a cheery smile, ‘except on the computer screen.’ It sounds like a nightmare to Ruth. She frequently complains about her students—though not aloud now that she’s department head—but, in truth, interacting with them is one of the best things about the job. No intake is ever the same, which is why teaching stays so interesting. She gets a lot of satisfaction when a student, so shy in the first term that they can’t speak, suddenly becomes obsessed with Iron Age burials in the third and won’t stop talking about them. How will this manifest itself via this Zoom thingy? A song of the same name by Fat Larry’s Band comes into her head and, unfortunately, stays there.

What is Freelancing? Freelancing is a work arrangement where individuals offer their services to clients on a project basis, often remotely and without being tied to a single employer. In this model, freelancers are self-employed and take on various assignments from different clients, rather than having a traditional full-time job. A Freelancer can provide various types of services in a wide range. Such as Article writing, Graphic design, Web development, Digital marketing, Consulting, SEO, and more. They have the flexibility to choose the projects they work on, set their own rates, and determine their work schedules. Some Features of Freelancing are Discussed Below: 1. Flexibility: Freelancers usually work on projects of their choice and set their own working hours. Because they have that freedom, which allows them to balance work with personal life. 2. Independence: Freelancers are essentially their own bosses. They manage their work, clients, and business operations independently. 3. Diversity: Freelancers can work on different projects for different clients, gaining exposure to different industries and challenges. 4. Remote Work: Most freelancers work remotely, enabling them to collaborate with clients from around the world without the need for a physical office. 5. Project-Based: Freelancers are hired for specific projects or tasks, with defined start and end dates, rather than being employed on a long-term basis. 6. Skill-Based: Freelancers offer specialized skills that clients might not have in-house, making them valuable for tasks requiring expertise. 7. Income Variation: Freelancers' income can vary based on the number and type of projects they take on, making financial planning important. 8. Client Relationships: Building strong client relationships is crucial for repeat business and referrals. 9. Self-Promotion: Freelancers often need to market themselves to attract clients and stand out in a competitive market. Basically, you can do freelancing with the work you want to do or the work you are good at. The most interesting thing is that in this field you are everything and your decision is final. Please Visit Our Blogging Website to read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.

Throughout secular culture, places of in-person gathering and embodied relationships are in decline. Jobs have gone remote. Streaming has crippled the cinema and concert industries. Classrooms are virtual, support groups are digital, and even dating is now centered around apps. In many communities, churches are some of the only physical centers of human gathering left. This is neither accidental nor arbitrary. Christianity does not reduce the self to the screen-mediated mind. We belong, as the catechism says, body and soul, to God. Our pursuit of the truth must take us nearer to other people and physical life, not away from it.

one occasion Ellen Gorman had gone grocery shopping and had carefully put all the items on the kitchen table before stacking them in the cupboards. The job took a considerable amount of time. But when she returned several hours later, all the items were back on the kitchen table

Tad and a couple of his friends had been asked by Tom to move 150 to 200 large metal corral poles from the front yard to a location beyond the canal. The poles were of varying length and were seven to eight inches in diameter and weighed between 25 and 150 pounds each. It took the three teenagers about four hours of hard work to complete the job. The boys finished about noon.

The fear, the possibility of death, makes you feel alive. That’s part of the reason why I do what I do.” “Swimming with sharks turns you on?” she questions with doubt, though she’s entirely distracted. I twist her rigid body around before she can spot the grin on my face. “Considering my job isn’t remotely sexual, I don’t get aroused, no.” I say with amusement. “But it does make me feel alive. And this will, too, if you let me show you.” “Will I get aroused?” she asks quietly. “Si,” I answer. “You will come harder than you ever have before.” “That’s a big promise to make.” “Then you’d better let me keep it.

About the author. While still a boy, Russell Evans sought the road to high adventure the classical way - by stowing himself aboard a ship. But it had steam up for moving only from one to another and didn't leave port! On finishing school he tried again, but this time by getting a job as cabin boy on a tramp shipping wheat from Russia's Black Sea ports. This was at the height of the muzhik famine when every bushel of grain exported could have saved a peasant's life. The experience left him hating dictatorships and admiring the astonishing fortitude of people who have to endure them. After training as a newspaper reporter, he volunteered to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, only to end up being grilled by a kangaroo court in Red Montmartre on suspicion of being a Franco spу. Disillusioned, he left for South America on a madcap scheme for starting a new republic in a remote corner of Amazonia. Two years later he emerged from the wilderness to find Hitler's war had started and hurried home. He fought in Wavell's Western Desert campaign, including the siege of Tobruk, was rescued from a sinking destroyer, took part in the Sicily landings, then served in Italy and finally in the Far East. He was a captain in the Intelligence Corps, and one of his earliest assignments was frontier control work in Egypt with the late Maurice Oldfield who was to become, as chief of MI6, Britain's top spymaster. After the war Russell Evans returned to South America for a final adventure before marrying and settling down to the more predictable life of a newspaper reporter. For fifteen years he was editor of a county weekly in mid Wales and then taught journalism in Cardiff College of Commerce. Now he works from home, writing. His wife is a doctor and they have one son.

Then you can stay home with them. Either way. Get a remote job if you really want to. I just want you to be happy.

Once we have determined their goals, the next part of the process is digging into the why. People buy because they have a vision deeper than just “make more money.” As a salesperson, it’s easy to think they just want money to buy stuff, but when I actually started to dig, money meant freedom. But I didn’t stop there. Freedom meant that they could leave their nine-to-five job they hated and do something they were truly passionate about. Now I could have stopped there and moved on feeling like I discovered the why but kept going. So I asked, “Why is it important for you to leave your nine-to-five?” The answer: “Chad, I never see my kids.” He said, “I was divorced five years ago, and I now work six days a week, and my kids are playing sports, and I can never go to game or even have the opportunity to take the time off to see them. You see, if I take time off, I can’t pay my bills. I’m tired of living a life on someone else’s terms. My family deserves more.

sales, a prospect believes 50 percent of what you say as a salesperson but believes 100 percent of what they say themselves. So if we can be conscious enough to ask the right question for our prospects to sell themselves on why they need your offer, you’ll start closing more deals. Most importantly, your prospect won’t feel they are being sold at all. They will have made the decision to do this all on their own. That right there is influence. Remember, you’re not a product pusher, but a problem solver. Your job is to help someone help themselves. We don’t force people to buy. We help people make decisions that can further their goals.

At this stage, you now have the confidence and rapport to know you can start to dig into the pain. So in regard to selling how to write and publish a book, I might ask, “What’s been holding you back from writing this book already?” Or maybe say something like, “You have some big goals, but what has been the reason you haven’t made progress?” These great open-ended questions begin to uncover how your product can help them. Your job in this stage is to now ask questions for the prospect to tell you why they need your product. For example, if your offer has coaching support, maybe you ask, “What has held you back from staying on task to do this yourself?” Most of the time, people will say something like “lack of accountability.” Now I already knew that was the answer. You see, a great salesperson is like a lawyer. They ask questions they already know the answers to. So the way you frame questions needs to be strategic and in your favor. But don’t be afraid to dig deep here as well. A key thing I am going to address is a tie-down. These are great ways to solidify a response that sticks in the prospect’s mind. Let’s use the example above again. I ask, “What has held you back from staying on task to do this yourself?” The prospect answers, “Lack of accountability. I think I need a coach.” Well, to do a proper tie-down, instead of moving on and thinking to yourself, “Great, they need a coach!” ask a tie-down question: “Why do you think you need a coach?” Make your prospect build and put a little effort into their answers so they are meaningful to them.

Yeah, there’s no way he works for Mr. Smith too. He’s not even remotely good at this, and she needs to do a better job of keeping her pawn in line.

Whenever anything remotely resembling anger had threatened to emerge, and especially during my teenage years, my mother would clench her jaw, look me hard in the eyes, and tell me that I was “just like my father.” That would be the man who had beaten her regularly throughout their (blessedly short-lived) marriage. As you can imagine, that did the job. I looked like my father; it was easy enough to believe I might unknowingly harbor some of his worse personality characteristics too.

What is Freelancing? Freelancing is a work arrangement where individuals offer their services to clients on a project basis, often remotely and without being tied to a single employer. In this model, freelancers are self-employed and take on various assignments from different clients, rather than having a traditional full-time job. A Freelancer can provide various types of services in a wide range. Such as Article writing, Graphic design, Web development, Digital marketing, Consulting, SEO, and more. They have the flexibility to choose the projects they work on, set their own rates, and determine their work schedules. Some features of freelancing are discussed below: Flexibility: Freelancers usually work on projects of their choice and set their own working hours. Because they have that freedom, which allows them to balance work with personal life. Independence: Freelancers are essentially their own bosses. They manage their work, clients, and business operations independently. Diversity: Freelancers can work on different projects for different clients, gaining exposure to different industries and challenges. Remote Work: Most freelancers work remotely, enabling them to collaborate with clients from around the world without the need for a physical office. Project-Based: Freelancers are hired for specific projects or tasks, with defined start and end dates, rather than being employed on a long-term basis. Skill-Based: Freelancers offer specialized skills that clients might not have in-house, making them valuable for tasks requiring expertise. Income Variation: Freelancers' income can vary based on the number and type of projects they take on, making financial planning important. Client Relationships: Building strong client relationships is crucial for repeat business and referrals. Self-Promotion: Freelancers often need to market themselves to attract clients and stand out in a competitive market. Basically, you can do freelancing with the work you want to do or the work you are good at. The most interesting thing is that in this field you are everything and your decision is final.

As this model of work gains ever more prominence, as fixed premises and traditional jobs are subsumed into the space of flows and flexible contracts, there is the prospect of this sort of remote-controlled labour spreading out from the entrepreneurial sphere to become the norm. The supposedly classless society of the future might well arrange itself around an elite of WiFi managers serviced by a mass of virtual assistants who are kept occupied well beyond their nominal work duties. This will be a society where self-marketing is just another administrative task, employment involves fitting multiple differently shaped assignments into every available gap, and there is no real beginning or end to the working day; a world in which we are all either willing or reluctant jugglers.

Joe Pike watched his friend Elvis Cole leave the Burger King parking lot, then entered the longitude and latitude into his GPS. Pike was not using a civilian GPS. He used a military handheld known as a Defense Advanced GPS Receiver, which was also known as a dagger. The DAGR was missile-guidance precise, could not be jammed, and contained the cryptography to use the Army and Air Force GPS satellite system. The DAGR was illegal for civilians to own, but Pike had used it in remote locations throughout Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central and South America. These were military contract jobs for multinational corporations, mostly, but also the United States government. The government gave the DAGR to him even though it was a crime for him to own it. Governments do that. Thirty-two

Paul, the baby is coming very soon.” He smiled. “That’s getting real obvious.” “You’re my very best friend, Paul.” “Thanks, Vanni,” he said, but he furrowed his eyebrows. Suspicious. “I want you to be with me during the delivery.” “With you how?” he asked. “I want you to be the one to encourage me, coach me, coax me. Hold my hand. Support me.” “Um… Isn’t that Mel’s job?” “Mel is going to be very much a coach, but she’s also going to be the midwife and she’ll be busy with other things. Especially when the baby is coming out. I need you to do this.” “Vanni,” he said, scooting forward on his chair, “I’m a guy.” “I know. Guys do this.” “I can’t…Vanni, I shouldn’t…. Vanessa, listen. I can’t see you like that. It wouldn’t be…appropriate.” “Well, actually, I thought about my brother or my dad and frankly, that really doesn’t appeal to me. So,” she said, lifting a video from the table beside her, “I got us a childbirth movie from Mel.” “Aw, no,” he said, pleading. She stood up and popped it into the VCR, then sat down again with the remote in her hand. “Jack delivered his own son,” she said. “I know, but in case you’re interested, he wasn’t thrilled about it at the time. And he refuses to do it again—he’s adamant about that. And, Vanni, this isn’t my son. This is my best friend’s son.” “Of course I know that, Paul. But since it is your best friend’s son, he’d be so grateful.” She started the video. “Now, I want you to concentrate on what the partner is doing. Don’t worry about the mother. Most of the time while I’m in labor you’ll either be behind me, or helping me walk or squat to use gravity to help with the dilating, or reminding me to breathe properly. It’s not like you’re going to have your face in the field of birth.” “I’m starting to feel kind of weak,” he said. “Why don’t you ask Brie or Paige, if you need someone for that?” “I could do that, but to tell you the truth, I’m much closer to you. And you’re here—right here. You can do this. We’ll watch the movie together and if you have any questions, just ask me.” He looked at the screen, his brows drawn together. He squinted. This was an unattractive woman, giving birth. Well, not just yet—she was working up to it. Her big belly was sticking out, which was not what made her plain. It was the stringy hair, monobrow, baggy socks on her feet and—“Vanni, she has very hairy legs.” “If that’s what worries you I can still manage to shave my legs, even though I have to admit I’ve lost interest.” The hospital gown on the woman was draped over her belly and legs in such a way that when she started to rise into a sitting position, spreading her thighs and grabbing them to bear down, she was covered. Then the doctor or midwife or whoever was in charge flipped that gown out of the way and there, right in Paul’s face, was the top of a baby’s head emerging from the woman’s body. “Aw, man,” he whined, putting his head in his hands. “I said watch the coach—don’t worry about the woman,” Vanni lectured. “It’s pretty damn hard to not look at that, Vanni,” he said. “Concentrate.” So

We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote.

and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs. The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America. We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received. Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work. Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it. I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay. Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing. Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have

Most people want to work, as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling. And if you’re stuck in a dead-end job that has no prospects of being either, then you don’t just need a remote position—you need a new job.

The US military had this huge generator they needed to get to an airfield site they were planning in the south. This was a remote area, and aside from a few pockets of US troops, it was completely under bandit control. There was no fuel available for miles around the landing spot, and none of the outfits we approached would touch it with a bargepole. They all kept saying, “We’ll never get out again, how can we take off from an unprepared airfield with no fuel?” ‘The job was priced at between sixty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but one day there’s a phone call from these Russian guys. They said, “We’ll do it, but it’ll cost you two million dollars, in advance.” The Americans didn’t really have a choice by this stage, so they paid. And sure enough, right on time, this ex-Soviet air force crew flew in, with the generator, in this battered old Il-76, unloaded the generator, then sat down for a leisurely smoke. ‘Just as all the Americans were wondering how on earth they were going to fly out again, there’s a cloud of dust and up clatters this old minibus driven by some Afghan bloke – and these airmen just get in and drive off. The Yanks were all going, “Hey, how will you get the plane back?” And the crew just said, “We won’t. It’s an old one – we only bought it for this job, and we’re ditching it here.” Half a million dollars it cost them, and they held it together with string just long enough to land, then cleared off one and a half million dollars in profit and left it to rust. It’s still there.

People have been indoctrinated so completely by their jobs that they don’t want to know how something works, they’re willing to accept that perhaps the laws of nature don’t work as they expect, and by the way, can I have the remote?

So it’s not without reason that you’ve come to believe that you need to know 150 percent before you consider yourself even remotely up to the task. You read a job description that requires a couple of minor skill sets or some previous experience you don’t possess, and you disqualify yourself right off the bat. And in an economy where jobs are being eliminated and the job market is increasingly competitive, this reluctance to jump in and learn as you go has real consequences.

In the course of my four-year computer science degree, I never had to take a single class on anything remotely resembling ethics. None of my homework assignments were meant to help me navigate the fraught gendered and racialised dynamics of applying for jobs or negotiating salaries. And none of my textbooks explained why I should feel good about making six figures writing proprietary software for a multi-billion-dollar corporation when an increasing number of my neighbours were being made homeless.

We may serve as the enabler, rescuing the alcoholic from unpleasant consequences of his or her own making. Or we may play the victim, unwillingly stepping in and covering for the alcoholic who is too drunk or hung over to fulfill job or family responsibilities. Perhaps we find that our role has been to take the blame whenever anything goes wrong, even when we weren’t remotely involved. Others provide

The people were poor, they smelled bad and talked incessantly, nobody seemed to have a job or anything in particular to do, everybody had yellow teeth and damp stains beneath their armpits, and as I looked out across the meadows where my father had walked and the houses in which his family lived I wasn’t remotely surprised that he’d wanted to leave, because there was no room to breathe out here, there was no escape.

He was a man who had his own urgent problems, but he visualized the life of this rejected girl, and it hurt him. She seemed to be full of energy, and—despite her deadly existence —operating on a high level of liveliness and good spirits. He began to question her casually. What kind of jobs had she held? Where did she sleep when she didn’t have a Wade Trask to provide a temporary haven for her? What about mail? Had she ever tried living in the Pripp section of the city? What about moving to the country? . . . It was a long list of questions. Riva replied, sometimes vaguely, but she seldom hesitated. In about an hour he had her life in outline. Her early childhood was dim. She had recollections of being with parents who moved, drove, flew—always seeking remoter distances of escape. And always the reaching red tape of the Great Judge’s registrars followed them. They were among the minority who were invariably refused group status. Their past connection with the Brain dogged them, brought them to ruin and hopelessness. The finale came with crushing unexpectedness. The Control descended one day upon the hovel where they lived. The father, unbelieving and protesting, was led out and put against the wall of the shack, and shot. There was no explanation, no further direct interference—but the breadwinner was gone. For mother and daughter, the time of nightmare had come. The transition to woman of the town took place in direct proportion to the need for food.

And then the great excitement of the solar breakthrough dimmed. As Pearson would later recall, the installation was “a huge technical success, but a financial failure.” The solar battery could power the remote telephone equipment with ease. But for the power they generated, the solar cells, at several hundred dollars per watt, simply cost too much.19 In 1956, Daryl Chapin figured that it would cost the average homeowner nearly $1.5 million to buy enough Bell solar cells to power his house.20 By one of Kelly’s fundamental dictums of innovation—something that could do a job “better, or cheaper, or both”—the cost of the cells and the results in Georgia suggested solar power was not going to be a marketable innovation anytime soon. Sometimes, in describing a new invention that seemed technically brilliant but impractical, industrial scientists would quip that they had found “a solution looking for a problem.” The silicon solar cell needed a problem, as yet unimagined, to appear.

has no prospects of being either, then you don’t just need a remote position—you need a new job. Only the office can be secure Companies often go to great lengths to make employees

missions. A moment later she heard the sound of the television start up. The clever little thing had worked out how to use the remote control. ‘Not till August,’ said Lauren. ‘We’ve got lots to sort out. Visas and so on. We’ll have to find an apartment, a nanny for Jacob.’ A nanny for Jacob. ‘Job for me.’ Rob sounded a little nervous. ‘Oh, yes, darling,’ said Rachel. She did try to take her son seriously. She really did. ‘A job for you. In real estate, do you think?’ ‘Not sure yet,’ said Rob. ‘We’ll have to see. I might end up being a house husband.’ ‘So sorry I never taught him how to cook,’ said Rachel to Lauren, not especially sorry. Rachel had never been much interested in cooking or that good at it; it was just another chore that had to be done, like the laundry. The way people went on these days about cooking. ‘That’s okay,’ beamed Lauren. ‘We’ll probably eat out a lot in New York. The city that never sleeps,

As we struck across the ridges and hollows of the undulating terrain, our attention was caught by a slight rustling in a clump of long grass to our left. In a few strides we had drawn level, and pushed aside the straggling stalks, to reveal the quivering body of a rabbit, on its side, oddly contorted. Ralph bent to examine it, and its fright became even greater; there was agony in its staring eyes. Gently, he tried to pick it up, only to withdraw his hand with a moan of disgust; moist and warm redness stained his fingers, and his face became set and sullen. Very little additional examination was required to establish that the creature had been shot by one of the Hall’s marauding parties, but that the job had been botched, and the victim had managed to effect a temporary escape to sink down here, and drain away to oblivion. It was remotely possible that the wound was the work of some more instinctive predator, but by far the greater likelihood rested with an incompetent marksman. As we watched, the animal began to succumb with paroxysms of twitching, and life fled from it very shortly. ‘Is it worth our fee, then, to work for people who enjoy this kind of thing?’ I enquired, bitterly, after we had walked a little way in silence. Ralph stared straight ahead. ‘I have accepted her terms, and she must accept mine. I only said I would look into the cause of her “little difficulty”. I did not say I would deal with it. I shall keep my word—exactly so.

When we’re outside, I hear Brittany take a deep breath. I swear it sounds as if she’s holding herself together by a thin thread. Not the way it’s supposed to go down: bring girl home, kiss girl, mom insults girl, girl leaves crying. “Don’t sweat it. She’s just not used to me bringin’ girls in the house.” Brittany’s expressive blue eyes appear remote and cold. “That shouldn’t have happened,” she says, throwing back her shoulders in a stance as stiff as a statue’s. “What? The kiss or you likin’ it so much?” “I have a boyfriend,” she says as she fidgets with the strap on her designer book bag. “You tryin’ to convince me, or yourself?” I ask her. “Don’t turn this around. I don’t want to upset my friends. I don’t want to upset my mom. And Colin…I’m just really confused right now.” I hold out my hands and raise my voice, something I usually avoid because like Paco says, it means I actually care. I don’t care. Why should I? My mind says to shut the fuck up at the same time words spout from my mouth. “I don’t get it. He treats you like you’re his damn prize.” “You don’t even know what it’s like with me and Colin…” “Tell me, dammit,” I say, unable to hide the edge to my voice. Initially I hold myself back from what I really want to say, but I can’t resist and tell it to her straight up. “’Cause that kiss back there…it meant somethin’. You know it as well as I do. I dare you to tell me bein’ with Colin is better than that.” She looks away hastily. “You wouldn’t understand.” “Try me.” “When people see Colin and me together, they comment on how perfect we are. You know, the Golden Couple. Get it?” I stare at her in disbelief. That is beyond fucked up. “I get it. I just can’t believe I’m hearin’ it. Does bein’ perfect mean that much to you?” There’s a long, brittle silence. I catch a flicker of sadness in those sapphire eyes, but then it’s gone. In an instant her expression stills and grows serious. “I haven’t been doing a bang-up job at it lately, but yes. It does,” she finally admits. “My sister isn’t perfect, so I have to be.” That is the most pathetic shit I’ve ever heard. I shake my head in disgust and point to Julio. “Get on and I’ll take you back to school to get your car.” Silently, Brittany straddles my motorcycle. She holds herself so far away from me I can barely feel her behind me. I almost take a detour to make the ride last longer. She treats her sister with patience and adoration. God knows I wouldn’t be able to spoon-feed one of my brothers and wipe his mouth. The girl I once accused of being self-absorbed is not one-dimensional. Dios mío, I admire her. Somehow, being with Brittany brings something to my life that’s missing, something…right. But how am I going to convince her of that?

In terms of the peripherals, the attitude of do-it-yourself, that kind of thing, not being a remote rock star and having layers of management and record labels and all that—instead, booking your own shows, doing your own publicity if necessary. Not everything has to be so home industry, but being willing to do whatever is necessary and not considering one’s self remote, dealing with the guy at the distributor and respecting people for the job that they’re doing, not thinking they should conform to some narrow aspect. “I think,” Ginn concludes, “Black Flag promoted the idea of just jumping off the ledge and doing it.

When Lombardi joined the Green Bay Packers in 1959, the team had gone eleven straight seasons without a winning record, and after winning only one of twelve games the previous year, the team fired Lombardi’s predecessor. Upon arriving at training camp as their new head coach, Lombardi made an immediate and indelible first impression on Bart Starr, a struggling third-string, fourth-year quarterback. After leading the players to a meeting room, Lombardi waited in front of a portable blackboard as the players sat down. He picked up a piece of chalk and began to speak. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have a great deal of ground to cover. We’re going to do things a lot differently than they’ve been done here before . . . [We’re] going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because, in the process, we will catch excellence.”6 He paused and stared, his eyes moving from player to player. The room was silent. “I’m not remotely interested in being just good,” he said with an intensity that startled them all.

I have no partner and no children, but I still have family and my absence affects them, too, because where they might have relied on me in the past, now they have to rely on themselves and each other. But in my experience, meeting the challenges of working in an isolated location like a remote island resort makes you more resilient and better able to meet even greater challenges in the future. Even if you don't have a sense of adventure to start with, you soon develop one. It's hard not to. At the end of the work day, just standing out in the dark and looking up at the millions of stars in the sky…it's like no city job anywhere.