Okay, enough of this foolishness.  Time to buckle down to the new year.  Or at least start.  So here’s a list of the “top 31 careers.” 

Why 31?  Who knows.  But, open wide!  The top career in terms of job satisfaction is:

• Dentist

Isn’t that weird?  Followed by:

• Engineer
• Government Manager
• Investment Banker
• Management Consultant
• Occupational Therapist
• Pharmacist
• Registered Nurse
• School Psychologist
• Urban Planner

For the other 21, and more info, go here.

Going back home (Seattle) tomorrow.  Looking forward to real life.  And rain. 

One of Working Girl’s huge pet peeves is tardiness.  Other people’s, of course.

Not from-time-to-time lateness.  No–what she despises is when a person is late every time.  To every thing.  Even more annoying: When said person seems to feel it is part of his/her charm.

News flash for the time-impaired:  Chronic tardiness does not make you seem charming.  It makes you look bad.  To wit:

1.  When you make people wait for you, you are in essence saying to them, “Your time is unimportant.”  So tardiness is more than rude, it’s insulting.

2.  Forcing people to wait for you gives them time to wonder why you need to pull this little power trip in the first place.  After all, you wouldn’t pull a power trip unless you felt you lacked power.  Would you?  When you think of it, chronic tardiness is a pathetic ploy of the powerless.  We are angry with you and feel sorry for you at the same time.

3.  If you actually are a powerful person–say the CEO of a company–and you are habitually late, you are doubly pathetic because even though you nominally DO have power you apparently for some reason feel deep down you don’t (else why would you abuse people under you by wasting their time?).  Yikes. 

4.  Okay, it’s not always all about power.  Another reason for being habitually late is you’re just a very bad planner.  It never occurs to you that there might be traffic to hold you up so you never build any extra time into your schedule.   Maybe once ten years ago there was no traffic and you made it to work in 15 minutes and so now you think, Oh, I have a 15-minute commute.  This complete lack of foresight and plain old common sense makes you look a bit, er, stupid.

5.  Okay, you’re not a power fiend and you’re not stupid.  But you are still habitually late.  Has it occurred to you that this is a sign you don’t want to do what you’re doing?  That you are trying to stuff yourself into some lifestyle not right for you?  Please, do us both a favor and reevaluate your life choices.

Working Girl has been told that her zero-tolerance policy toward the tardy is almost as obnoxious as being tardy.  But if you are someone who is never on time, think about what this is saying about you.  Consider revamping your modus operandi.

It’s not too late!

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the Enron debacle in this week’s New Yorker.

A point he highlights is that Enron never tried to hide its questionable doings.  The hithering and thithering of funds, the setting up of “pretend” corporations—it was all there in the public record for anyone to see.
 

Meaning? 
 

1.      Either the people at Enron didn’t think they were doing wrong, or
2.      they bet that their financial dealings were so complex and intimidating and confusing no one would ever figure out anything was amiss.
 

People rarely think what they are doing is wrong, even when their wrongness is far more obvious than Enron’s shenanigans, so there is a good case for #1.
 

Possibility #2, though, also has its charms.  When you believe you are the smartest one in the room, it’s often just another way of saying you think other people are stupid.  Sure, most smart people are smart enough to realize they are not the only smart ones. 
 

But some smart people are. . . . .stupid. . . . enough to believe they are so far ahead of everyone else that what they do and think and say must be ipso facto okay.
 

A third possibility worth considering: it was all so complicated not even Enron itself understood what it was doing.  In the corporate body, each cell mostly only understands its own function. 
 

Not an excuse, though—even a corporate body has, or is supposed to have, a functioning brain.