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Chile Quake Shifted Earth's Axis

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Shiplord Kirel: From behind wingnut lines3/02/2010 2:59:07 pm PST

Bullying behavior is one of the things we look for when evaluating job applicants. We have interns and college students who are often quite vulnerable, while some ARE bullies themselves, so we have to be especially careful about it. There are some signs you can look for, like a swaggering stance from someone who is in fact overweight and in poor condition. I also watch very closely how applicants behave around other employees in contrast to how they behave with those in authority.

That brings up another, related, thing I won’t tolerate, a lack of respect for people who do honest work. The latter, unfortunately, is endemic in this part of the country. A friend of mine, a cultural historian, hypothesizes that this is a distorted legacy of the slave-holding culture. There is a publisher here who is the world’s worst about this. She once sat across from me and referred to secretaries, janitors, and the like as “peons” with whom she could not be bothered. I told her to get her ass out of my building before I called my (very large) secretary to throw her out.

I did not invent these policies myself, of course. I learned a lot of it from Southwest Airlines, which for many years was voted the “best company in America to work for.” They applied the “no asshole rule” for decades before the term was coined. They had a policy that an applicant who was rude or demeaning to anyone in the company or associated with it would not be hired, regardless of the applicant’s qualifications and the company’s other needs. It didn’t matter if you were a senior captain with 10,000 hours of heavy jet time, if you were rude the security guard, the janitor, or the receptionist, you would have to seek employment elsewhere. It seems to have paid off for them.