Some workplace affects, 2007

Posted on | January 28, 2007 | 4 Comments

1.
TGIF - Regatta Hotel, Toowong

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“Sure, networking is more focused in its intentions than merely hanging out with one’s friends, but that doesn’t make it crassly utilitarian. I may say to myself, “Self, you really need to increase your visibility in Sub-Subspeciality A.” But I don’t go and find all the Important People in that field and try to finangle a meeting–I just go to a conference, give a paper, and make sure to talk to a reasonable number of people while I’m there. If there’s someone whose work I admire, I make it a special point to meet them–but otherwise I just talk to whomever I run into, whether grad students, emeritus professors, journal editors, whatever. I don’t work the room, but I don’t stay in one place for an hour, either.
[...]
Most of my professional friends and acquaintances are not friends in the sense that my “real” friends are. But just as my friends and I are continually offering each other advice, generating ideas, and expanding the number of our connections–and just as that activity is neither entirely selfish nor entirely disinterested–so it is with professional friends. Knowing people is good for you, absolutely. . . but knowing YOU is also good for THEM.”


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Tortured Soul (thanks Glen)

Category: Gender, Out in Vegas, Work

Comments

4 Responses to “Some workplace affects, 2007”

  1. glen
    January 28th, 2007 @ 4:43 pm

    i like it not only cause of the suffering quasi-LotR gimp thing (“my preshesss…”), which is hilarious considering that is exactly how I imagine office peeps to be (“my careeeeeer…”), but cause of the language in the use of ‘soul’, which I read literally in terms of a neo-leibnizian ‘soul’ correlating with the world of a monad (ala d’s fold), ie self as an event, integration of soul and world. hence, (wrong) career is torturing world.

    this is interesting because work is not necessarily meant to be easy or enjoyable sometimes! that is why ‘work’ is not called ‘fun’. the ad frames a career in terms of being a world to be selected, like Lazzarato’s comments about consumer society not being about products but selling the world in which products — and then the consumer that buys them — exist.

    lastly, it is interesting also, to pick up on the career-as-torture vs tough-work refrain, the gendering, as you note with your blog tag. It is a woman, but dressed in power suit, v. sophisticated, but wearing stupid high heals. while in cinema recently there have been numerous scenes and entire films that valorise explicitly dangerous or stupid labour. _the perfect storm_ is a classic example of a kind of honorable stoic stupidity in the face of chaotic events. _black hawk down_ is another. all men killing themselves as a kind of tribute or sacrifice to the monument of their own gendered labour.

  2. jason_a_w
    January 29th, 2007 @ 6:10 am

    This is a question rather than a comment (I have now at last had the opportunity to reverse my least favourite preamble in conference discussions), but is the whole unbuttoned Friday-afternoon-let-your-hair-down-and-drink-red-stuff-at-the-Regatta vibe sightly deflated by the rather prissy ‘Thank GOODNESS its Friday’ tagline? I thought that we had started by thanking ‘God’ and replaced Him with ‘fuck’ in that phrase (TGI Fridays restaurants to TFI Friday the 90s Brit TV show). Why the backsliding? Are they afraid of alienating all those bishopswho might just take their business to the RE instead? Is it symptomatic of a new reluctance to offend religious sensibilities? If I can’t have fuck, I at least want God back.

    Sorry, slightly off -topic.

  3. melgregg
    January 29th, 2007 @ 8:27 pm

    I’m totally with you! I wonder whether ‘goodness’ is supposed to encourage the lovely power-suited ladies to believe that the boys they meet at the pub will have manners? The Regatta Hotel has an interesting history of supporting its female clientele.

    Anyway, as Glen suggests, the empowered post-feminist uni student that turns up in my COMU1000 class and the salaried UQ graduate wandering in from a Coronation Drive office park both have the freedom to forge a career in their chosen field *and* keep up with the blokes at Friday Night Drinks.

    That’s progress, right?

  4. Mel
    February 7th, 2007 @ 5:15 pm

    WHAT ABOUT WEDNESDAY NIGHT DRINKS?!?! Am I seriously the only person prepared to booze mid-week?

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