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Jon White
Ms. Ellington
English 155
June 26, 2009
Gamers Anonymous
I’m an addict. While some people may be addicted to smoking, drinking, illicit drugs or even sex, my addiction is gaming. From childhood, I’ve played board games, card games, videogames, and pretty much any other kind of game put in front of me and I love them all. For the sake of this particular essay, however, I’ll keep my focus on console gaming (videogames). My biological father bears most of the blame for my gamer status and gaming is just one of the many far-reaching effects he had on my life, which, in turn, has also cast forward its own effects. Among these are a consistent lack of money, a circle of friends almost equally fond of games, and a gnawing hunger for the next innovative gaming experience. Also, while I can partially blame my addictive personality for my gaming habits, I can almost equally blame my gaming habit for the way I’m so quickly addicted to new experiences and ideas as well.
When I was about four or five years old, my father brought home a brand new NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) fresh off the shelves as well as the first hockey game ever made for it, Blades of Steel. I can now only vaguely remember the nights of playing it with him for hours but it was our own personal form of father-son bonding. He was also very into emerging technologies, in part because of his employment as a financial manager for Blanchard Construction. This meant I was one of the few children I knew to ever get to try out the early “suitcase laptop” that my father occasionally brought home to work with. All of these, accompanied by my father’s almost equal fondness for gaming, meant I was well on my way to becoming a hardcore gamer from an early age.
My father also pushed me into gaming in a very indirect and entirely unintentional way. When I was eight years old, right around the end of summer to early autumn, my father died of a cancer-related heart attack in the middle of the night. As a child, of course, I never really grasped that my father was sick at all. Truth be told, I don’t think anyone expected things to turn out anything like the way they did, since his cancer was supposedly under control and in recession. Since I was a child and a peculiar one at that, his sudden death affected me in a unique way. Instead of breaking out into tears, I pushed it away. Instead of getting violent and rebellious towards life, I became more pensive and focused in the moment. This focus was especially evident as I quickly retreated into gaming to avoid thinking about painful reality. Gaming was my own form of escapism and I took to it happily and have been caught up in it ever since.
Being a gamer, however, does have a few drawbacks. To start, anyone who has ever been a gamer knows that trying to keep up with the gaming industry is not for people of a low income. Every new system is more expensive than the last, even at initial release prices. Every new system’s games starts off with a higher price tag and a high rate of release. Even more, every time a new system is released, I’d have to start its “game library” all over from scratch, as well as making sure I had enough controllers and other accessories to play the games I was interested in. All told, I’m sure I’ve spent many thousands of dollars in gaming in my life and would likely be much more financially stable if I had never gotten into it.
On the other hand, another result of being a gamer has meant that I usually have a conversation point with a very large percentage of people and have always surrounded myself with friends who also enjoy it. While my friends and I do regularly go out to eat, see movies, and hang out in person, it’s often much easier just to hop online during the week to play a few hours of gaming with friends and chat online as we attempt to survive hordes of zombies or shoot other players. Not having to leave home to spend time with friends means I don’t have to spend money that night on gas, food, or entertainment, as well as not having to worry about how certain friends might act when thrown into social situations. Anyone who knew my friends as well as I do would likely realize how high the potential is for embarrassment there.
Finally, and likely most importantly, is the factor of addiction. Gaming is an addiction for me, as I said earlier. The cause might be attributed to the fact that I have an addictive personality and very easily get pulled into new addictions. On the other hand, this might also be attributed to a direct result of gaming and the way it opens the mind to new ideas and experiences, making it an effect. Cause or effect, the simple fact is that gaming itself can easily become an addiction to most anyone who gives it a chance, though thankfully it is one of the better things to be addicted to, given the list of other possibilities. One clear example of this addiction in action, which I mentioned earlier, is the hunger for new games. It can often drive people to do things they might not otherwise consider doing, be it putting off paying an important bill to have money for a game or sinking large amounts of money into one that they know could be rendered obsolete in under a year.
Regardless of the various causes and effects, being a gamer has been one of the high points of my life and I sincerely believe that I will always remain a devoted addict to it, especially with the new breakthrough advances in technology emerging every year. I predict that in the very near future, everyone will have a connection to online gaming technology in one way or another, even if it’s only to have an easier way to watch movies or connect to their social networks online. Deep down, there is a gamer in all of us; some of us have just decided to go ahead and set it loose.
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Jon White
Ms. Ellington
English 155
June 19, 2009
Odd Jobs
No two jobs are ever exactly alike, yet no two are ever completely different either. I’ve possessed many different jobs in my life, some great and some horrible. The two that shaped my life the most heavily, however, were the years I worked for Lowes and Movie Gallery. Both are retail chains that directly merchandise to customers but the overall atmosphere and particulars couldn’t have been more different. From the autonomy and responsibilities of the job to the work environment and customer familiarity, each job had its own strengths and weaknesses. Despite the close balance, Movie Gallery has always been my favorite previous job due to the close-knit family atmosphere among my coworkers and the familiarity with the products and customers.
Starting off, both Lowes and Movie Gallery seemed pretty alike in autonomy and job responsibilities. Lowes was a very by-the-book type of job where I clocked in, did my job, did what I was told, then clocked out and went home. The job responsibilities were general and constant and there was very little autonomy with so many employees at different levels of management. In contrast, Movie Gallery had a small number of steady employees who all “wore many hats” on a regular basis. I never really stopped thinking of Movie Gallery when I left for the day either, since I often had movies out, had pre-played movies stuck back to buy later, or needed to talk to my manager about one thing or another. Also, by showing my manager how well I could do my job and handle customers and by being a dependable and invaluable worker, I was quickly considered the go-to guy for other stores that needed someone to fill in for them.
The work environments between Lowes and Movie Gallery were vastly different. While at Lowes, I went in, worked my hours, got regular breaks, could go to the bathroom when I really needed to, and could get support when needed. On the other hand, Movie Gallery often went from slow and mind-numbing to overwhelming in a matter of minutes. Meal breaks came when there were few or no customers or if I had someone else working with me (which almost never happened during morning and afternoon shifts) and only if I brought food with me or could get someone to pick something up for me. Like meals, bathroom breaks were either readily available or few and far between and the only support to be had was when the next person was scheduled to come in. While this often created some very tense and stressful days at work, it also left a feeling of pride that I (like a few others that worked solitary shifts) was trusted to be up to the task of handling it on my own.
Even though Lowes was a customer-friendly atmosphere, Movie Gallery was often just a little more familiar because of the repeat customers who continually came in to check out the new movies. While customers might come in to Lowes to purchase items to repair, renovate, or remodel their homes, they came in to Movie Gallery with the express intent of finding entertainment. Just like Lowes, when they needed recommendations, they usually came to us for advice or suggestions and were usually pretty grateful when one of us pointed out that one unnoticed, nondescript movie that they never realized was so great. This continual service, somewhat surprisingly, actually built up a level of trust between employees and customers, though a very fragile one.
With all of this taken together, while both Lowes and Movie Gallery were comparable in many ways, Movie Gallery was clearly my favorite job between the two. The only real reasons I ever left it were the extremely low chance for advancement, the abominably slow and miniscule rate of pay increases, the negligible health benefits, and the lack of available hours to work. While a job may be wonderful, cozy, and mentally uplifting, if it doesn’t pay the bills, it isn’t enough.
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Jon White
Ms. Ellington
English 155
June 12, 2009
How to Plagiarize an Academic Paper
Have you ever had gotten into one of those situations where you have an academic paper due in less than twenty-four hours and haven’t even begun to write it? Did you spend all night and morning straining to get it done and in workable order before it was due? How did that work out for you? Not well, I’m guessing. The alternatives, though, are to accept a zero, turn it in late, or find some way to magically create a decent paper in minimal time. The easy answer to all of this is plagiarism, or turning in work by another person as your own.
Unfortunately, many people that attempt to plagiarize papers make the novice mistake of turning in a directly-copied paper and are usually caught very easily. The real questions you need to answer to yourself before attempting this are, “How much time and work do I want to put into this?” and “How worried am I about being caught?” For the purpose of this paper, we’ll assume that you have a short but acceptable amount of time to work on this and really don’t want to get caught. To start, you need the basic word processing software (we’ll be using Microsoft Word as an example) and an internet connection to retrieve the original paper.
The first step to this is to create a new Word document. This is generally not a hard task and if you’re having to type out a paper, you should already know how to do this or you’re wasting your time even reading this. The next step, while keeping your new file open, is to find an acceptable paper to copy. Finding one shouldn’t be all that difficult either since there are plenty of websites that offer free papers to copy online. I won’t offer any suggestions here but type “free essay” into any search engine and you should find something to fit. The real trick, however, is finding a paper to fit your personality and writing style. Keep in mind that, no matter which paper you pick, you’ll be turning it in as your own work (with some careful revision of course). This being understood, a typical guy wouldn’t try to plagiarize a process essay titled, “How To Knit a Proper Doily.” Also, try to avoid any papers containing strange wording or excessive use of large vocabulary. Chances are that if you don’t know what the words mean, it will catch the professor’s attention and make your paper more of a target.
Now that you have a proper paper selected, you need to copy and paste it all into the new Word document. Highlight the entire title and body of the text, right-click on the selected text, and then hit “copy.” Now, go to your new document file and right-click in the center of the screen and hit “paste.” Now you have the clay you’ll need to mold into your actual paper. Unfortunately, here comes the hard part of the process. In order to avoid having your paper show up in a matching program, you now have to paraphrase it. The easy way is to take each sentence and change at least one word. This is easier said than done, however, and generally leads to it being caught anyway. Personally, I recommend taking each paragraph individually and dissecting it into the individual ideas and points it presents, then rewriting it in your own words, making sure to include all of the ideas and points the original paragraph contained. While this is a good deal of effort and is almost the same as writing your own paper, it’s a lot easier than trying to come up with your own ideas. Changing the original sentence structures is just one way to further avoid having your paper be matched to the original paper posted online.
Next, you need to reformat the new text to fit the requirements of your particular instructor. If he or she said to have it double-spaced with a specific font, change the spacing and the font. The last thing you want is to steal a paper, work really hard altering it, then lose a ton of points just because it isn’t formatted correctly.
Finally, you need to proofread your paper for any obvious errors and become as familiar as possible with it. Thankfully, by rewriting the paragraphs, you should already know what you have in the paper and be able to talk about it even without having it in front of you. However, this is the final step before you turn in your paper (more than likely), so it’s a perfect opportunity to catch any errors you might have made while rewriting. Also, make sure to check for any odd words or phrases that might single your paper out, such as references to specific seasons, regional language, slang, gender or race-specific examples, etc. These are easy ways to get caught and should have been spotted well before now.
Now you have a paper that, while plagiarized, is still partially your own and can be defended as such. Unless you left one of the sentences the same, it shouldn’t show up on any matching programs and probably didn’t take nearly as long to write as it would have if you’d written it entirely from your own ideas. All there is now is to turn it in and pray that you don’t get caught and get an automatic zero for the grade. With that said, let me make it clear that I do not actually condone nor participate in the activity of plagiarizing other papers. I do, however, enjoy writing about interesting and controversial subjects at times and this is one of those times.
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PSY120 Term Paper
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Personal Assessments Paper
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Term paper written for Organizational Psychology (PSY120) based off of Kuder Assessments and the Jung Typology test.
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Jon White
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When our teacher began talking about the requirements and purpose of this paper, I’ll admit that I had my doubts. I like the general idea of writing a paper based around self-discovery, it’s just a bit more difficult to write about abstracts like that that really can’t be researched online or found in a book. The first few assessments (the Kuder Assessments) I found to be a little dry, often badly worded, and entirely too focused on trying to “trick” an honest answer out of the taker. Additionally, it was entirely too likely to end up fooling itself by the way it was worded. For instance, does your preference for doing something really mean that you have more skills in that area? Or does it simply mean that you prefer doing that to the alternatives, even thought you may have no obvious skill in it? Either way, I did learn a few things about myself in the course of researching/writing this.
First off, although I suppose its impact on my actual career is more indirect than something like career interests or work related skills, I really enjoyed taking the Jung Typology Test. I’m almost certain that I’d taken it sometime in my youth but I can’t remember the details so I suppose it doesn’t matter. Apparently I am an INFP type, which stands for Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving. Supposedly, I am a slightly expressed introvert with a moderately expressed intuitive personality, a distinctively expressed feeling personality, and a moderately expressed perceiving personality. This means that my personality type falls under the category of “Healer,” a type that generally sees the world as “an ethical, honorable place, full of wondrous possibilities and potential goods.” Personally, I believe that, while there is a great undercurrent of goodness in humanity as a whole, our personal desires, petty ambitions, and constant in-fighting and self destructive natures make this world anything but ethical or honorable. Yes, everyone wants everyone else to stand up, take responsibility, and act in a generally accepted ethical manner. Unfortunately, as soon as they get behind closed doors, these selfsame people are more than ready to throw away their moral high ground in pursuit of a base desire or grand ambition.
I do agree on a lot of the points they mention about “healers” though, and I feel that most, if not all of it, has applied to me at one point or another. Healers are said to generally give a calm and serene face to the world, sometimes coming off as shy or cold, while in fact, inside they often care more deeply than anyone else. They tend to focus on the inner lives of particular individuals or on a larger cause, attempting to heal conflicts troubling individuals or dividing groups, thereby bringing their world in general to a better state. Unfortunately, due to their privacy and scarcity (healers reportedly make up only 1% of the population), Healers often feel more isolated by virtue of their idealism.
As I write this, I feel it echoing in memories of my own life; of trying to help people that immediately looked for hidden motives, of rejection for feeling too strongly too quickly, and of a general sense of distance from others and their motivations. Though over the years I’ve gotten a better handle on my feelings and how I express them, it is still sometimes unnerving to feel an instinctive pull towards anyone who seems to be hurting inside. I’ve always said that I seem to be a magnet for the psychotic or dramatic portion of the female population but perhaps it’s just the opposite… Perhaps I am drawn to THEM. It is food for thought, at the least.
It goes on to speak of how a Healer’s sense of separation might also be further exacerbated by an unpleasant or simply misunderstood childhood. Kids tend to grow up with one step in reality and one in fantasy as a general rule. However, it is usually more pronounced in children who start life as Healers, often with them living their early years enveloped in fantasy, imagining themselves as the “princes” or “princesses” of the stories they are told. While this may be innocent and not really a negative situation, it is sometimes frowned upon or even punished by some parents, often in effort to “ground their children in reality.” This can come to cause children to consider themselves as too “dreamy” or fanciful, often leading to what psychologists call an “Ugly Duckling Syndrome,” or a feeling that the child just isn’t as good as the more “stable” children around them. In truth, the child is okay, only different; a “swan” raised within a family of “ducks.”
Again, this line of thinking really made me think back to my own youth. While I wouldn’t say that my childhood was lived with me imagining myself a prince, I definitely grew up with my head in the clouds. Being diagnosed with A.D.D. (Attention Deficit Disorder) at an early age, it became quite obvious to people around me that keeping my focus grounded in reality and on the job at hand was usually an exercise in futility. Unfortunately, it was also then blamed on me and assumed that my actions (or lack thereof) were acts of laziness, apathy, or outright rebellion. I can’t honestly recall how many times I was put into “time out” or required to skip recess because I had not been paying attention during class or gotten sidetracked and not finished an assignment. To this day, I still have trouble keeping my focus on any particular activity if there are distracting influences around. Sadly, I also realize that my mind often subconsciously LOOKS for things to distract me when I am focusing on something particularly dry or uninteresting.
The upside of most of this is that Healers are a welcome part of most work environments due to their high level of adaptability and versatility. They are open to new ideas and new information and are patient with complicated situations, but we are often very impatient with routine details. They relate well with others but can often just as easily work alone. Due to the tendency to follow heart over head, we (at this point I feel more than comfortable grouping my personality firmly among this typeset) may sometimes make errors of logic or fact, but we rarely make any of feeling. While the text refers to us having a natural ability with language, I am personally not all that capable, for one reason or another. However, I am very true to type in that I too have a gift for interpreting stories as well as for creating them and I often write in lyric, poetic fashion. Considering that I have been writing poetry since I was in the 10th grade, I believe this is one of the closest ties I have to the Healer type in general.
Having spoken so much of the Jung Typology Assessment and my results, I suppose I should move on to my results from the various Kuder Assessments and their impact on my career outlook. To start, I believe that, while the assessments were fundamentally flawed in how they were set up, they did come impressively close with their results to my answers. The “Kuder Career Search with Person Match” listed my top 5 career clusters as “Information Technology”, “Architecture and Construction”, “Finance”, “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics”, and “Arts, Audio-Video Technology, and Communications.” Besides the “Architecture and Construction” and the fact that “Marketing” and “Business Management and Administration were relegated to the 6th and 7th tier positions, I feel that these results were very accurate indeed. I have always had an integral fascination with information systems and how they are interconnected as well as practical applications of them and in taking my accounting classes this semester for my current Business Management degree, I have just recently begun contemplating returning to Tri-County to pick up an Accounting degree once I finish my current degree requirements. “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” is too broad a category to simply dismiss it as an inaccurate result and my natural ability and enjoyment of creative expression would likely go along quite well with a position in “Arts, Audio-Video Technology, and Communications.”
The “Kuder Skills Assessment” gave me more of the same results, only in a slightly different order. According to it, my top 5 results were “Marketing”, “Information Technology”, “Arts, Audio-Video Technology, and Communications”, “Business Management and Administration”, and “Finance” with “Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics” and “Manufacturing” pulling in at 6th and 7th places. Apparently my skills are much more attuned to what I want to be doing than what the Kuder Career Search thought I should be. To be honest, while I did enjoy taking the assessments and reading my results, the included reports were more confusing than illuminating. The “Most Preferred Work Activities” section seemed to be almost entirely unrelated to the actual job areas that the results gave me, seeming to be little more than basic things you might have to do in ANY given job. The “Preferred Work Environment,” on the other hand, was tailored exactly to the job areas the assessment mentioned. Then the report decided to list every job title of every result the assessment possessed, leaving me with 16-18 pages worth of printout with only 2 pages of actual, useful information. By and large, I was pretty disappointed with the results I got back from the Kuder Assessments, especially compared to the spot-on personality typing of the Jung Typology Assessment.
Finally, let me give (dis)honorable mention to the Kuder “Super’s Work Values Inventory.” Although I enjoyed the questions it offered much more than the ones asked by the first 2 Kuder assessments, the results from it were vague and not all that practically applicable. According to my results, my top 5 work values are “Supervision”, “Independence”, “Workplace”, “Creativity”, and “Co-Workers.” Ok, so now what do I do with those results? Not only that, the actual report that it gave me back was so incomprehensible in its responses that it really wasn’t worth the time to take the assessment in the first place. Really, who lists “Director of Human Resources”, “Data Systems Manager”, and “ICE CREAM MAKER” as person matches for “Workplace?”
All in all, I learned the most about myself from my Jung Typology results and am happy to say that they will likely play a big role in what I will be doing in the future. After taking all of these assessments and writing this paper, I have decided to carry my results to an advisor to see if my current major will really be the best fit for me or if maybe I should consider redirecting my efforts toward a different degree entirely. While I like the idea of writing this paper as a class requirement, my biggest criticism is that maybe we should have made an effort to go over the Explore booklet in class, as the Occupational Profile section was more than a little confusing in where to find the information to fill in the blanks. Also, consider dropping the requirement for the Work Values Inventory assessment for either requiring the Jung Typology test or just requiring the 2 Kuder assessments and 2 other of the student’s choice. The actual booklet was a much better guide for the work values area with its area on “Why People Work.”
While I didn’t actually include my results from my “brain test” program in this paper, I will say that it is more than worth the effort to take it and consider the results carefully. It is more accurate in its results than many would care to admit. With that being said, I am embedding the images of the text of my results from the test here in my paper. Considering all of the other assessments I have taken and how their results truly reflect my everyday decisions and potential future, I feel I would be remiss to leave out something that explains how my actual brain affects my life in general as well. However, I’ll leave the comparisons between my test results and my behavior to you. In any case, I hope that this paper has been as personally enlightening to you as it has been to me.
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BUS220
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Sexual Harassment:
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The Employee Who Cried Harassment
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Jon White
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4/24/2009
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Business Ethics (BUS220) Term paper for class taught by Rodney Garza at Tri-County Tech.
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Sexual Harassment: The Employee Who Cried Harassment
Sexual harassment, obviously, is unethical. This is not up for debate really, it just is. My point to this paper, however, isn’t whether sexual harassment or its monitoring is ethical or not, it’s about the fact that it is entirely too easy to abuse the right to protest it. It is too easy to use sexual harassment as a tool to strike out at those whom you may not like.
Sexual harassment in the workplace today is a tricky subject at best, easily sparking off highly volatile situations in any company from the smallest local store to the largest corporation. With just a few words to the right (or wrong) person, suddenly a juggernaut of capitalism can be pulled up short in order to “correct” the behavior of its workforce. Personally, I believe that the measures put into place in the last few decades to correct this are a boon to corporations everywhere, as they keep things flowing smoothly on a social level. Unfortunately, it can also be used inappropriately as a tool of revenge or just a way to get attention or money. The best way to explain this, I suppose, would be with an example of the abuse I’m speaking of.
Sally was a good employee but she had a habit of constantly trying to be the center of attention. One day she noticed a male coworker, Jeff, and decided to flirt with him. Being already taken, he nodded but basically ignored her advances, making up excuses to avoid her. Angry from the lack of response, she decided to get back at him and went to HR complaining that he had been harassing her when no one else was around. Due to their company’s strict sexual harassment policy, Jeff was then forced to undergo a sexual harassment seminar and was also passed up for a promotion. All of this happened simply because a girl was unhappy about his lack of attention and he had no way to prove otherwise.
Was it Jeff’s fault for not being prepared for such a possible event or is the company to blame for its policy’s knee-jerk reaction to sexual harassment charges? My opinion is that it’s entirely too easy take advantage of the current paranoia about workplace harassment and use it to indirectly slander people who don’t deserve it. With companies growing and falling at such alarming rates, it is easy to understand why there are so many sexual harassment cases, large and small, being brought up on a daily basis.
According to the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), there are two different types of harassment: something called “quid pro quo harassment,” where career or job-based opportunities are promised in exchange for sexual favors, and “environmental harassment,” where unwelcome sexual conduct interferes with that person’s work environment or creates an uncomfortable or even hostile work environment. The simple definition of sexual harassment, however, is:
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sex·u·al ha·rass·ment
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Noun
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Definition:
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unwanted sexual advances: unwanted sex-related behavior toward somebody, e.g. touching somebody or making suggestive remarks, especially by somebody with authority toward a subordinate
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Unfortunately, it is often this second, simpler definition that employees go by when deciding whether or not they have been a victim of sexual harassment. In fact, a sexual harassment survey conducted in late 1988 for “Working Woman” by Klein Associates stated that sexual harassment costs a typical Fortune 500 company about $6.7 million a year. Strangely enough, studies show that cases of sexual harassment are actually LESS prevalent now than they were then. According to the EEOC, federal cases of sexual harassment in 1990 totaled 5,694 while in 1984 there were 6,342, despite that there were 17% more women working in 1990 than 1984. In searching, though, I found that, astoundingly, there is an apparent lack of information on how many cases are actually dismissed versus settled or won by the plaintiff.
To truly see how pervasive this issue is, all I have to do is ask, “Did you hear what happened with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky?” As perhaps the most famous sexual harassment trial to date, it easily symbolizes the outlook on sexual harassment today. The charges were filed for attention’s sake, lead to an impeachment trial that did nothing to truly lower Clinton’s approval rating, and ultimately lead to a more blasé reaction to sexual harassment on a personal level. I cannot count how many people I have heard say that they still liked and/or even respected Clinton more after the scandal.
Honestly, my biggest concern isn’t so much the amount of cases being filed without good cause, but its inevitable effect on sexual harassment cases in general. What happens when close to half of the cases filed are then just as quickly dismissed? Put simply, it’s another example of “the boy who cried wolf.” The sad thing is, the farther we go, the more bad examples we seem to get.
Again, I fully believe in the monitoring and policing of sexual harassment in general, I simply feel that the rules and regulations (and especially the courtroom precedents) that are currently being enforced are not up to the challenges facing them in today’s workplace. Also, we need to find a way to stop the constant influx of unfounded sexual harassment claims.
Encarta. Encarta - Sexual Harassment Definition. 2009. 14 April 2009 <http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?refid=1861723150>.
HR World Editors. www.hrworld.com - The Top 20 Sexual-Harassment Cases of All Time. 2007. 17 April 2009 <http://www.hrworld.com/features/top-20-sexual-harassment-cases-121307/>.
Morgenson, Gretchen. www.ArticleArchives.com - May I have the pleasure... 18 November 1991. 23 April 2009 <http://www.articlearchives.com/society-social-assistance-lifestyle/sex-gender-issues/214585-1.html>.
Rights, The Illinois Department of Human. "Sexual Harassment in Illinois: A Comparative Study of Complain Files." December 1994. 21 April 2009 <http://www.state.il.us/dhr/Publications/SXHRS_Rpt94.pdf>.
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BUS101 – DEBRa Jones
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My Manager, My Friend
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BUS101 Project Term Paper – Level 5 Leadership
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Jon White
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11/30/2009
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What makes a great leader so great? What propels them to heights that more qualified leaders may never attain? Apparently, it’s a contradictory mix of humility and willpower. While one must be strong and determined in the face of adversity, it is all too easy to let success go to one’s head, often causing downfall or simply just complacency. This is where the level 5 leader – and my former manager – come in.
I once worked at a local branch of the movie rental corporation, Movie Gallery. I was hired out of the blue when the manager realized that I, a frequent customer, was doing nearly as much customer service as the people already employed there as I often helped people out throughout the small store. One day, I commented that, as often as I was in there, maybe I should just go ahead and work there, and she agreed. This was one of the earliest founding moments in a friendship that has lasted nearly a decade and will continue so long as she can tolerate me. Her name is Tamyla Mitchell.
When I first began working at MG (Movie Gallery), I wasn’t really aware of the lack of morale and teamwork they had suffered up until recently, when Tamy was made store manager. I came in fresh, new, and totally unprepared, especially for the pleasant surprise that was Tamy’s management style. Here was a manager who actually cared. When I needed more hours, she found ways to give them to me. When I needed money just to have gas until the next paycheck, she loaned it to me from her own pocket. Startlingly enough, that was just two weeks after I began working there.
Unlike so many managers I’d worked under before then, she cared about her employees on a personal level and never considered herself superior to any of us. When the store needed to be open the day after a blizzard was called for, she rolled out a sleeping bag and stayed the night. When the corporate office told us they wouldn’t be paying for any decorations for holidays, she brought her own. Most of all, when I needed to talk about my own life, when I had issues to deal with, or when I just felt like babbling to anyone who would listen, she was there.
All of these examples are nice, but the true evidence of her management style was in the changes that occurred under her leadership. Where at first we had been a collection of employees working bad hours for bad pay, in time we became something closer to an actual family. There were disagreements of course, rivalries, terminations and new hires, but in the end, most of us knew each other better than employees at most other companies ever would. We knew that we could depend on each other in a crunch, knew that we could, as a team, handle any problems that might come up, but most of all, we knew that if worse came to worse, our manager had our back.
Over the years, I came to be close friends with Tamy and she trusted me as few other people ever had. If other stores ran short on help, she sent me. If they needed someone reliable to open or close the store, I went. She taught me most of what she knew as a manager and I learned so much from her, but the thing that meant the most to me in all of that was one simple realization: she trusted me. Because of that trust, I was motivated to be a better individual; to work harder, know more, and be more capable as a manager in my own right.
One of the best traits about Tamy, though, was the same trait that ended her time as our manager: she stood up for what she believed in. If something came down from corporate that didn’t make sense, she didn’t just pass it off as another harebrained corporate scheme that hadn’t been fully thought through, she challenged it. She might not stand in the street protesting or make some outlandish display, but she actually put in the effort to be sure that we, her employees, were not taken advantage of (at least not anymore than we were when we were first hired on). That simple fact was one of the things that probably kept our store afloat during the rough times after she quit, the ideas of teamwork and responsibility, as well as the work ethic she instilled in us.
Unfortunately, corruption and ego have a way of bringing down even the best of managers, whether directly or indirectly, and Tamy was no exception. One day, it came down that one of her supervisors had made specific policy changes (which we later found out were of his own design and never actually approved by the corporate office) that would cost her valuable time with her family that she had been promised months before. When she challenged it, she was simply told that she would have to reschedule her own life around this new policy, despite the fact that she had planned ahead, been promised the time in advance, and couldn’t reschedule. So, Tamy did what she had to and I expected no less of her; she quit. She turned in her two week notice on the spot and immediately began training me to replace her. The events that followed are an entire other set of drama that I will not go into but needless to say, corporate (and managerial) corruption is rampant and often overlooked.
To be honest, I couldn’t say for sure that Tamy would fit the description of a level 5 manager perfectly. If people looked at her accomplishments at Movie Gallery during her time as store manager, I don’t know if they’d see an exceptional leader, both humble yet willing to do what she must to propel the company forward. All I really know is that meeting her and having her as a manager changed my life and, quite possibly, countless other lives as well as the company, and I am indebted to her for it. She was my manager, she is my friend, and she will always be a part of my life.
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BUS121 – Manuela Vinson
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A Closer Look at the FDA (Food & Drug Administration)
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BUS121 Project Term Paper
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Prepared by Jon White, J.L. Owens, and Amy Anthony
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11/30/2009
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What does the agency do?
Have you ever stopped to think about just how many things you eat, use, and take on a daily basis? How about the numerous ways any number of them could be harmful, corrupted, underprepared, or even just plain defective? For instance, let’s say you buy a bottle of Tylenol to relieve your headache. Do you know all of the active ingredients in it? If given the same ingredients, could you make your own Tylenol geltab and be sure that it wouldn’t hurt you? How about food? Or, better yet, how about dog food? When was the last time you went sifting through the various types of dog food looking for specific ingredients or a guarantee that it would not contain something harmful? My guess here is: never. To be honest, most of us may think about it for only a moment or so but then we dismiss it and move on. Why do we do this?
The reason that most of us never think twice about these things is an agency known as the FDA, or Food and Drug Administration. They exist entirely to monitor and regulate the release, use, and research of various products and applications related to food and drugs. Without them, any two-bit salesman could pour sugar water into a bottle and label it a wonder drug, and often did. Imagine how angry you might be to find you just spent $200 on a bottle of cheap aspirin when you were supposed to be buying antibiotics or a prescribed narcotic. Even more frightening for some women, imagine that you bought makeup and put it on, only to find that it permanently scarred you or made you sick on contact. While these ideas may be considered far-fetched now, prior to the founding of the FDA, they were almost common occurrences.
As of 2001, the FDA employed a staff of approximately 9,100 employees comprised of chemists, pharmacologists, physicians, microbiologists, veterinarians, pharmacists, lawyers, and many others and boasted a budget of $1.294 billion. Close to a third of the FDA’s employees are stationed outside of Washington, D. C., staffing over 150 field offices and laboratories, which includes 5 regional offices and 20 district offices . The various scientists and employees evaluate applications for new drugs, medical devices, food and color additives, infant formulas, animal drugs, as well as a myriad of other products. The FDA also monitors the manufacture, import, transport, storage, and sale of around $1 trillion worth of items annually. On average, this typically costs the taxpayers $3 per person.
One of the greatest, and least often used, powers of the FDA is their ability to demand a company or organization to perform a recall. Arguably their most potent ability, they may only make such a demand if the product line in question is defective and/or harmful to the consumer. However, should these conditions be met, the company almost always complies immediately with the order for a recall, releasing information on the danger and requesting all such items be returned at cost to the company.
How and why was the agency set up?
To put it simply, the FDA was organized to fill a need, like most organizations, government or otherwise. Prior to 1883, when Harvey Washington Wiley arrived as chief chemist to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there was little to no government regulation on food, tobacco, and/or pharmaceuticals, with federal authority limited mostly to imported food and drugs. Instead, states exercised the principal control over domestically produced and distributed foods and drugs in the 19th century, and this control was very inconsistent from state to state. This allowed many disreputable individuals and companies to conduct all manner of fraud and negligence, even going so far as to cut their products with other substances to lower their effectiveness, make bold claims they never intended to back up, and often to even sell placebo cures labeled as the real thing.
With the arrival of Wiley though, things changed dramatically as the government started paying much closer attention to the regulations regarding food and drugs, as well as the gross negligence and unethical practices of many salesmen and even some larger companies. Beginning as the Division of Chemistry within the U.S. Department of Agriculture and then the Bureau of Chemistry in 1901, the FDA most closely ties its origin with the passage of the Federal Food and Drugs Act in 1906, changing their scope from primarily scientific research and adding in regulatory functions. In 1927, their name changed again to the Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration when the non-regulatory research functions were moved to a different part of the department.
Finally, their name was changed one final time in 1930 when it was shortened to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as we know it today. However, throughout all of these name changes, the FDA remained a part of the Department of Agriculture until, in 1940, the agency was moved to the new Federal Security Agency. It changed hands a few more times, moving in 1953 to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), then to the become a part of the Public Health Service within HEW, finally ending up in its current home, the Department of Health and Human Services, in 1980, where it remains to this day.
What businesses are affected by the agency?
The regulation of tobacco products and cosmetics also falls under the jurisdiction of the FDA. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ensures that the food Americans eat, the dietary supplements they use, and the medicine, biomedicine, and medical devices people rely on are safe and effective. The FDA also oversees food and medicines for both farm and domestic animals. There are 90 sub-classifications of eight main industries that are directly affected by the FDA.
According to “Global Cosmetic Industry Business Magazine,” eye makeup alone was a $10.1 billion dollar industry in the United States last year. There are as many cosmetics exported as there are imported in the United States. The FDA’s standards for imported cosmetics are the same as domestically produced cosmetics. The item is approved as long as the ingredients are approved ingredients, and the label accurately reflects the information for the particular cosmetics item. The FDA will, however, step in and intervene if there are questions as to the items safety.
Just this year, in June of 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law, legislation that granted the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco products. The FDA will now be able to regulate how the tobacco products are labeled, ensuring that there are no false claims such as ‘low tar’ or ‘light’. Regulation of advertising practices is also included as part of the FDA’s new role. The FDA will need to enforce scientific claims both for and against the use of tobacco products, and it will allow the FDA to mandate whether an ingredient in a tobacco product needs to be removed because of harmful qualities.
The FDA has developed branches to the organization that assist with the regulation of particular industries. The Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) is in charge of the safety and labeling of almost all food items in the United States. It is also responsible for maintaining standards for accurately labeling food items. CFSAN also determines the requirements for nutritional labels. Although regulation of non bottled drinking water is covered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), bottled drinking water is governed by both the state governments and the FDA.
The FDA does not regulate meat products from traditional domesticated animals like cattle and chicken. The USDA, or United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service, is the regulatory agency that handles that specific industry. The FDA does however handle foods that contain a small amount of meat. The FDA publishes the ‘Food Code,’ a guideline that helps food control by allowing them to use a scientifically sound and a legally valid basis for regulating retail and food service organizations, every four years. According to the FDA’s website, http://www.fda.gov, 79% of the United States population’s food industry is regulated by codes that were patterned from the FDA’s ‘Food Code’.
Dietary supplements are included as a food subcategory within the FDA’s regulatory power. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 directed the FDA to take over regulation of dietary supplements as a food item but dietary supplements are not subject to safety and testing to determine whether they are effective. The FDA cannot take any consequential action against a company that manufactures dietary supplements unless they are proven to be unsafe. Makers of dietary supplements are allowed to make general claims of benefits to overall health. However, there must be a disclaimer on the label stating that the supplement does not treat, cure, diagnose, or even prevent a specific medical condition or disease
Generic, prescription, and over-the-counter drugs are all regulated by the FDA. A company needs to submit a New Drug Application and then is subjected to intense scrutiny before being approved or denied. Once approved, a drug company needs to submit both periodic and quarterly reports to the FDA on possible side effects, contraindications, and efficacy, as well as many other criteria. Generic drug companies are required to prove that their drug is interchangeable with the name brand version. The FDA has a list of approved ingredients that may go into the manufacturing of an over-the-counter drug. They do not, however, regulate the actual process of manufacturing the drug or how the ingredients are combined.
The Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) is the branch of the FDA that regulates medicines that are used in animals. Its primary concern is not so much how these medications the animals, but how they may eventually affect humans. The FDA also mandates that pet foods be safe to eat and manufactured under sanitary conditions. Similarly to dietary supplements for humans and generic drugs, the FDA’s main concern with pet foods is that it is labeled truthfully, makes no false claims such as promoting urinary tract health, and that the ingredients simply be approved ingredients by the FDA.
FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), is the branch of the FDA that regulates the use, manufacture, and labeling of medical devices. It is also charged with regulating radiological devices such as x-ray machines. The public can access Devices@FDA, which is an online database of approved medical device information. Some of the information included in this service includes links to the device summary information, manufacturer, approval date, user and use instructions and other generic consumer information.
The FDA plays an integral part in every aspect of daily life, from the food we eat and the medicine we rely on, to the cosmetics we wear. The FDA makes it possible for us to use safe and effective products. The FDA plays an integral part in every aspect of daily life in America. Regulating advertising, labeling, and ingredients is the most effective way for the FDA to regulate the safety of the majority of food, medical, tobacco, or cosmetic related industries.
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A Trip to Movie Gallery
Overview:
Names, Locations, and a Brief History:
The actual location of Movie Gallery has been many different movie rental companies over the years, finally culminating into the current Movie Gallery. When they first built the actual building, it came out under the eye-catching name, Moovies, complete with cow theme and strangely appealing merchandising gimmicks. Not long after that (around 2-3 years maybe), however, it changed and became Video Update. The colors became muted and most of the gimmicks were gone but the values rose to match. A few years later, Video Update was taken over by Movie Gallery, leaving us where we are today. As for the actual company, however, not much was found on their official history besides that the company is currently around 20 years old and consists of Movie Gallery, Hollywood Video, and Game Crazy, with thousands of store locations across the country.
The Mission:
“We are dedicated to exceptional customer experiences delivered with genuine warmth and friendliness.”
The Visit:
Location:
The particular store I visited was in Pickens, South Carolina, my hometown, as it was the closest available branch to me and I was already familiar with it and its store manager. While they previously had branches in places like Easley, Powdersville, and Traveler’s Rest as well, many of them have been closed in the last few years due to the steady decline of the company in general. As of now, the Pickens store stands as one of the few remaining branches in Pickens County.
Physical appearance of the business:
Based in front of Bi-Lo in Pickens and next to Little Caesar’s, the Movie Gallery’s exterior seems both commercial and yet unassuming due to its small size and positioning. The outside of the store is clean and well-kept while the inside seems to be equally maintained. While the cleanliness is admirable, I tend to attribute this more to store policy than any active desire on the employees’ part to keep it tidy.
How quickly you were greeted:
As is always the case when shopping at Movie Gallery, I was greeted as I entered the store (by the girl working at the cashier’s station at the front counter. I was then offered assistance by the store manager who was busy putting out movies. Finally, as I left, they said goodbye and requested for me to come again, which is a traditional goodbye message in the corporate world.
Ability of the customer service representative to answer product question:
When asked various questions about movies and asked for suggestions, the associate answered clearly and without much hesitation. He even went so far as to suggest alternatives to the movies I was looking for that they didn’t have in stock. All in all, I was more than satisfied with his depth of knowledge and willingness to assist customers.
Professionalism:
From start to finish, every employee I encountered was both courteous and professional. While many stores and companies may sometimes fail here and there, I feel that a large part of what allows MG (Movie Gallery) to maintain such consistent professionalism is its low number of actual employees. With a smaller workforce, maintaining discipline is clear not as hard as if it had been a larger company with a larger amount of staff working at once.
Suggestive selling:
As I shopped around the story, it was impossible to miss the large number or POP (point-of-purchase) sales displays, banners, and listed reminders of the various offerings within Movie Gallery. Also, the associate who rang me up made it a clear point to suggest various offers that I might be interested in based on my high number of movie rentals and repeated late fees. Clearly, suggestive selling is an integral part of the Movie Gallery business plan.
Pace of transaction:
From the moment I entered until I was finally ready to check out and go, I basically lost track of time entirely. However, as soon as my selections were made and I was prepared to leave, the wait time in line seemed to drag on forever. While it seemed very annoying to me at the time, it was clearly my own impatience getting the better or me, not any failure on the part of the employees.
Detracting factors:
Honestly, having been to Movie Gallery many times in the past and even having worked there, it’s hard to point out any clear detracting features of the store or my experience with it. Besides minor issues and several large issues with the corporate structure and policies, I have nothing but praise for the actual Movie Gallery store in Pickens. In fact, I am more than a little proud that they have managed to maintain order and a good work ethic despite many branches closing all around them.
Ambiance/Odor:
The overall ambience for Movie Gallery is hard to describe really. At times, you can smell the popcorn and candy on the racks throughout the store and it almost makes you nostalgic of your own days as a kid. At other times, however, it resembles nothing more than another movie rental store, commercial and impersonal.
Appearance of employees:
All of the employees working the day I visited were dressed appropriately and professionally according to the Movie Gallery company dress code (red or white collared t-shirt and khakis). Although one of them did have a beard, it was well-trimmed and in no way unkempt. Also, while most of them seemed very professional and upbeat, you could occasionally catch glimpses of exhaustion and/or boredom on a couple of them when they thought they were out of customer eyesight (which would’ve gone unnoticed had I not been looking for it).
Physical layout:
The physical layout of Movie Gallery is both simple and effective. The New Release wall, containing all of the most recent movies to be released on DVD, wraps all the way around the store from one side to the other, only broken by the storefront and full-size windows. Racks of candy sit on either side of a double-sided drink cooler facing away from the front counter, showing off row upon row of slightly overpriced candy. The middle of the store is mainly taken up by multiple shelves of older, “catalog” DVDs for rent, as well as a large section devoted to games for the 3 large console systems currently available, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii.
Temperature:
While I couldn’t tell for sure what the temperature might’ve been inside at the time, at a guess I would’ve said in the low 70’s. This is a generally accepted good temperature for stores since it is rarely seen as either too hot or too cold, although the thermostat would naturally by dictated by the weather outside.
Parking Lot:
Movie Gallery shares its parking lot with the Little Caesar’s Pizza store directly next to it. With the constant traffic between the Movie Gallery external drop box and the various people coming through to pick up pizza, their parking lot is rarely empty or constant, especially on weekends. Also, while trash does sometime accumulate in the parking lot, a “sweeping machine” comes by several times a week at night to clean it out.
Lighting:
The lighting within Movie Gallery was more than adequate, with most of its light contributed to fluorescent lightning on the ceiling. However, the large windows on the storefront did seem to sometimes cause some annoying glare. On the other hand, I’m sure that the sun also does quite a bit to help warm up the store on cold days.
Feeling of safety:
While safety was never really an active concern in my mind, I suppose it would be important to the company from a customer service standpoint. I don’t believe that Movie Gallery did anything as a corporation to instill a sense of safety but the locations sheer proximity to one of the largest shopping areas in Pickens is more than enough to set most peoples’ minds at ease. Also, it is a well-known fact that in Pickens, the police are extremely quick to respond to any and all alarms set on, in, or near businesses.
Courtesy of the customer service representative:
I’m assuming by the wording of the actual question that this is not the same question repeated but a similar question asked about a different employee (i.e. cashier, greeter, customer service representative, etc). However, Movie Gallery tends to function by having all of its associates trained to be multi-role employees, sometimes even left to be the only one working at a given time. Either way, all employees treated me with courtesy and respect (or at least did a really good job of pretending to).
Knowledge of the customer service representative:
All of the employees I spoke to seemed to be very knowledgeable, with some obviously more educated on one particular subject or area than another. At no time was I ever told, “I don’t know,” but instead, “Let me see if I can find an answer for you, Sir.” All in all, those that were not knowledgeable about something were at least trained to divert well rather than just admitting ignorance.
How the service representative handled the situation:
While there was no special “situation,” I believe that the employees I met not only performed admirably, but well above what is normally expected of workers doing the same job. They were efficient, helpful, and managed to seem upbeat and courteous, despite having likely been there for several hours already.
Overall feeling of satisfaction:
Overall, I would say that I was not only satisfied by my experience but even impressed by it and proud of the employees working at that time. I hope that that kind of work ethic is carried on to any jobs they move to in the future.
Other comments about your experience:
Doing this particular project was a lot like doing a mystery shop, which I was often asked to do in other jobs every now and then. While it isn’t all that challenging or difficult to do them, they are often repetitive and time-consuming, which this project definitely was. Hopefully, however, this will help others be better prepared to have to do the same kind of thing in any future jobs that might ask it of them.
Would you recommend this company/product to another?
I would most definitely recommend this store to anyone in the area looking to rent a movie, even though I rarely actually take the time or money to rent them myself anymore. The store is clean and well-stocked, the employees courteous and helpful, and the overall experience is whatever you choose to make of it.
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