Little Ideas

Between being bogged down with work and keeping up with domestic activities, like lawnmowing and updating Myspace pages, parents in the near future will be far too busy to keep their friends and families abreast of their new baby’s oh-so-adorable first words and so-so-surprising first steps. In fact, they will be too busy to have the time to spare to actually take notice of those things. As a result the baby publicist is an inevitability.

Baby publicists fulfill the same duties as our favorite celebrities’ PR people do now. They keep everyone abreast of the baby’s latest activities, make sure that the baby is seen with the right other babies, and cover the fallout of any mishaps the baby might accidentally be a part of.

Press releases will fly as “Little Tom Tom” makes his first words. Little Tom Tom’s publicist will have  those press releases headed out to every family newsletter floating off the family tree. The publicist will be on the phone with the people who count,  describing every detail down to  the little puddle of drool, letting them know exactly how the first words went down. Finally, if there is video available, expect it to hit the net within thirty minutes of the occasion, a skill the baby publicist honed during a short stint working for TMZ.com.

With the first birthday party rapidly approaching and parents and child unable to contribute much to the planning of the party, It is the publicist who will invite the other babies who matter. The publicist will also arrange for appropriate sponsorships and keep any and all Hiltons from stealing the spotlight.

Did Baby Lily have an accident? No, not in the capable hands of your baby publicist, who will turn that accident into a “statement of defiance in the face of a society uncomfortable with its natural instincts.” Either that or a “no comment.” Also, if you were under the misapprehension that baby “got a boo-boo” from crawling full-speed into a door, you soon will learn that not only did baby not get a boo-boo, but the baby’s family is investigating whether to press charges against homebuilder for not anticipating such an obvious mishap. Finally, if a video should surface of a certain little bundle of joy, sitting naked in a basin, becoming a little too familiar with certain parts of their anatomy, well, there’s little that baby publicist can do, but the baby publicist will have age-appropriate talking points available for the baby to study.

I understand that many people are going to take umbrage when baby publicists begin multiplying and baby handling becomes routine. They may feel that we’re pushing our children to grow up too soon. Well, if a child does grow up too soon, a baby publicist will be there on the scene to let everyone know that the baby grew up in an entirely reasonable rate of time.  

Tags: humor, baby publicist, PR, publicist

If only it were as easy as Donald Trump makes it seem to be fired. On The Apprentice, contestants walk into a dimly lit room, sit before a triumvirate headed by Donald Trump, who cuts them down and fires them with rapidity, guillotining your career ambitions. Ah, if only it were so easy. Getting fired is less like being beheaded and more like being trampled to death. As it’s happening, all you can do is ask yourself, “Why is this taking so long?”

There must be a way to make firing a more humane experience, and I think I’ve come up with a perfect solution. First we have to change corporate America’s view of employment. Corporate America is too clingy. Each time a company hires a person, that person is less an employee and more a family member, part of a large extended family in which members get paid for performance and are governed by laws and rules they’ve had no part in creating. The company hates to see a family member leave the nest, especially when that family member, due to circumstances often beyond the company’s control (’curse you, evil shareholders!’ thinks the company), is tossed from the nest unceremoniously and with great shedding of tears. Corporate America has to stop thinking of its employees as family members and start thinking of new hires as potential fires. It is, after all, inevitable, that an employee is going to engage in behavior that will get him or her fired. It’s human nature. The company, then, should start looking toward the firing of the employee, considering how to make it as comfortable as possible.

• Contact the employee early in the day

There is nothing better than waking up the morning after daylights savings time has ended, realizing that you have an hour more to sleep because you’ve forgotten to reset your clock, and sleeping for three more hours, missing any and all appointments you had that day. Beautiful. Wouldn’t it be a comfort to wake up to a telephone call at 7:30 AM, your employer suggesting you get a couple hours more rest because you needn’t come to work today? It’s no more difficult to fire someone at the end of the day than at the beginning, so why not give it a shot?

• FTD Gift Basket

The forward thinking company will have prepared for this day for each of its employees. The company’s job applications, since they already require useless information, will have asked the employee questions about his or her interests, hobbies, friends, and acquaintances. That information will have been compiled in anticipation of this firing, and that information will be used to fill out an FTD gift basket. Since the employee will have a lot of spare time, maybe a book or movie, tailored to the employee’s interests will be included. Definitely tickets to the local theater will be found in the basket. Maybe even a guide to local events with certain events of interest highlighted and marked with a note such as “You and Pat would love this!” That basket would arrive in the middle of the day, just as the employee was finally waking up. At the bottom of the basket, under the pile of gifts, the company would have been nice enough to include a note saying “It’s not you; it’s us. Enjoy your newly-acquired free time!”

• Answering Machine Messages

This isea will probably be a little more controversial than the others, but it’s not without its merits. The one thing a new entrant into the job market needs is confidence. No matter how nice a company is to a new fire, one can easily lose one’s confidence upon being fired. Especially when that person goes to the gas station to buy a candy bar and has his or her debit card denied. “But, heh heh, I swear there’s money in there! I’m going to have to call someone and really let them have it, boy I tell ya!” says the person before running back to the car to cry. To bolster the new fire’s confidence, a week after an employee has been fired, maybe his or her manager could call and leave a message on the answering machine, feigning despair. Near tears, the manager could come right up to the edge of begging the ex-employee to come back to work before rejecting the idea out of fear of reprisal from supperiors, sobbing into the telephone that beauracracy– not Crystal Meth– is really what’s depleting America’s stock.

Obviously many of these ideas will seem to progressive for all but the most thoughtful of companies (Wal-Mart, Adidas, and Consolidated Papers and Pens) to adopt, but all one leader is all that is required to bring others onto the right path.

It’s almost Labor Day, which we all know means it’s time for the administration to begin rolling out new products. Since the lineup for the new fall line is not quite set in stone, I have a few prototypes at which I’d like to offer the administration first crack.

White House Caulk: Porous only when it’s in your best interest.
Crawford Mini-blinds: Keeps out 15% more sunlight, 30% more reality and 100% more Sheehan.
Karl’s Deroverant: Never let ‘em see you sweat. (Not for use by people without something to hide)
Rummy’s Smug Check: Guaranteeing that you’re always in compliance with federal, state, and local smug guidelines.
GOP Red Ink: Get it by the gallon.

While many of you may have read the internet rumors of the White House’s introducing Iraq’s Constitution – theocracy with a splash of democracy, the latest word is that is has been pushed back. Look for it in time for Christmas with an entirely different ad campaign: In God we Trust… and repress women.

When I lived in California, a technologically progressive state, I learned that you could check traffic conditions by logging onto the state’s website. Area maps were had overlays that informed you of the traffic on the street by displaying green in low traffic areas, yellow in medium areas, and red in difficult areas. I’ve noticed that many large cities now have similar programs. In fact, Yahoo Maps, in a bid to remain relevant in the face of the mighty Google Maps site, displays traffic conditions in many of those large cities. The time when you have least necessity of knowing that traffic information is when you’re sitting in front of a computer. You don’t need to know traffic information until you’re actually inside the car, but by then, it’s too late.

Why can’t municipalities take that information that is already available to them, and send it to signals on the road? Maybe two blocks before a major intersection, short light poles could be installed that would tell you the state of the traffic a mile away, giving you plenty of time to decide that you should probably turn onto a different road and try another route. The system wouldn’t need to be any different from the Red, Yellow, Green system we’ve all become familiar with.

Yes, there’s a certain joy that comes from sitting in a car, stuck in traffic, becoming bowled over by joy when Justin Timberlake’s “Senorita” comes on the radio, but isn’t that joy always dissipated by the realization, halfway through the song, that your McDonald’s fries are slowly creeping from golden delicious to rubbery gross? There are plenty of indicators for things you don’t need to know– the speed limit, for example– when are we going to get access to the information we need to know?

A couple weeks ago, Hotjobs went from being a somewhat useful job search tool to being one of my favorite job search tools with one little tweak: It started scouring the web for job listings and publishing them below the job openings listed in its database. It also makes wonderful use of RSS, which allows me to keep an eye on job postings without having to log in to the site or check my e-mail. Congratulations! I can think of something, though, that would make Hotjobs a lot better. Let’s call it a Heat Index.

When you’re applying daily, desperately, for jobs, there’s nothing more disheartening than the notion that a million other people are simultaneously checking out the same job you’re checking out. Of those millions, hundreds or thousands are probably applying for those jobs, forcing your resume into the middle of the heap. Under those conditions, your resume has about as much chance of being discovered as a pedophile in a parish. Hotjobs, though, has the ability to know how many times the job you’re looking at has been applied for, and it should use an indicator to let you know just how truly “hot” the job is. If fewer than 100 people have applied for the job, it would show the job as being hot. As more and more people began applying for the job, the indicator would slide ever closer to the dreaded tepid status. This would be useful for employers, too, because as important as finding the right employee might be, fighting your way through a glut of resumes seems little likely to make you better able to find the right choice.

It makes sense for the job seeker, and it makes sense for the employer, but I’ll be honest, I’m proposing this for my own sanity. I want to get a job!