Quote for the Day 6/6/2009
Child (from another room) : Come on Mom. That was only a five. You can do better than that.
"Mom" is a farmer's market vendor who is mother to eight children, the youngest of them about twelve years old.
She confessed today to having an Irish temper, which gets away from her occasionally--not very often anymore, because she works hard at keeping it under control. But her children somewhere along the line developed the annoying habit of rating the outbursts on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst ever.
She figures it's a good sign if they can joke about Mom's temper.
Recently, when one of her adolescent sons exhibited a temper of his own, and he came eyeball to eyeball with his mother, she responded in kind, and then took some cooling off measures before she talked again soberly to her son. "You have a real temper," she told him. "And you know what? You didn't get it from your dad."
"Dad" is an engineer who just got laid off after 32 years of working for the same company. If he has a temper it doesn't show. His employment termination would provide plenty of fodder for anger if he were so inclined. Another engineer made a costly design mistake and then left the company. "Dad" discovered it, and figured out how to make the necessary corrections. Unfortunately the company had already manufactured $18,000 worth of junk parts, and gearing up to make correctly designed parts would have cost a great deal in addition to the parts loss. Because the error discovery came on "Dad's" watch, and "someone has to take responsibility for this, "Dad's" superiors (who were newcomers each time it was evaluation time) looked at the problems, singled out "Dad,' and, for the first time ever, he was getting negative evaluations. After that happened twice, he got laid off.
It could be worse. All his children who are in college are already paying their own way. He got one year's wages as severance pay. His retirement funds are intact, except that they are devalued now because the investments have lost value. He gets unemployment compensation.
********************
"Mom" shared her tactic for getting her youngest son to do his share of the work. She used to take her children to the garden to work for a specified length of time. At the end of that time, the youngest son would have about a half a row weeded to everyone else's two or three rows. So the rules changed. Everyone had to weed a certain number of rows. If the dawdler had only half a row weeded by lunchtime, when everyone else had finished their jobs, he worked on it after the rest went to the house for lunch.
"Mom" is a farmer's market vendor who is mother to eight children, the youngest of them about twelve years old.
She confessed today to having an Irish temper, which gets away from her occasionally--not very often anymore, because she works hard at keeping it under control. But her children somewhere along the line developed the annoying habit of rating the outbursts on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst ever.
She figures it's a good sign if they can joke about Mom's temper.
Recently, when one of her adolescent sons exhibited a temper of his own, and he came eyeball to eyeball with his mother, she responded in kind, and then took some cooling off measures before she talked again soberly to her son. "You have a real temper," she told him. "And you know what? You didn't get it from your dad."
"Dad" is an engineer who just got laid off after 32 years of working for the same company. If he has a temper it doesn't show. His employment termination would provide plenty of fodder for anger if he were so inclined. Another engineer made a costly design mistake and then left the company. "Dad" discovered it, and figured out how to make the necessary corrections. Unfortunately the company had already manufactured $18,000 worth of junk parts, and gearing up to make correctly designed parts would have cost a great deal in addition to the parts loss. Because the error discovery came on "Dad's" watch, and "someone has to take responsibility for this, "Dad's" superiors (who were newcomers each time it was evaluation time) looked at the problems, singled out "Dad,' and, for the first time ever, he was getting negative evaluations. After that happened twice, he got laid off.
It could be worse. All his children who are in college are already paying their own way. He got one year's wages as severance pay. His retirement funds are intact, except that they are devalued now because the investments have lost value. He gets unemployment compensation.
********************
"Mom" shared her tactic for getting her youngest son to do his share of the work. She used to take her children to the garden to work for a specified length of time. At the end of that time, the youngest son would have about a half a row weeded to everyone else's two or three rows. So the rules changed. Everyone had to weed a certain number of rows. If the dawdler had only half a row weeded by lunchtime, when everyone else had finished their jobs, he worked on it after the rest went to the house for lunch.
posted by Mrs. I at
7:47 PM
1 Comments:
What a Corny family, huh?:-)
Monkey In the Middle
By
Anonymous, at 6/06/2009
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