The Boston Marathon has finished for another year.  It’s a wonderful event with world class runners, drama, and of course Heart Breake Hill where the race is often made or lost.   While I was doing some web surfing trying to figure out some of the stories of the people in the middle of the pack I cam across Joy Johnson.  Wait till you see her.

Joy is the defending 80-and-over champion in the New York City Marathon.  You read that right, 80 and over.  She’s so good and so fit she increased the intensity of her training when she thought she might be slipping.  I had no idea the 80 and over bracket was so competitive!   You can read her inspiring story and see her training even at the Wall Street Journal at this link here

I think Joy’s story draws me in since she so inspires me as does Elaine Mansfield’s story of her transformation through strength training at age 55.   Both women show it’s never too late.  It’s never too late to take control back of your own personal health if you want to.   That is quite and inspiration for me and, if you read their stories, for you too I hope.

Now to get the coffee ready for tomorrow morning

Life just got a whole lot more complicated as my company, finally, had to succumb to the pressure of the current economic thing-a-ma-bobish recession er MACRO-micro economic thing we are in. It was inevitable. Being a small firm with valuable technology we are valuable but we are also easy to push around. So as we sat in the meeting room today, our chief scientist cleared his throat (“ahem”) and became one for whom stroking one’s beard is a nervous act hiding as one of wisdom and he spaketh unto us …..

“I have some good news and some, well, less than good news…statistically speaking of course”.

Those of us tech-marketing weenies looked about and said to ourselves, “wow, even WE didn’t understand that but it was good; we didn’t know this guy was that good at creating copy”. But he continued.

And we all got kinda puzzled seeing charts, graphs, scattergrams, hockey stick graphs, deep valley graphs and then realized…oh crap we really ARE in trouble!

My first thought was, so typical, “My freakin’ hair removal budget down the drain”. Said through clenched teeth under my breath my blonde hair’d friends words echoing through my ears, “The hair Becki, it’s always about THE HAIR”. Many of our kind readers will remember her refrain, so captured in “Hair Removal Horror” … and here it was again. But my fretting and dark clouds soon had a silver lining as I learned about workshare. And that was a treat.

Share my job? Oh hell ya! I’m all about that and so I really DID feel joyful upon learning that my company would join many others in New England to spread the hurt a bit and help us all keep our jobs to make it through the tough times.

Jo Landers, President of Jo Lander’s Business Services, captures the essence of this program best on her site, when she writes,

The WorkShare Program, run by the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance (formerly the DET), is a way to ‘partially’ layoff employees during a slowdown, without having to let them go or shut your business down completely.

The program is a boon on many levels for companies who are being assaulted by the difficult business climate. Among the many benefits are:

1. The company putting Workshare into place doesn’t lose it’s super skilled labor.
2. The employees aren’t hitting the bricks to the unemployment line, they are working, just a little less for a little less pay
3. Workshare payments count against a company’s state unemployment account but because a company is paying only partial benefits, the impact is much less
4. Workers (like me) do see a paycut, but, if one were to be laid off, the reduction would be significantly larger and in this economy who knows for how long.
5. Employees continue to keep their health care and other benefits during a Workshare arrangement

You can read Jo’s excellent summary on the Massachusetts Workshare Program at her professional services site here. You can read all about it from the employees and the employer’s perspective at mass.gov at this link here.

So, if the firm you work is having some challenges keeping the ship aright, suggest a Workshare program. Everyone sharing a little can keep the boat afloat giving everyone valuable time to make things right for the long term.

(Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Flickr Photostream)

“Large gender differences in the propensity to choose challenging tasks … appear to be driven by gender differences in risk aversion and in confidence about the ability to perform a new and potentially difficult task.”

How’s that for a quote!

You can read the full article here, “Gender Differences: The Role of Institutions” but here are some snippets that might make you situp and take notice:

• “The psychological literature suggests that women and men may differ in ways that affect economic decisions such as their self-perception of ability”
• “Women may not only be less certain about their abilities but also more risk averse, and less willing to explore and test their abilities.”
• “the authors predict that reducing the expectation of up-front commitment may especially help high performing women to move into harder and more challenging tasks”.

(Photo courtesy of SillyDog Photos, used under Creative Commons License)