talopine

Women: we can relate to them on a deep and complex level

Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.

You can install on your tablets, laptops and browers etc, so not only can you change things like documents into it, you can change websites into that font as well! 

For computer reading, when you mix up lines of text, there’s a web browser app called Beeline Reader. It looks like this

“Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. Among marine architects this is known as the zero-moment point – the point of no return.” –Sebastian Junger, “The Perfect Storm”

Posts like this aren’t my usual fare, but there’s a lot of readers on Tumblr. So y’all might be interested – or, if not, you really should be.

On Monday, this went down:

That’s the bloodless, matter-of-fact, ho-hum business event way of describing it. Let me paint you a different picture.

On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location – that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.

Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.

People.

We’re not talking post-holiday culling of seasonal workers. This was the Red Wedding. Every person laid off was a full-time employee. These were people for whom Barnes & Noble was a career. Most of them had given 5, 10, 20 years to the company. In most cases it was their sole source of income.

There was no warning.

But it gets worse.

Ahh, so this is an excellent start to my week: I just got my @masseffectholidaycheer​ gift from @talopine​ in the mail, and it’s excellent. There were two delicious smelling teas in there (and as soon as it cools down some, I shall be sampling that earl grey for starters!) and a fantastic knitted hat!

(Which is going to see so much use over winter with all the early, eaaarly morning public transport I see in my future. Freezing ears, begone!)

My gift to @talopine of Jane and Garrus taking a stroll! <3

Like, if a woman decides to quit her job and start a family, I think folks can generally agree that the right thing to do is to not be a jerk and to respect her choice and to even make sure plenty of resources and support are available for people like her wanting to make that transition. But if, at the same time, a lot of the women in a field are quitting, that’s a large-scale pattern, and that’s a problem where you have to start looking at the societal factors and pressures at play—is there harrassment? What’s going on in this field that’s pushing women out? What can be done to prevent that?

You get friction when “this is a problem at a large scale” gets filtered down to the individual scale, when “it’s a problem that so many women quit this field” becomes interpreted as “it’s a problem that Mary’s quitting this field and she should stay no matter what”. When you look at the individual, there are endless factors that come into play, some of which may legitimately give an airtight explanation for why Mary should get the heck out of Dodge. But that shouldn’t necessarily be the conversation in the first place. When you look at larger statistics, those smaller individual explanations start to come out in the wash and the major issues (and major players!) can be tackled head-on.

It’s like how there always seem to be incredibly long-winded explanations for why it’s okay that such-and-such specific film failed the Bechdel test: because it’s not meant to be a single point, it’s meant to be a statistic summarizing a whole dang dataset. The productive argument often isn’t that a specific movie didn’t pass, it’s that so few movies pass at all. Examples are helpful and illustrative and enlightening, but they generally have to be part of a larger discussion for anything to be accomplished.