Wow, your families suck. A lot. It is amazing how you turned into such a nice, thoughtful bunch of readers. How did it happen? What are your secrets?

Unfortunately, we have a winner.

I was sent a copy of Don’t Bring It To work: Breaking the Family Patterns that Limit Success. It’s written by Sylvia Lafair. The publicist asked if I wanted to read the book and review it.

I thought, Read it? I lived it.

You can have my copy of the book if you tell me, in fewer than 250 words, why your family is the most dysfunctional family on the planet. Leave your ‘pathetic family story’ in the comments section and I’ll pick the winner on Thursday.

I am inviting you to bring it to my blog instead of bringing it to work. Aren’t you lucky to have me?

If your life is anything like mine, your extended family will come together over the holidays and someone will drink too much light beer, eat too many cookies, and start complaining about his job.

It’s probably your cousin — the guy who wears a baseball hat to every family event. He will get all sentimental & shit and bemoan the loss of family values. He may also rage against the commercialism of Christmas and criticize corporate America — and you’ll have to resist the urge to point out that he drove to the holiday party in his Ford F150, he is wearing a pair of jeans from Old Navy, and he is eating his weight in government subsidized high-fructose corn syrup.

Deck the halls, yo. I don’t envy you.

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Why don’t you mix things up, this year? I dare you to be a shit-disturber and tell your family member to

• stop buying stuff he doesn’t need.
• sell one of his cars.
• learn how to cook.
• vacation locally.
• use coupons.
• give up red meat.
• cancel the cable TV.
• buy clothing at consignment stores.
• stop buying his kids soda and candy for snacks.
• find personal meaning in life by volunteering with animals, abused children, or those less fortunate.

Or you can tell your family member to STFU and eat another cookie.

What’s it gonna be?

Today is my sister’s birthday. Her name is Carolyn, and she is a hellraiser. (Obviously — we’re related.)

My sister is now 24. She is dreamy & sentimental. She likes puppies, romantic comedies, and Hanson. When she was a little girl, she had ringlets like Shirley Temple. She also had these perfect, baby, jumbo, “pork chop thighs” that were so meaty you could eat them with a fork. I called her CHUBBERS. (Who knew that might not be a good nickname for my sister? I was nine.)

I’m a judgy, crabby, cynical older sister — and she is the perfect, well-adjusted, thoughtful, angelic little sister. Also, she no longer has chubby thighs, but she does have a cute chin that I want to grab and touch!

Happy birthday, Carolyn.

My father-in-law, Walter Ruettimann, passed away, this morning. He was in his 70s and was feeling much better after a recent dip in his health. Unfortunately, Walter was doing some work around the house and fell off a ladder. He died from injuries sustained from the fall.

I wrote about Walter when The Happy Employee challenged me to write about a world without HR.

• My father-in-law was never really sure about how I earned my paycheck because he saw the function of Human Resources in its infancy — back in the days when it was called PERSONNEL.
• Walter was part of a generation of Americans who worked for one company from the day he graduated college until the day he retired.
• Walter great stories about working in Manhattan, traveling around the country on business trips, and enjoying multiple-martini lunches with executives. It was old school stuff, and it was amazing to hear how Corporate America operated before employment lawyers, internal audit groups, and HR departments.

When Walter worked in Corporate America, the HR department was made up of two groups: the men who managed the unions & the women who managed the personnel files. If you had a problem with your boss, you didn’t go to your HR representative. You went to your boss or you found another job.

I know I spend too much time in the HR blogosphere because I immediately thought of Mike Haberman’s post about safety awareness and emergency response teams when I heard about my father-in-law’s accident with the ladder. I hit the Google to understand more about ladder injuries, and it turns out that the internet is plastered with information, safety tips, and videos of people falling off ladders. Holy crap, dudes. Ladder accidents injure 200,000 people on an annual basis. Who knew?

The husband is on bereavement leave over the next couple of days and I’m holding down the fort with the kitties. At my old company, bereavement leave for the loss of a parent was one week. Some people took the entire week, but most people returned to work after a couple of days just to focus on something other than the mourning process. What’s the policy at your company?

I saw this on Passive-Aggressive Notes and it made me think of my brother. He always needs a job — not that he would qualify for pizza delivery at Cardo’s. He can’t go more than 10 minutes without talking on his mobile phone because he’s important & stuff.

My sister needs a job, too, but she’s totes irritated with me. It turns out that being ‘the foremost HR professional in the family’ doesn’t mean shit when it comes to siblings and advice.

Well now I’m nagging her in a passive-aggressive way.

Who says I’m not perfectly built for HR? My skills will not be wasted!

Thanks to everyone who is reading and commenting on my post about taking your kids to work.

I’m still in the LEAVE YOUR KIDS AT HOME AND FIND DAY CARE school of punk rock — but I’m totally sympathetic to the issues around day care. Furthermore, I’m impressed because several readers are plugged into the childcare mess at The Googles.

Some background:

• Google proudly advertises their daycare program as an employee benefit, but they are raising the costs of on-site daycare at Google to an almost unfordable price.
• Some employees are staging a revolt and using the media, company time, and a mix of private resources to voice their concerns to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Here’s a list of sites to get yourself up to speed with the day care issue @ Google.

• The NYTs kicks things off with a primer on what’s happening at Google.
• Frank Roche boldly and succinctly tells Google that the bloom is off the rose.
• FrannyO plugged us into a discussion on Google Daycare.
• There are some who argue that the rise in daycare expenses is unfair because the quality of Google’s on-site childcare is declining.
• Valleywag has the communication from Google’s chief HR officer on this issue! Turns out that short-sided nepotism may be involved in the reasons why Google started offering expensive & subsidized day care in the first place.
• Is childcare a benefit or a luxury in this economy? Even Google is facing challenges, as evidenced by the fact that they’re closing offices in Denver and Dallas.

The dollar is weak, the economy is lagging, and fuel prices are up. It’s almost too expensive to have children, and when you do have a kid, the work environment doesn’t provide any benefits or incentives for birthing & raising the next generation of doctors, lawyers & tax accountants. (Oh, and thugs.)

If Google can’t get childcare right, can any organization?! Can the government help?

What do you think?

Holiday weekends are for catching up on celebrity gossip — or so I thought until I saw an article about parents in North Dakota who are allowed to take their babies to work (as described in the latest edition of People Magazine).

Oh crap, I thought, it’s bad enough to endure high school internships and TYCTW events. Now there are babies in the cubicles?! Good god.

Maybe I’m clueless, but I assume that people go to work to avoid their kids. You spend 18 hours a day with your monsters — why would you invite that kind of chaos into the workforce?

I am, however, somewhat sympathetic to working parents who struggle to find qualified and affordable childcare providers. I know it’s tough to find a decent human being who won’t beat your children or let them eat yummy, lead-based paint chips for lunch; however, I’m not sure that parenting in the workforce is the thoughtful and comprehensive solution that’s needed for America’s workers.

Moreover, your workplace is a haven of germs & viruses. Your coworkers are gross and never wash their hands. The surfaces in your office are rarely (if ever) cleaned & disinfected properly. Do you want to exposure your kids to e.coli and salmonella via the community food table?

Also, what about respecting people who come to work and choose not to have children? How do you accommodate their needs? Where do you toss the dirty diapers? What do you do with a colicky baby? What about children with colds and the flu?

It’s bad enough that I catch your kid’s back-to-school cold, every September. Now I have to smell your new baby’s stinky poops?!

Dudz, let’s keep the babies at home with Baby Einstein toys and lots of television. That’s where they belong (and that’s where they are comfortable & safe). If you have childcare issues, please advocate for common-sense solutions such as telecommuniting, increased parental leave, thoughtful expansion of FMLA, more access to dependent care FSA programs, and better access to Head Start programs. Those are a win/win solutions for employers and your fellow employees.

Please, I beg you, keep the babies at home — or I’m going to demand equal access and bring my five cats to work!

For those of you who asked, here’s a Gramma update.

1. She’ll be in the hospital through Friday but she won’t lose her foot.
2. She has Medicare and reasonable medical expenses but doesn’t support universal health care.
3. She won’t vote for a Democrat, even though it’s in her best interests.

We did have a nice visit and talk about things other than politics and diabetes. My grandmother worked at the airport for many years, and I’m currently working on a list of famous people she met at O’Hare. If you have a crummy job with a difficult boss, it helps to distract yourself with famous people.

She’s in the hospital.

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I’m off to Chicago in the morning for a visit with Gramma (& a lecture about how to avoid foot amputation, duh!) and an ancillary — but equally important — visit with A.Lo.

Hooray!

*Gramma, Easter 2007